Posts Tagged ‘Aaron Swartz’
Weekend Links!
* Nice treat: my LARoB piece got namechecked in an Unexpected Stories review at NPR.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine the polar vortex making it unseasonably cold, forever.
* New Data Says Huge West Virginia Chemical Spill May Have Been More Toxic Than Reported. But don’t worry: Freedom Industries has been fined a whopping $11,000.
* The OECD says the party’s over.
These are that growth will slow to around two-thirds its current rate; that inequality will increase massively; and that there is a big risk that climate change will make things worse.
* Here’s what the world would look like if we took global warming seriously.
* A Brief History of the Humanities Postdoc.
* On the huge screwed-uppedness of “studies show.”
* An oral history of LucasArts.
* A feature of oligarchy is the dynastic ascension of new leaders, children who rise to positions of power and wealth simply by the luck of birth. We welcome Chelsea Clinton to the club.
* What disapproving friends don’t understand about cesarean births.
* If A Man Takes Paternity Leave, His Coworkers Will Probably Take It Too.
* For years we’ve been telling kids to sit still and pay attention. That’s all wrong.
* Analysis: Over Half of All Statements Made on Fox News Are False. I sincerely hope they included statements like “I’m Bill O’Reilly” and “You’re watching Fox.”
* Five Thirty Eight and screwing up predictions.
The measurement error in the World Cup case was simple: FiveThirtyEight and other sites had marked Brazil as having a strong defense, and a solid offense anchored by its star, Neymar, as measured by a statistical amalgamation called Soccer Power Index. In reality, Brazil had been aggressively fouling its way as a means of defense, elbowing and kicking its way, and not getting called for it by referees. I’m not just making this up as a day-after-big-loss armchair analysis: pretty much most punditry on soccer had been clear on this before the game.
In other words, the statistics were overestimating how good a team Brazil really was, and the expert punditry was fairly unified on this point.
In other words, this time, the hedgehogs knew something the fox didn’t. But this fox is often too committed to methodological singularity and fighting pundits, sometimes for the sake of fighting them, so it often doesn’t like to listen to non-statistical data. In reality, methodological triangulation is almost always stronger, though harder to pull-offs.
* What happened to the super-rich of yesteryear?
If today’s corporate kvetchers are more concerned with the state of their egos than with the state of the nation, it’s in part because their own fortunes aren’t tied to those of the nation the way they once were. In the postwar years, American companies depended largely on American consumers. Globalization has changed that—foreign sales account for almost half the revenue of the S&P 500—as has the rise of financial services (where the most important clients are the wealthy and other corporations). The well-being of the American middle class just doesn’t matter as much to companies’ bottom lines. And there’s another change. Early in the past century, there was a true socialist movement in the United States, and in the postwar years the Soviet Union seemed to offer the possibility of a meaningful alternative to capitalism. Small wonder that the tycoons of those days were so eager to channel populist agitation into reform. Today, by contrast, corporate chieftains have little to fear, other than mildly higher taxes and the complaints of people who have read Thomas Piketty. Moguls complain about their feelings because that’s all anyone can really threaten.
* Let this AskMe post from an academic spouse ruin your morning!
* College Graduates and the Great Recession by The Numbers.
* Over Duke U.’s Protests, Estate of ‘the Duke’ Asks Court to Approve Use of ‘Duke.’
* The next-generation F-35, the most expensive plane ever built, may be too dangerous to fly. Why is Congress keeping it alive? What could possibly explain it!
* “Superhero stories are really about immigrants.”
* Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?
* Change.org petition inviting Department of Labor investigation into adjunct labor. I’m very skeptical there’s anything actionable here, unfortunately.
* Having Your Sleep Interrupted May Be As Bad As Not Getting Any at All.
* Losing to Germany Wasn’t Actually the Worst Thing to Happen to Brazil This World Cup.
* Colorado’s legal pot market is bigger than anyone anticipated. First person to legally purchase pot in WA fired after being seen on local news buying it.
* DEA Officials Responsible For Nearly Killing College Student, DOJ Watchdog Finds. Daniel Chong is the entirely predictable result of dehumanizing drug offenders.
