It’s becom­ing a trend. Around the coun­try, police­men are pep­per spray­ing peace­ful pro­tes­tors. It start­ed in NYC when Tony Bologna, one of New York’s finest, pep­per sprayed a group of young women already cor­doned off by a police bar­ri­er. Next they man­aged to get an 84 year old woman in Seat­tle. And now Lieu­tenant John Pike gives UC Davis pro­tes­tors a face full of pep­per spray, even though they were peace­ful­ly seat­ed on the ground. To make things worse, “When stu­dents cov­ered their eyes with their cloth­ing, police forced open their mouths and pep­per-sprayed down their throats,” or so claims Nathan Brown, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Eng­lish Depart­ment. (You can read a first-hand stu­dent account here.)

Ini­tial­ly the chan­cel­lor of the uni­ver­si­ty, Lin­da P.B. Kate­hi, appeared to defend the police action. But, as the video above went viral, she began chang­ing her tune and call­ing for an inves­ti­ga­tion into the mat­ter. Noth­ing like a lit­tle trans­paren­cy … and some pub­lic sham­ing (below) … to make peo­ple see the light.

You can read a fuller account of Fri­day’s events in the UC Davis news­pa­per. Also don’t miss the paper’s col­lec­tion of pho­tos on Flickr. And I’d also rec­om­mend the analy­sis by James Fal­lows over at The Atlantic. Here’s the mon­ey quote:

I can’t see any legit­i­mate basis for police action like what is shown here. Watch that first minute and think how we’d react if we saw it com­ing from some riot-con­trol unit in Chi­na, or in Syr­ia. The calm of the offi­cer who walks up and in a leisure­ly way pep­per-sprays unarmed and pas­sive peo­ple right in the face? We’d think: this is what hap­pens when author­i­ty is unac­count­able and has lost any sense of human con­nec­tion to a sub­ject pop­u­la­tion. That’s what I think here.

And per­haps we can add this thought. If you’re the chan­cel­lor, the per­son charged with over­see­ing the edu­ca­tion and wel­fare of stu­dents, you should­n’t rec­og­nize the prob­lem with Fri­day’s events only when the polit­i­cal heat gets turned up. Talk about a lack of human con­nec­tion.…

Updates:

Offi­cers in pep­per spray inci­dent placed on leave

Learn about pep­per spray and the harm it does

Accord­ing to Unit­ed Nations demog­ra­phers, the world’s pop­u­la­tion like­ly topped 7 bil­lion on Mon­day, and we’ll now steam for­ward, hit­ting 9.3 bil­lion by 2050. 7 bil­lion is a news­wor­thy mile­stone, to be sure. But what does this num­ber real­ly mean? To put things in per­spec­tive, we’re fea­tur­ing a recent TED Talk by Hans Rosling, a pro­fes­sor of glob­al health who presents data in imag­i­na­tive ways. His pre­sen­ta­tions can get wild­ly dig­i­tal. (Just watch 200 Coun­tries & 200 Years in 4 Min­utes). But not so in this case. The props are sim­ple goods bought at IKEA, and they do more than an ade­quate job explain­ing the past, present and future of glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth.

Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty has launched a new con­test called 10,000 Solu­tions open to any­one over 18, any­where in the world, and it offers a $10,000 prize. Entries can take on one of the eight great­est chal­lenges fac­ing the world, like sus­tain­abil­i­ty and the future of edu­ca­tion. What makes the con­test unusu­al is that par­tic­i­pants are encour­aged to col­lab­o­rate and build on one another’s solu­tions. ASU wants to cre­ate an open solu­tions bank that oth­ers can use to gen­er­ate new ideas, and some stu­dents at ASU have already met up in per­son to talk over things they shared on the site. The school is pro­mot­ing 10,000 Solu­tions as an exper­i­ment in col­lab­o­ra­tive inven­tion and the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion is fund­ing a team of ASU researchers to study the con­test and see how ideas are shared and devel­oped.

The con­test is off to a strong start, get­ting some high-pro­file entries like this one from Dan Ariely.

While many of the solu­tions share ques­tions or ideas at the brain­storm­ing stage, some groups are using the plat­form to pro­mote work­ing pro­to­types. This group of ASU stu­dent engi­neers is work­ing on a low-cost smart­board tech­nol­o­gy based on the Wii that could be set up any­where you can run a pro­jec­tor.

ASU hopes 10,000 Solu­tions will bring some fresh ener­gy to prob­lems that often seem over­whelm­ing. If you have a minute to spare and a bright idea for mak­ing the world a bet­ter place, why not share it?

Ed Finn is an occa­sion­al con­trib­u­tor to Open Cul­ture. He recent­ly start­ed work­ing at Ari­zona State Uni­ver­si­ty in Uni­ver­si­ty Ini­tia­tives, an office focused on devel­op­ing new projects and think­ing big about the future of pub­lic uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion. 10,000 Solu­tions is a project his team is help­ing to launch this year.