Wednesday! Night! Links!

* I used to say of apartheid that it dehumanized its perpetrators as much as, if not more than, its victims. Your response as a society to Osama bin Laden and his followers threatens to undermine your moral standards and your humanity.

* Ambivalent campus benchmarks watch: Today is “Tuition Runs Out Day” at Marquette.

* The MOOC Revolution: A Sketchy Deal for Higher Education.

The promoters of MOOCs claim to see universities as dinosaurs, but their business model is parasitic upon the very institutions they claim to be rendering obsolete. Udacity designs its own curricula rather than aggregating pre-existing university courses like Coursera and EdX, but without the Stanford credentials and backgrounds of its founders it is highly unlikely it would have gone anywhere. The affiliation provides startup companies with a highly desirable brand: the “top tier” of higher education, according to the U.S. News and World Report (which always rates the wealthiest and most selective schools as the best). A similar motive drives the colleges themselves: much like encouraging over-application to enhance their selectivity and thereby their U.S. News ranking, or establishing campuses in Abu Dhabi, China, and Singapore, the promotion of MOOCs is a way for highly competitive university administrators to enhance global brand visibility and give themselves an aura of cutting-edge innovation. The media’s celebratory response confirms the initial success of the strategy.

* From Cal’s student regent: “Online education: proceed with caution.”

* CUNY Loses Landmark Discrimination Lawsuit.

* It’s a curiosity of literary history that Corelli’s fantasy virgin, unwrinkled and slim waisted, would give rise to one of its most grotesque, tragically despoiled characters. But without Corelli’s Thelma, there would be no Gollum.

* Secrets of a Feminist Icon: The Anti-Union History of Rosie the Riveter.

* The Malware-Industrial Complex.

No law directly regulates the sale of zero-days in the United States or elsewhere, so some traders pursue it quite openly. A Bangkok-based security researcher who goes by the name The Grugq tweets about acting as a middleman and has spoken to the press about negotiating deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars with government buyers from the United States and western Europe. In an argument on Twitter last month, he denied that his business is equivalent to arms dealing, as critics within and outside the computer security community have charged. “An exploit is a component of a toolchain,” he tweeted. “The team that produces & maintains the toolchain is the weapon.”

* Judge Rules White Girl Will Be Tried As Black Adult.

* Climate Hawk Obama: ‘If Congress Won’t Act Soon To Protect Future Generations, I Will.’

* Unpaid Internships Are a Rich-Girl Problem—and Also a Real Problem.

* The famous 1996 Election Day crossword puzzle.

* The blue eyes / brown eyes experiment, 1968.

* The rich are different from you and me: they’ve captured 121% of income gains during the recovery. You read that right, more than 100%.

* “You could safely say that Iceland holds the world record in household debt relief,” said Lars Christensen, chief emerging markets economist at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen. “Iceland followed the textbook example of what is required in a crisis. Any economist would agree with that.”

* Zounds! Credit agencies ripping everybody off. I’m shocked, shocked…

* In the largest false memory study to date, 5,269 participants were asked about their memories for three true and one of five fabricated political events. Each fabricated event was accompanied by a photographic image purportedly depicting that event. Approximately half the participants falsely remembered that the false event happened, with 27% remembering that they saw the events happen on the news.

* Defense Nerds Strike Back: A Symposium on the Battle of Hoth. gerrycanavan.wordpress.com will be tracking this important story as far as it goes.

* Proved: Wertham fudged his data for Seduction of the Innocent.

* What is fracking?

* An ‘Autopsy’ Of Detroit Finds Resilience In A Struggling City.

* Car gets stuck at 125 mph for over an hour.

Lecerf, frantic, called the police from his car — and they sent an escort that The Guardian describes as “a platoon of police cars” to help him navigate a highway full of fellow cars and get them to swerve out of the way of the speeding car. (Lecerf stayed, appropriately, in the fast lane.) What resulted was a small miracle of technological coordination: Responding to emergency services’ advance warnings, three different toll booths raised their barriers as Lecerf approached. A police convoy ensured that roads were kept clear for the speeding car. Fellow drivers, obligingly, got out of the way. Emergency services patched Lecerf through to a Renault engineer who tried — though failed — to help Lecerf get the speeding car to slow down.

* And the reason for the season: Wes Anderson valentines.