* So, look: I’m not saying the Democrats are definitely going to blow it. But they’re more than capable of blowing it.
Posts Tagged ‘actually existing academic biases’
Thursday Night Links!
* New Photo Seems To Prove Amelia Earhart Survived Plane Crash, Was Captured By Japanese.
* If hunger had an effect on our mental resources of this magnitude, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45 a.m. Or at the very least, our society would have organized itself around this incredibly strong effect of mental depletion. Impossibly Hungry Judges.
* Free download: Posthumanism and the Graphic Novel in Latin America.
* On My High School Obsession with UFOs.
* It’s in the National Review — and it describes a phenomenon at work in many departments along many political axes — but this piece describes a problem academics should take more seriously than they do. This is probably the most crimethink intellectual position I hold.
* Head of Office of Government Ethics resigns, sending President Trump a serious message. The message is “you can do whatever you want and nobody will stop you.”
* 4 dumb ideas that centrist Democrats simply adore.
* Mark Penn has been giving shitty advice for literally forever. But don’t worry, we’ve got this.
* Meet the populist Wisconsin Democrat looking to dethrone Paul Ryan.
* But in truth the Declaration wasn’t quite the singular achievement we remember it to be. As it turns out, nearly 100 other “declarations of independence” had already been issued in the months leading up to July 4th, 1776, by states, towns, counties, and assorted other bodies. The Declaration of Independence endorsed at the Continental Congress that July wasn’t a bolt out of the blue: It was more like a final draft in a loose, many-centered, wide-ranging process, authored not by one man but by a chorus of voices in a fledgling nation whose people had caught independence fever and were suddenly proclaiming it with contagious enthusiasm.
* Hobby Lobby Agrees to Forfeit 5,500 Artifacts Smuggled Out of Iraq.
imperialism, 1817: all of history is ours. this belongs in our museums
imperialism, 2017: history is over. this belongs to a big box store— Sam 🐫 Kriss (@sam_kriss) July 6, 2017
* No SWAT Zone: Resisting police militarization under Trump.
* Mom Feared Beating by United Employees — So She Gave Up Toddler Son’s $1000 Seat to Standby Passenger. It’s clear the time has come for United to be abolished.
* Rick Perry left his smart-guy glasses at home today. Check out 2nd Term SS 1970.
* Arizona Court Overturns In-State Tuition for Some Immigrants.
* Facebook and Google gobble ’99 per cent of new digital ad cash.’ Media buyers warn Facebook viewability ‘diabolical and horrible.’ Taxonomy of Humans According to Twitter.
* Easily the most boundary-pushing, offensive path they should have chosen: South Park to Lay Off Trump Jokes, Focus on Childhood Antics.
* The poverty of expanded universes: Man, Rey and BB-8 Went Through a Lot During Their One Night on Jakku.
* This is how climate change will shift the world’s cities.
* When your book only sells sixty copies. Don’t tell me what to do. Or, the utopian impulse. And they hated Jesus because he told them the truth.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 6, 2017 at 1:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic biases, advertising, air travel, Amelia Earhart, anti-trust, Arizona, austerity, books, centrism, China, class struggle, climate change, CNN, comics, crimethink, Declaration of Independence, Democrats, digital media, don't panic, Donald Trump, DREAM Act, economics, editing, editors, Episode 7, ethics, expanded universes, Facebook, Fourth of July, Google, Hobby Lobby, How the University Works, hunger, Iraq, ISIS, Japan, Jesus, Latin America, Latin@futurism, Mark Penn, mergers, militarization, monopolies, neoliberalism, Office of Governmental Ethics, panic, Paul Ryan, police, police state, police violence, politics, posthumanism, psychology, Rick Perry, social media, solar power, South Park, Star Wars, statistics, television, the Chinese century, the courts, The Force Awakens, the law, the truth, the truth is out there, Thomas Jefferson, tuition, Twitter, UFOs, United, Utopia, Wisconsin, World War II
Monday Mega-Links
* Donald Trump Isn’t Going to Be President. Trump Has Won and the Republican Party Is Broken. Clinton Releases a Brutal Anti-Trump Ad. 5 not-totally-crazy electoral maps that show Donald Trump winning. Could Trump Put Georgia in Play for Democrats? Only a Democrat can stop Trump now. Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism. The six days of Carly Fiorina’s vice presidential campaign, ranked.
* Report: FBI Preparing to Interview Hillary Clinton About Email Thing.
* Wave of no-confidence votes sweeps Wisconsin campuses.
* Why graduate students should be allowed to see the letters we write on their behalf. I was in strong disagreement with the headline but was won over by the text.
* Recommendation for a quick, great read: Nnedi Okorafor’s novella Binti, an Afrofuturist space-age riff on Harry Potter with more than a little bit of Octavia Butler in there…
* Another thing I’ve been enjoying, which you might too: “Hardcore Game of Thrones” on howl.fm. (First three episodes available for free here.) It’s completely sold me on the viability of a prequel spinoff, and I may actually like it more than the actual series.
