Posts Tagged ‘Canada’
Weekend Links!
* Big fair use decision: specific commentary on the original work is not required for a fair use defense.
* Finding common ground with Senator Coburn: To amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to exclude major professional sports leagues from qualifying as tax-exempt organizations.
* Gasp! Many students stay away from online courses in subjects they deem especially difficult or interesting, according to a study released this month by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The finding comes just as many highly selective colleges are embracing online learning and as massive open online courses are gaining popularity and standing.
* “What we’re saying is that bargain-basement (clothing) is automatically leading towards these types of disasters,” John Hilary, executive director at British charity War on Want, told Reuters.
* Bad Robot will adapt 11/22/63.
* Canada gets it right: “The legal test for a true volunteer arrangement looks at several factors, but merely agreeing to work without pay does not in itself make you a volunteer,” Ministry of Labour spokesperson Jonathon Rose wrote in an email. See also Natalia Cecire:
Like the hypothetical minimum-wage high schooler whose income serves as pocket money, non-essential and destined for “fun,” the youthful volunteer, who may very well intrinsically enjoy the work, authorizes a category of labor exploitation that is not only okay but also okay to take as the norm for the labor of cultural preservation. “I can get you a twenty-year-old!” is, in that sense, not a labor solution but its opposite: a commitment to the norm that this work will be unpaid.
* Whitewashing and manwashing cinema.
* Mother Jones profiles the great Tig Notaro.
* What BP Doesn’t Want You to Know About the 2010 Gulf Spill.
* And 66 behind-the-scenes photos from the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.
Quebec’s Child Care Program Pays for Itself
At a forum held at the Atkinson Centre for Society and Child Development in Toronto, economists argued that according to their analysis of Quebec’s popular $7-a-day program, governments that say they can’t afford to invest in affordable child care are wrong. Pierre Fortin, an economics professor at the University of Quebec at Montreal, presented his findings that for every dollar Quebec invests, it recoups $1.05 while Ottawa receives a 44-cent windfall.
Monday, Monday
* In local news! @baylorstudio and @artmilwaukee win $50,000 Joyce Award to create original work of art in blighted neighborhoods.
* The next Kim Stanley Robinson novel! Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age.
* Is science fiction the future of the novel?
* Student loans: The next housing bubble.
* ‘We Ask That You Do Not Call Us Professor.’
* McSweeney’s: “I’m an English professor in a movie.”
* The University of British Columbia is striking a blow at gender inequity in professors’ pay, promising all tenure-stream female faculty a 2 per cent pay hike by the end of the month – a rare approach expected to cost the school about $2-million this year. I asked on Twitter and nobody answered — is this legal in Canada? I don’t think it would be here.
* Expelled Student Activist Wins $50K Court Judgment Against University President. The president is being held personally liable for his decisions.
An environmental activist expelled from Georgia’s Validosta State University (VSU) has won a $50,000 award in a lawsuit against the university president who kicked him out of school in 2007. In a dramatic rebuke to President Ronald Zaccari, the federal jury that heard the case found Zaccari personally liable for violating Hayden Barnes’ due process rights.
* Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o’clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. The department chair, a plant biologist named Gopi Podila, distributed a printed agenda. Bishop was sitting next to him, in a spot by the door. Inside her handbag was a gun.
* Scenes from the struggle for academic freedom in New York. Much more here.
* School closings are a popular method of cost-cutting for big-city districts, but critics say the savings are exaggerated. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing for up to 100 school closings this year. New York City just announced 26 planned closures.
But studies refute claims of savings. School buildings are difficult to sell. They cost money to maintain, and when vacant can become blights on their communities. Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools in 2008, claiming she would save $23 million—and instead cost the district $40 million.
* The Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S. Football’s death spiral. The Rarest Play in the NFL.
* Capitalism: rise of the machines.
* Being touched against your will has become a twisted rite of passage for American females. It’s a reminder that you’re never safe anywhere. That your body is not really yours—but instead public property, there to be rubbed against by an old man or pinched and videotaped by a young one.
* It was a startling assertion that seemed an about-face from church doctrine: A Catholic hospital arguing in a Colorado court that twin fetuses that died in its care were not, under state law, human beings.
* Communism! S&P To Face Charges From States, U.S. Over Wrongdoing Before Financial Crisis.
* John McCain: the mask slips.
* Our individual perception of global warming is matching up with reality.
* Occupy Buddhism. Relatedly: growing up a Lama in exile.
* The Institute for Centrifugal Research.
We believe that even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind can be diverted via human centrifugalization. Spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-Force will solve every problem.
* Canada ends the penny. This means the U.S. will start talking seriously about ending the penny in about fifty years or so.
