Wednesday Links!
* The end of UW: Gov. Scott Walker to propose 13 percent cut, more freedom for UW System. UW System predicts layoffs, no campus closings under budget cuts. Layoffs, Building Closures, Slowdown on Admissions. But “few details.”
* But there’s always money in the banana stand.
* In praise of zombies. A response to yesterday’s anti-Canavanist IHE polemic.
Giving students access to an important, brilliant, historically significant corpus of art seems to be an entirely appropriate activity for the undergraduate classroom at a university. After you have taken a Zombie Course, you may discover you have actually just taken a Great Books (or in the case of Ware, a Great Box) course without realizing it, and you may also decide that any Great Books course worthy of its name cannot afford to ignore the recent surge of brilliant zombie art. If anything, we need more Zombie Courses than we have, and one hopes — in time — even full-blown Zombie Majors (or at the least Zombie Double-Majors).
* Multiple Choice and Testing Machines: A History.
* “What I would say about the university today,” he says, “is that we’re living through an absolutely historic moment – namely the effective end of universities as centres of humane critique, an almost complete capitulation to the philistine and sometimes barbaric values of neo-capitalism.”
* National Adjunct Walkout Day is coming soon.
* Higher Education Is Not a Mixtape.
* The Climate Science Behind New England’s Historic Blizzard. Massive Blizzard Exposes How Decrepit New York City’s Infrastructure Is.
* All Our Grievances Are Connected.
* Forget immoral; the latest legal challenge to Obamacare is still nonsense.
* Punch-Drunk Jonathan Chait Takes On the Entire Internet. It’s a terrible op-ed that makes an important point badly in the midst of saying a bunch of incorrect things, all in the service of a fundamentally bad framing — so of course it’s all we can talk about.
* To Collect Debts, Nursing Homes Are Seizing Control Over Patients.
It was a guardianship petition filed by the nursing home, Mary Manning Walsh, asking the court to give a stranger full legal power over Mrs. Palermo, now 90, and complete control of her money.
Few people are aware that a nursing home can take such a step.
* Drone, Too Small for Radar to Detect, Rattles the White House.
* Defending those accused of unthinkable crimes.
* One aspect of that danger is the “abstract authority” of astrologers, now mirrored by the black-box algorithms of the cloud. The opacity of the analytic method lends forecasts their appearance of authoritative objectivity. In “Astrological Forecasts”, Adorno notes “the mechanics of the astrological system are never divulged and the readers are presented only with the alleged results of astrological reasoning.” “Treated as impersonal and thing-like,” stars appear “entirely abstract, unapproachable, and anonymous” and thus more objective than mere fallible human reason. Similarly, as Kate Crawford pointed out in an essay about fitness trackers for the Atlantic, “analytics companies aren’t required to reveal which data sets they are using and how they are being analyzed.” The inaccessible logic of their proprietary algorithms is imposed on us, and their inscrutability masquerades as proof of their objectivity. As Crawford argues, “Prioritizing data—irregular, unreliable data—over human reporting, means putting power in the hands of an algorithm.” As Adorno puts it, “The cult of God has been replaced by the cult of facts.”
* America and fractal inequality.
* 100% of the women of color interviewed in STEM study experienced gender bias.
* Gender Bias in Academe: An Annotated Bibliography of Important Recent Studies.
* Reasons You Were Not Promoted That Are Totally Unrelated to Gender.
* Today, more U.S. women die in childbirth and from pregnancy-related causes than at almost any point in the last 25 years. The United States is the one of only seven countries in the entire world that has experienced an increase in maternal mortality over the past decade.
* Marissa Alexander is out of jail after three years.
* What has happened before will happen again, subprime auto edition.
* Huckabee Complains That Women Can Cuss In The Workplace: ‘That’s Just Trashy.’
* Oklahoma GOP wants to restrict marriage to people of faith.
* Corey Robin, against public intellectuals.
* I linked to a story about this the other day, but here’s the resolution: Vanderbilt Football Players Found Guilty of Raping Unconscious Student. Of course the next horrifying story in this wretched, endless series is already queued up.
* American Sniper focuses in tight on one man’s story of trauma, leaving out the complex questions of why Kyle was in Iraq being traumatized in the first place. The Iraqis in the film are villains, caricatures, and targets, and the only real opinion on them the film offers is Kyle’s. The Iraqis are all “savages” who threaten American lives and need to be killed. There’s some truth in this representation, insofar as this is how a lot of American soldiers thought. Yet the film obviates the questions of why any American soldiers were in Iraq, why they stayed there for eight years, why they had to kill thousands upon thousands of Iraqi civilians, and how we are to understand the long and ongoing bloodbath once called the “war on terror.” It does that precisely by turning a killer into a victim, a war hero into a trauma hero.
* Freakishly Old System Of Planets Hint At Ancient Alien Civilizations. Okay, I’m in for three films with an option on a television reboot.
* Vulture says Jason Segel is good as David Foster Wallace in The End of the Tour, but I’ll never accept it.
* The Psychology of Flow: What Game Design Reveals about the Deliberate Tensions of Great Writing.
* The Politics Of The Next Dimension: Do Ghosts Have Civil Rights?
* It’s finally happening, and of course it’s starting in Florida: ‘Zombie cat’ crawls out of grave.
* And while this may be of interest only to those whose children have made them watch untold hours of Dora the Explorer, it’s certainly of interest to me: Swiper the Fox has a totally bananas backstory.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 28, 2015 at 10:08 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, administrative blight, Adorno, America, American Sniper, apocalypse, astrology, atheism, austerity, Barack Obama, Big Data, blizzards, childbirth, Chris Hayes, civil rights, class struggle, climate change, comics, Corey Robin, David Foster Wallace, debt, defense attorneys, Dora the Explorer, drones, ecology, eldercare, English majors, extrasolar planets, facts, film, Florida, fractal inequality, free speech, games, gender, Ghostbusters, ghosts, Great Books, Greece, guns, health care, How the University Works, Huckabee, income inequality, infrastructure, Jason Segel, Jonathan Chait, kids today, Marissa Alexander, marriage, marriage equality, McSweeney's, medicine, Milwaukee, misogyny, MOOCs, multiple choice, narrative, neoliberalism, New York, nursing homes, Oklahoma, outer space, pedagogy, political correctness, politics, public intellectuals, race, racism, rape, rape culture, religion, scams, science fiction, Scott Walker, sexism, single payer, speech codes, sportsball, stadiums, stand your ground, standardized testing, Stanford, statistics, subprime loans, Supreme Court, Swiper no swiping, Terry Eagleton, the courts, the elderly, The End of the Tour, the law, the Left, trauma, University of Wisconsin, UWM, violence, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, what it is I think I'm doing, White House, Wisconsin, writing, zombies
Gerry Canavan 
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