Political scientist. Views expressed here are my own.
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ALT The Global Urban Polygons and Points Dataset (GUPPD), Version 1 is a global data set of 123,034 urban settlements with place names and population for the years 1975-2030 in five-year increments. The data set builds on and expands the European Commission, Joint Research Centre's (JRC) 2015 Global Human Settlement (GHS) Urban Centre Database (UCDB). The JRC Settlement Model (GHS-SMOD) data set includes a hierarchy of urban settlements, from urban centre (level 30), to dense urban cluster (level 23), to semi-dense urban cluster (level 22). The UCDB only includes level 30, whereas the GUPPDv1 adds levels 23 and 22, and uses open data sources to both check and validate the names that JRC assigned to its UCDB polygons and to label the newly added settlements. The methodology described in the documentation was able to consistently label a greater percentage of UCDB polygons than were previously labeled by JRC. This image shows SMOD Class 22 Polygons (Semi-Dense Urban Clusters)
ALT That’s right: Students don’t have the same right to medical privacy that you or I have. In fact, college students are most often not even covered by HIPAA. Instead, college students are ‘protected’ by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), a widely-criticized federal law. As one law professor put it, “FERPA is about as protective as cheesecloth.” The details of the law are dense, but here’s the most important thing to know: FERPA loopholes would allow colleges to disclose student abortions. Which, in certain states, would put them at risk of arrest. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Katie Rose Guest Pryal, law professor at the UNC School of Law, gives this scenario: A college student is sexually assaulted at school, she seeks abortion care out-of-state where it’s legal, and tells a school counselor about it. This student decides to sue her college for mishandling her rape case, which under FERPA, gives the administration access to her private counseling records
ALT Anyone at the school who can argue they have an interest in her case can now read those records—be it deans, professors or campus police. This student could then be criminally prosecuted. This isn’t just horrifying from a legal standpoint, but a moral one: FERPA essentially gives colleges the ability to retaliate against students who sue them. The consequences of which, in our new post-Roe reality, are more dangerous than ever. Professor Pryal also points out that it’s not just the student in this hypothetical who could be at risk. Let’s say a school therapist counseled the student on how to obtain an abortion, the girl’s roommate helped her get abortion medication, and they happen to live in Texas. Later, a dean’s assistant making copies of the student’s records happens to read about that therapy session. “The assistant, who is anti-abortion, can now sue the therapist (who gave counsel about abortion) and the roommate (who provided the pills) for the $10,000 bounty, each,” Pryal w
!["I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the [school] had read these notes before I had even seen them."
Students’ medical privacy has already been violated in the past thanks to FERPA. A student who was raped as a freshman at the University of Oregon, for example, had her therapy notes seized by college lawyers before she filed suit against the school. “I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the University of Oregon had read these notes before I had even seen them,” the student said. And in 2005, a federal court ruled that a school who notified a student’s parents about her pregnancy had not violated her privacy under FERPA.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Fa7w5E_WQAAOqhK.jpg?name=orig)
ALT "I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the [school] had read these notes before I had even seen them." Students’ medical privacy has already been violated in the past thanks to FERPA. A student who was raped as a freshman at the University of Oregon, for example, had her therapy notes seized by college lawyers before she filed suit against the school. “I found out months later that every single meeting I had with a therapist, she took detailed notes on, and the University of Oregon had read these notes before I had even seen them,” the student said. And in 2005, a federal court ruled that a school who notified a student’s parents about her pregnancy had not violated her privacy under FERPA.