* In ‘sexting’ case Manassas City police want to photograph teen in sexually explicit manner, lawyers say. You’ll be glad to know police have withdrawn the request.
* Two hundred years into the social experiment of modern imprisonment, and 40 years into the expansion of what is frequently called “mass incarceration,” America’s system of jails and prisons arguably constitutes the most prodigious system of torture the world has ever seen.
* …while Swartz’s death was a mistake, destroying him as a lesson to all of us wasn’t a mistake. It was policy.
* Tough Louisiana Catholic Church case goes to the heart of mandatory reporting law.
* The Atlantic has a challenging piece on helping intersex children, albeit with an absolutely terrible headline.
* What the Potato Salad Kickstarter Campaign Says About Tech, Silicon Valley, and Modern Life.
* On giving Title IX teeth. It does surprise me that no school has ever received a Title IX sanction for its approach sexual violence.
* SMBC on kind aliens. XKCD on a wraith called Timeghost. The adventures of Process Man.
* Predicting the end of Game of Thrones from George R. R. Martin’s repeated requests for a big-budget epic finale.
* Ideology at its purest is ripe for disruption: “Inside tech’s latest management craze.” Meanwhile: Silicon Valley wage fixing: Disney, Lucas, Dreamworks and Pixar implicated.
* Westerners are so convinced China is a dystopian hellscape they’ll share anything that confirms it.
* 16-Year-Old’s Rape Goes Viral Because Human Beings Are Terrible. Awful story.
* Syfy orders a pilot for its adaptation of Lev Grossman’s The Magicians.
* The wisdom of markets: Social Network With No Revenue or Assets Somehow Worth $4.75 Billion.
* When asked whether it was possible to think too much upon the Holocaust, Sebald said, “No serious person thinks of anything else.” On still trying to come to terms with the Holocaust.
* Trigger warning: breakfast. A confessional comic about the night after the artist’s rape.
* A Webcomic About A Time Traveler Trying To Comprehend Terminal Illness.
* A Field Guide To Unusual (And Hilarious) Harry Potter Patronuses.
* And Ian McKellan just won’t leave any franchise un-awesomed. He simply won’t!
Wednesday Is Friday and the Living’s Easy
* Half the professoriate will kill the other half for free.
In other words, while a few already well-paid superprofessors get their egos stroked conducting experiments that are doomed to fail, “second- and third-tier universities and colleges, and community colleges” risk closing because Coursera and its ilk have sent higher education price expectations through the floor and systematically devalued everybody else’s work. And they get to do all this while dispensing a produuct that they know is inferior! Jay Gould would be proud.
* The irony, of course, is that “business” logic can kill its own host, like any parasite. When taken as an end in itself, it destroys everything — and then there’s nowhere else to invest, no more areas producing real values that can be syphoned off into the giant pool of money. The imaginary values that finance has racked up then become the object of a game of hot potato, furiously churning through the system until the point when they simply disappear (i.e., lose all their value). That’s what running everything “like a business” does — it trades real value for imaginary value that is then destroyed.
* Just because it’s totally ineffective doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it: A study by the Pew Charitable Trust in 2011, which looked at school closures in six US cities, found that school districts end up saving less than had been predicted. But think of all the other advantages school closings offer!
A University of Chicago study focusing on schools closed between 2001 and 2006 found that only six percent of displaced students ended up in high-performing schools.
And 42 percent of students continued to attend schools with ‘very low’ achievement levels. A year after changing schools, students’ reading and math abilities were not any better or worse.
Students who did go to better-performing schools also had to travel an average of 6km to get there – which critics say risks the safety of students who have to go through neighbourhoods containing rival gangs.
And here, at the limit of life that idling alone brings into view in a nonthreatening way, we find another kind of nested logic. Call it the two-step law of life. Rule No. 1 is tomorrow we die; and Rule No. 2 is nobody, not even the most helpful robot, can change Rule No. 1. Enjoy!
* Junot Diaz Talks Superman As An Undocumented Immigrant On The Colbert Report.