* And the Big Picture blog visits the sky.
A Few for Thursday
* In all, 33% of all subprime student loans in repayment were 90 days or more past due in March 2012, up from 24% in 2007, according to a Wednesday report by TransUnion LLC. Meanwhile, the Chicago-based credit bureau found that 33% of the almost $900 billion in outstanding student loans was held by subprime, or the riskiest, borrowers as of March 2012, up from 31% in 2007.
* Will Brain Injury Lawsuits Doom or Save the NFL?
* New Yo La Tengo album, with videos.
* The Awl covers Bady v. Shirky re: MOOCs.
Tuesday Links
* David Graeber teaches my superheroes module in one long go at the New Inquiry.
* Affirmative action and the fantasy of “merit” comes to the Supreme Court. Buckle up.
* The wisdom of markets: Mysterious Algorithm Was 4% of Trading Activity Last Week.
* The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, but democracy — not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a failure of capitalism is more capitalism.
* Annals of Canadian crime: Canada cheese-smuggling ring busted – policeman charged. Maple syrup seized in N.B. may have been stolen in Quebec.
* Obama makes a strong pitch for my particular demographic.
* Are drones illegal? Well, we’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality, so…
* Let six-year-olds vote: Afghan war enters twelfth year. And onward! And onward!
* The maintenance of civil order in society rests on the foundation of family discipline. Therefore, a child who disrespects his parents must be permanently removed from society in a way that gives an example to all other children of the importance of respect for parents. The death penalty for rebellioius children is not something to be taken lightly. The guidelines for administering the death penalty to rebellious children are given in Deut 21:18-21… You know what? Let me stop you right there.
* “Man who defaced Tate Modern’s Rothko canvas says he’s added value.” And he’s probably right!
* Community not coming back on schedule is/is not a catastrophe. I’ll just go ahead and assume that they need more time to bring Dan Harmon back.
* Why do Venezulans keep reelecting Hugo Chávez?
To understand why Chávez’s electoral victory would be apparent beforehand, consider that from 1980 to 1998, Venezuela’s per capita GDP declined by 14%, whereas since 2004, after the Chávez administration gained control over the nation’s oil revenues, the country’s GDP growth per person has averaged 2.5% each year.
At the same time, income inequality was reduced to the lowest in Latin America, and a combination of widely shared growth and government programs cut poverty in half and reduced absolute poverty by 70%—and that’s before accounting for vastly expanded access to health, education, and housing.
Oh.
* The Rise and Fall of the Cincinnati Boner King.
* Admitting that scientists demonstrate gender bias shouldn’t make us forget that other kinds of bias exist, or that people other than scientists exhibit them. In a couple of papers (one, two), Katherine Milkman, Modupe Akinola, and Dolly Chugh have investigated how faculty members responded to email requests from prospective students asking for a meeting. The names of the students were randomly shuffled, and chosen to give some implication that the students were male or female, and also whether they were Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, or Chinese.
* Campus officer kills naked freshman at University of South Alabama.
* The Ohio Statue University marching band pays tribute to video games.
* Johnny works in a factory. Billy works downtown. / Terry works in a rock and roll band looking for that million dollar sound. / Got a job down in Darlington. Some nights I don’t go. / Some nights I go to the drive in. Some night I stay home. On “The Promise.”
* digby imagines what would happen if we tried to ban lead today.
* Like Darth Vader at the end of Jedi, Ridley Scott ends his career a hero.
* Behind the Scenes of the Planet of the Apes.
* And get ready for competing Moby Dick projects! Who says Hollywood is out of ideas?
Friday
* Dolphins: smarter than you think!
* You know what they say: a socialist is just a conservative who has moved to Canada.
* The land of the free: Judge says it’s OK to use your seized phone to impersonate you and entrap your friends.
* 1009 variations on “Language X is essentially language Y under conditions Z.” Via Kottke. Watch out! There’s some weird racism mixed in among the good ones.
English is essentially the noise made by people who don’t believe you can use language but want your stuff handed over politely.
–John M. Ford
* And the Internet, once again, has won everything. Trust me on this.
‘Dignity, Independence, and Grace’
A landmark ruling in Canada has set the stage to legalize doctor-assisted suicide. I haven’t talked about it very much publicly, but a Scary Genetic Disease runs in one of my families. I found out I was at risk when I was 12; I finally found out I wasn’t at risk when I had a gene test done last year, at 31. In the two decades between those benchmarks I planned my own eventual suicide—at 50? at 60? We’d have to wait and see—many, many times.
Doctor-assisted suicide, this is all to say, is one of those issues that completely breaks my rational mind. I simply cannot fathom how any decent person could oppose a sick person’s ability to end their life on their own terms. Well done, Canada.
Saturday Night!
* Stand-up Comedy and Mental Illness: A Conversation with Maria Bamford.
* Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak.
* “Budget Cuts Hurt a State’s Response to Whooping Cough.”
* Can You Call a 9-Year-Old a Psychopath?
* A Generation Hobbled by the Soaring Cost of College. Those Humanities Ph.D.’s! Colleges as Merchants of Debt. Could Your Student Loans Make You Unemployable?
* Profiles in courage: Mitt Romney’s Support Of Same-Sex Adoption Lasts One Day.
* And then Canada destroyed the climate. Enjoy your weekend!
Saturday Night Links
* Breaking: Right-wing Supreme Court Justices don’t take their jobs seriously. Supreme Court May Be Most Conservative in Modern History. Antonin Scalia, semi-retired crank.
* Jonathan Cohn, Scott Lemieux, and Richard Hansen and ponder the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that has actually gone the full monty and overturned the ACA.
* Of course they say the same thing about us. Judge Strikes Down Key Parts Of Walker’s Anti-Public Employee Union Law.
* Don’t check the date, just believe it: Google Maps QuestView for the NES.
* This collection of more-accurate Dr. Seuss titles is one of my favorite things on the entire Internet.
* James Cameron teases the Avatar sequels.
“The best inspiration I got for ‘Avatar’ 2 and 3 was dealing with the master navigator culture in Micronesia,” Cameron said by phone from Tokyo on Friday, where he attended the Japanese premiere of “Titanic 3D.”
The Micronesians, a seafaring culture who navigated the Pacific for centuries without the aid of compasses or charts, already have a lot in common with the blue Na’vi residents of Pandora — they’re an indigenous, matrilineal culture, colonized by outsiders. And the cerulean and aquamarine tones of “Avatar” and its inhabitants seem drawn from postcards from the watery Micronesian region.
* The New York Times has some fun with towards a quantum theory of Mitt Romney.
* 21st Century as Intergenerational War. More here and here.
* Why are colleges acting as volunteer loan collection agents for the banks?
* In 2011, California spent $9.6 billion on prisons, versus $5.7 billion on higher education. Since 1980, California has built one college campus; it’s built 21 prisons. The state spends $8,667 per student per year. It spends about $50,000 per inmate per year.
* The lottery lie: The educational “bonus” appears to be nonexistent. Miller and Pierce (1997) studied the short- and long-term effect of education lotteries. They found that lottery states did indeed increase per-capita spending on education during the lottery’s early years. However, after some time these states actually decreased their overall spending on education. In contrast, states without lotteries increased education spending over time. In fact, nonlottery states spend, on average, 10 percent more of their budgets on education than lottery states (Gearey 1997).
* The education reform lie: it’s impossible to talk about primary and secondary education in America in any meaningful way if you won’t allow yourself to discuss class.
* Hunger Games commentary watch: Understanding Katniss.
* If you and your board are now determined to show that you in fact have wisdom and maturity when you exercise your powers over the eduction of your young, then you should acknowledge that it was a rotten lesson you taught young people in a free society when you denounced and then burned books–books you hadn’t even read. You should also resolve to expose your children to all sorts of opinions and information, in order that they will be better equipped to make decisions and to survive. Yours sincerely, Kurt Vonnegut.
* Too Smart to Fail: Notes on an Age of Folly.
But the problem goes far beyond politics. We have become a society that can’t self-correct, that can’t address its obvious problems, that can’t pull out of its nosedive. And so to our list of disasters let us add this fourth entry: we have entered an age of folly that—for all our Facebooking and the twittling tweedle-dee-tweets of the twitterati—we can’t wake up from.
* Slate continues to pioneer bold new horizons in fantasy capitalism.
* 3 New Studies Link Bee Decline to Bayer Pesticide. No one could have predicted the widespread implementation of insecticides would kill so many insects!
* The government has put the chances of a magnitude 7.3 quake centered in the north of Tokyo Bay at 70 percent over the next three decades, and has estimated there would be about 11,000 casualties and 850,000 buildings destroyed.
* Cancer research: it’s worse than you think.
* “Military surplus a bonanza for law enforcement.”
* And Canada will stop issuing pennies. Honestly, they’re decades ahead of us. Could be centuries.
Tuesday Night Links
* Community is back March 15, but NBC still hates you; they’re putting Parks & Rec on hiatus instead.
* 46 Things to Read and See for David Foster Wallace’s 50th Birthday. Via MeFi.
* Weirdest Unsolved Mysteries of World War II. I feel certain Indiana Jones was involved in each of these.
* “How New York Pay Phones Became Guerrilla Libraries.”
* A literary history of erasure.