* The Essential Verso Undergraduate Reading List. Makes me think I really need to start including more theory on my syllabi.
* MOOCs we can believe in? One of the most remote outposts of Jesuit higher education is tucked away in dusty northwest Kenya, in a place whose name means “Nowhere” in Swahili. There, at Kakuma Refugee Camp, a small group of students — refugees from several neighboring African countries, including Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia — are enrolled in online courses taught by 28 Jesuit colleges, mostly in the United States. The course is part of the Jesuit Commons project.
* Unexpected: SCOTUSblog now thinks there’s at least five judges who will vote to strike down DOMA. Meanwhile, McCaskill seems to have triggered Hagan to announce her support of marriage equality.
* Ripped from the stuff Fox News usually just has to make up: Gov. Rick Scott of Florida has stepped into the fray over an offensive classroom exercise at Florida Atlantic University in which students were asked to stomp on a sheet of paper with “Jesus” written on it.
* Boston College threatens disciplinary action against students distributing condoms.
Boston College officials sent a letter to students on March 15 demanding an end to student-run “Safe Sites,” a network of dorm rooms and other locations where free contraceptives and safe sex information are available.
Students living in the “Safe Sites” were told in the letter that the distribution of condoms is in conflict with their “responsibility to protect the values and traditions of Boston College as a Jesuit, Catholic institution.”
* Mexican town finds more security by throwing out the police.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal considers the Singularity.
* xkcd considers the past as another country … with an outdated military and massive oil reserves.
* And making the rounds again: The 50 Most Perfectly Timed Photos Ever.
Me in TNI, Occupy MLA, Seven Short Stories about Drones, Wes Anderson’s ‘Godzilla,’ and More
* My piece on ecological science fiction and pessimistic despair from the “Weather” issue of The New Inquiry is online: Après Nous, le Déluge. Don’t let the title fool you; it’s in English!
Perhaps Lear would have thought it all a bit too on-the-nose—but now our suicidal urges and our selfishness and our sickening disregard for the future come back to us as hurricanes and heat-waves. Let a thousand science fictional panoramas bloom: the Statue of Liberty frozen over, toppled in the sand, neck-deep in water. Hollywood on fire. Texas cracked with drought. Hundred-year storms every other year. Après nous, la glace, le feu, le désert, le déluge.
* In case you missed it last night, my course this semester: “Thrill and Dread in the American Century.”
* Profhacker has a writeup from the people behind the Occupy MLA hoax for people who are still curious just what was going on there. If my Twitter timeline is any indication, it’s fair to say this was not well-received. Personally I think it’s very hard to argue this was about advancing cause of adjuncts and NTT faculty in any meaningful way, though I can see why they want to say so now. Nothing about the portrayal of the Occupy MLA participants either this year or last year cast critics of academic labor in a good light. Bérubé agrees! For a somewhat more nuanced take, see Noel Jackson’s timeline.
* Bad news for the for-profit education industry. But don’t worry! We’ve got the next revenue stream all queued up.
MOOCs are designed to impose, not improved learning, but a new business model on higher education, which opens the door for wide-scale profiteering. Public institutions of higher education then become shells for private interests who will offer small grants on the front end and reap larger profits on the back end.
* But, in fact, we’ve got two grand experiments of her theory,” he said. “The first is the American South, where teachers unions are weak and the schools are not lighting the world on fire. The other is charter schools, which are 88 percent non-unionized. In charters, you can do everything that Michelle Rhee wants to do — fire bad teachers, pay good teachers more. And yet, the most comprehensive studies looking at charter schools nationally find mediocre results.”
* Teju Cole: Seven short stories about drones. Mirrored at TNI.
2. Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.
* io9 tells you to set your DVR to Continuum, “the most intriguing new time travel show in years.”
* Supreme Court Justice Death Calculator. I’ll save you the trouble:
The probability of at least 1 conservative justice dying by 2017: 46.62%.
* While popular culture has for centuries reflected an older form of law and justice, its capacity to undermine the very pluralist and discursive openness which are its well-spring, demonstrates the dangers to which the rhetoric of urgency and the emotional power of medium and message are prone. In a world shorn of its faith in the traditional structures which sustained the moral economy and the moral legality, the appeal to simply trust in an inarticulable justice sustained by an emotional pitch which is in ‘24’ at every moment apparent, opens the prospect of legal terrorism.