* When Jon Hamm met Miss Piggy.
* Cory Doctorow reviews Lawrence Lessig’s Constitutional-conventionalist One Way Forward.
* ‘I exist wholly for you. I will never reject you. You cannot disappoint me.’ A brief history of the money shot.
* Canadians: They’re Just as Bad as Us!
* And of course you had me at 1811 Dictionary in the Vulgar Tongue. Via Kottke.
FLOGGING CULLY. A debilitated lecher, commonly an old one.
COLD PIG. To give cold pig is a punishment inflicted on sluggards who lie too long in bed: it consists in pulling off all the bed clothes from them, and throwing cold water upon them.
TWIDDLE-DIDDLES. Testicles.
TWIDDLE POOP. An effeminate looking fellow.
Post *All* the Links
A big post, catching up from most of last week:
* Science fiction on the BBC: A brief history of all-women societies.
* Top Five Most Destroyed Canadian Cities in the Marvel Universe.
* News from MLA! Dissing the Dissertation. Anguish Trumps Activism at the MLA.
* News from my childhood: Another new version of Dungeons & Dragons is on the way. MetaFilter agonizes.
* News from the Montana Supreme Court: “Corporations are not persons. Human beings are persons, and it is an affront to the inviolable dignity of our species that courts have created a legal fiction which forces people — human beings — to share fundamental, natural rights with soulless creatures of government…”
* News from the future right now: Record Heat Floods America With Temperatures 40 Degrees Above Normal.
* How College Football Bowls Earn Millions In Profits But Pay Almost Nothing In Taxes.
And what ends up happening there is that the candidate with the big stack of donor money always somehow manages to survive the inevitable scandals and tawdry revelations, while the one who’s depending on checks from grandma and $25 internet donations from college students always winds up mysteriously wiped out.
* Learning From The Masters: Level Design In The Legend Of Zelda.
* How The Cave of Time taught us to love interactive entertainment.
* Inside the Shel Silverstein archive.
* While genomic research on the super-old is in its very early stages, what’s fascinating is what the researchers are not finding. These people’s genomes are fundamentally the same as other people’s. They are clearly very special, but not in ways that are obvious.
* What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955.
* The headline reads, “Quadriplegic Undocumented Immigrant Dies In Mexico After Being Deported From His Hospital Bed.”
* Dallas teen missing since 2010 was mistakenly deported.
* A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to Arkham Asylum.
* Pepsi Says Mountain Dew Can Dissolve Mouse Carcasses. Keep in mind: that’s their defense.
* Obama Openly Asks Nation Why On Earth He Would Want To Serve For Another Term.
* Romney: Elected office is for the rich.
* How banks and debt collectors are bringing dead debt back to life.
People who stop paying bills earn lousy credit ratings but eventually are freed of old debt under statutes of limitations that vary by state and range from three years to 10 years from the last loan payment.
But if a debtor agrees to make even a single payment on an expired debt, the clock starts anew on some part of the old obligation, a process called “re-aging.”
So if borrowers again fall behind on their payments, debt collectors can turn to their usual tools: letters, phone calls and lawsuits. By restarting a debt’s statute of limitations, the collectors have years to retrieve payments.
* Wells Tower: In Gold We Trust.
* Epic Doctor Who Timeline. More here.
* Battlestar Galactica: Totally planned. See also.
* The cast of Community plays pop culture trivia.
* “White House Denies CIA Teleported Obama to Mars.”
* Classified docs reveal why Tolkien failed to win ’61 Nobel Prize!
* Solve the Fermi Paradox the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal way.
* And you probably already saw Paypal’s latest outrage, but man, it’s a doozy.
Thursday Links
* BREAKING: Weiner goes down.
* ’22 Elite College Sports Programs Turned a Profit in 2010, but Gaps Remain, NCAA Reports Says.’ Those “gaps” include the 98 Football Bowl Subdivision sports programs that lost a median $11.6 million last year, as well as losses at 100% of all Football Championship Subdivision programs and 100% of all Division I schools without football.
* Muhammad Idrees Ahmad in Al-Jazeera on the magical realism of body counts.
* Joan Walsh on the mirage of the Obama coalition.
* BREAKING: The “conservative movement” is a money-making scam.
Yesterday, Politico reported what an educated listener could’ve guessed: Right-wing radio pundits are paid by conservative organizations to mention them favorably. FreedomWorks pays Glenn Beck to talk about how great FreedomWorks is, Rush Limbaugh wholeheartedly endorses the Heritage Foundation because the Heritage Foundation pays him, and Mark Levin receives a check for telling you that donating to Americans for Prosperity will help defeat Obama.
* And confidential to Vancouver: really, it’s poor form to riot when you lose.