* “Dean Kamen, inventor of the SegWay, has a new invention out! This one is for dieting, and it sucks food out of the stomach before the body can absorb it.” Well, that all checks out.
* Aaron Swartz Faced A More Severe Prison Term Than Killers, Slave Dealers And Bank Robbers.
* And a public service announcement: Harmontown comes to Wisconsin next week…
Saturday Night Links
* The headline reads, “Glenn Beck Building Ayn Rand-Inspired Utopia.”
* Grief for Aaron Swartz: The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime.” Prosecutor as bully. How to Get a Job Like Mine.
* Aaron Bady saw Zero Dark Thirty.
* Quentin Tarantino talks to himself.
* And the US Treasury agrees with me about the trillion-dollar coin. It’s enough to make me rethink my whole position…
Gerry Canavan 
NYEE Links! A Whole Lot of Them!
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* What happened when slaves and free men were shipwrecked together. Amazing read.
* Schedule for the MLA Subconference.
* The MLA’s annual report on its Job Information List has found that in 2014-15, it had 1,015 jobs in English, 3 percent fewer than the previous year. The list had 949 jobs in foreign languages, 7.6 percent fewer than 2013-14. The full report.
* “These young T.A.s believed they were being asked to prostitute themselves in order to increase enrollment in the Spanish Department.”
* Reading Everything Aaron Swartz Wrote.
* “Obscure law lets Prince of Wales set off nuclear bombs.”
* “The hidden legacy of 70 years of atomic weaponry: at least 33,480 Americans dead.”
* Your weekly must-read: N.K. Jemisin has a new SF/F column in the The New York Times Sunday Book Review.
* Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in SF: A Conversation.
* Adjuncts at Loyola University Chicago Want a Union. Will the Jesuit University Respect Their Demands?
* The Absolute Disruption blog has some thoughts on spoilerphobia and The Force Awakens, with a digression through my Tolkien/TFA piece. That piece has had some interesting patterns of circulation, incidentally; the Salon piece did well on Facebook and Twitter while the WordPress version has had a second life in the conservative blogosphere by way of Ross Douthat and Tyler Cowen….
* George Lucas, genius. Another oral history of the Star Wars Holiday Special. Star Wars and the death of culture. What was cut from The Force Awakens. 13 Story Ideas That Were Dropped from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. What is a Mary Sue, and does Star Wars: The Force Awakens have one? I have not seen the new Star Wars but ambient levels of Star Wars have reached such a peak that I feel eminently qualified to review it without actually seeing the film or even reading a plot synopsis. Anakin Skywalker and the Methods of Rationality.
* Given that the term Mary Sue will always carry gendered connotations and that it is highly likely to be disproportionately applied to female protagonists—who, in big budget epics, are already vastly outnumbered by their male counterparts—I see very little benefit to its continued use.
* “This iconic picture will live in history. When a women escaped ISIS territory and was able to wear color again.” More links after the photo.
* A suggestion for search committees, and some questions.
* The Irresistible Psychology of Fairy Tales.
* From the archives: The Really Big One.
* ESPN is such a money pit it’s even dragging Star Wars down.
* My life as a job creator.
* Guy Beats Fallout 4 Without Killing Anyone, Nearly Breaks The Game.
* Cleveland Officer Will Not Face Charges in Tamir Rice Shooting Death. How Can No One Be to Blame for Tamir Rice’s Death? How Philadelphia prosecutors protect police misconduct: Cops get caught lying — and then get off the hook. Police Rarely Criminally Charged for On-Duty Shootings. When is it legal for a cop to kill you?
* Why we turned off comments on Tamir Rice news stories.
* ASU’s Global Freshman Academy Is a Complete Bust.
* Being Véra Nabokov.
* Today in loopholes: consumptive demand.
* Loophole watch, part two: Pope Francis: atheists who follow their consciences will be welcome in Heaven.
* Why not cubic centimeters, or raw tonnage? Among other issues, the report said, Princeton had allotted “only 1,500 square feet” for student incubator and accelerator programs, “whereas Cornell has 364,000; Penn 200,000; Berkeley 108,000; Harvard 30,000; Stanford 12,000; Yale 7,700; N.Y.U. 6,000; and Columbia 5,000.”
* Great moments in political campaigning.
* This story has everything.
* Like Goodfellas but for embezzling from a fruitcake company.
* For the Wealthiest, a Private Tax System That Saves Them Billions.
* Africa and the Looting Machine.
* The House That Marx Built. Marxism for Tomorrow.
* How Esurance Lost Its Mascot to the Internet.
* NSFW, obviously, but: These Real Women Want to Show You How to Give Them an Orgasm.
* Everything is totally normal, don’t even sweat it.
* We’ve been talking about climate change for a long time. Why Engineers Can’t Stop Los Angeles’ Enormous Methane Leak.
* The Opium Wars, Neoliberalism, and the Anthropocene.
* The Radical History of 1960s Adult Coloring Books.
* The DMCA poisoned the Internet of Things in its cradle.
* More than one-third of wells in dairy farm-intensive Kewaunee County were found to be unsafe because they failed to meet health standards for drinking water, according to a new study.
* William Gibson: how I wrote Neuromancer.
* This Man Just Guessed How Much the Movies Have Spent “Rescuing” Matt Damon.
* For the poor in the Deep South’s cities, simply applying for a job exposes the barriers of a particularly pervasive and isolating form of poverty.
* Your 2016 TV Preview.
* Why Do Employers Still Routinely Drug-Test Workers?
* When Gun Violence Felt Like a Disease, a City in Delaware Turned to the C.D.C.
* Reports of rapes of college-age women in localities of big-time teams go up significantly on game days, national study finds.
* After difficult summer, UW-Madison fighting off efforts to poach top professors. The view from the provinces.
* The Coolest Images From National Geographic’s 2015 Photo Contest. This Is Your Brain on Nature.
* Star Wars Lego Sets Exploding at 3,000 Frames per Second Is the Best Guilty Pleasure.
* When Bobby Shrugged.
* The science myths that will not die.
* Because you demanded it! The DeBoerist Manifesto.
* And Here’s More Evidence That Galactic Super-Civilizations Don’t Exist. But don’t you believe it! Bring on 2016!
Written by gerrycanavan
December 30, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, 2016?, Aaron Swartz, academia, academic jobs, adjunctification, adjuncts, aliens, Arizona State University, bad handwriting, Bobby Fischer, Cascadia Subduction Zone, Catholicism, chess, Cleveland, climate change, coloring books, consumptive demand, corruption, cultural studies, culture, Delaware, Disney, DMCA, don't read the comments, drug testing, earthquakes, ecology, Eliezer Yudkowsky, embezzlement, English departments, entrepeneurs, epidemics, Episode 7, ESPN, fairy tales, fallout, Fallout 4, feminism, football, Freddie deBoer, galactic empires, Galápagos, games, gender, genius, George Lucas, Goodfellas, graves, guns, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, How the University Works, innovation, ISIS, Jesuits, leftism, LEGO, loopholes, Loyola, Madison, manifestos, Marx, Marxism, Mary Sue, mascots, methane, MLA, money, MOOCs, my media empire, mythology, N.K. Jemisin, National Geographic, neoliberalism, NSFW, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, opium wars, orgasms, Pacific Northwest, pacifism, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, photography, police corruption, police state, police violence, pornography, Prince Charles, race, racism, radiation, rape, rape culture, religion, science, science fiction, search committees, SETI, sex, sexuality, shipwrecks, slavery, spoilers, sports, Star Wars, Star Wars Holiday Special, superexploitation, Tamir Rice, taxes, television, the 1960s, the Anthropocene, the CDC, The Force Awakens, the internet of things, the Pope, the prequels, the rich are different, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, true crime, United Kingdom, University of Wisconsin, USPS, Vera Nabokov, violence, Vonnegut, water, Wisconsin