* Two Great Tastes: On Civil War and Hamilton. Meanwhile, a great review from Abigail Nussbaum asks whether Civil War (which I liked a lot) has ruined the MCU.
Some quickie CIVIL WAR thoughts: better job balancing the sides than the comic. Much better than BvS. Still should have never come to blows.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
And the choreography on the last bit of the last fight of CIVIL WAR is such a great, subtle character moment. Really stellar work there.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
Overall, deantastic, would dean CIVIL WAR deangain.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
socialistdefenseofsuperherofantasy.notreally.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 8, 2016
* The Norton Writer’s Prize will be awarded annually for an outstanding essay written by an undergraduate. Literacy narratives, literary and other textual analyses, reports, profiles, evaluations, arguments, memoirs, proposals, mixed-genre pieces, and more: any excellent writing done for an undergraduate writing class will be considered. The winner will receive a cash award of $1,500. Two runners-up will each receive a cash award of $1,000.
* “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
* Unable to analyze meaning, narrative, or argument, computer scoring instead relies on length, grammar, and arcane vocabulary to do assess prose. Should you trust a computer to grade your child’s writing on Common Core tests?
* A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism.
* Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents). In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.
* Why are Tenured Philosophy Professors Unhappy?
* Ivy League economist ethnically profiled, interrogated for doing math on American Airlines flight. This situation is absolutely untenable and I cannot believe the airlines are willingly participating.
* Nestlé Wants to Sell You Both Sugary Snacks and Diabetes Pills.
* Maps of the end of the world. The post keeps going after the image!
* Why Refrigerators Were So Slow to Catch On in China.
* U.S. Justice Department officials repudiated North Carolina’s House Bill 2 on Wednesday, telling Gov. Pat McCrory that the law violates the U.S. Civil Rights Act and Title IX – a finding that could jeopardize billions in federal education funding.
* Resettling the First American ‘Climate Refugees.’
One of those grants, $48 million for Isle de Jean Charles, is something new: the first allocation of federal tax dollars to move an entire community struggling with the impacts of climate change. The divisions the effort has exposed and the logistical and moral dilemmas it has presented point up in microcosm the massive problems the world could face in the coming decades as it confronts a new category of displaced people who have become known as climate refugees.
* Why You Can’t Lose Weight on a Diet.
* Happy Mother’s Day: Kids’ Screen Time Is A Feminist Issue. Keep scrolling!
A moment of silence for all of the fictional mothers that had to die in the name of tragic back story and character development.
— Professor Snape (@_Snape_) May 8, 2016
* Nonhuman Rights Project Chimpanzee Clients Hercules and Leo to Be Sent to Sanctuary.
* Lab-grown meat is in your future, and it may be healthier than the real stuff.
* The modern banking system and zero-factor security.
* University of Oxford acquires rare map of Middle-earth annotated by Tolkien. There’s still more after the image!
* Here’s the Table Of Contents For Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Amazing Big Book of Science Fiction.
* The day we discovered our parents were Russian spies.
* Before the word processor, perfect copy was the domain of the typist—not the literary genius.
* Fullest House, A Never-Ending Stream of Daily ‘Full House’ Scripts Generated by a Neural Network.
* Before Hamilton, there was… An Oral History of Rent.
* Leicester City’s Impossible, Anomalous Championship.
* Grimdark realism isn’t realistic: where is kindness on Game of Thrones?
* Twilight of The Antioch Review.
* Why we sued the American Studies Association.
* When Robinson Met Bacigalupi.
* Daredevils Jump Out of Plane, Play Quick Game of Quidditch Before Landing. Keep going.
* The Flight of the Navigator sequel/reboot just wrote itself.
* New J.M. Coetzee novel announced.
* Daredevil and the Problem of the Not Bad.
Ultimately, there’s not much you can say about Daredevil because its not-goodness derives from the fact that it doesn’t have anything to say. This makes it hard to say anything about the way it’s not saying anything. Based on the first season, I would have argued that the show uses the superhero genre tode-familiarize gentrification and the way crime plays into struggles over urban land use. Similarly, I would contend that Jessica Jones uses the superhero-detective genre to de-familiarize trauma and addiction. Coming out — dare I say, being flushed out — of Daredevil season two, I would say that it uses the Batman-genre to re-familiarize the Ninja-genre. And for all the violence it does to its characters and setting, the real problem is this reinvestment in the fetish of ninja violence. The show uses the spectacle ofliteral violence to render unnecessary the organic narrative flow of people just being people in the world. Instead of the hidden injuries and traumas of class, as they play themselves out across our lives, we get a story of a ninja fighting ninjas because, well, ninjas.
* CEI et al. argue that TSA’s final rule fails to consider one important factor related to the deployment body scanners: a potential increase in highway injuries and deaths. If that sounds crazy, let me explain. Past research suggests that post-9/11 airport security policies were so invasive that a number of would-be air travelers decided to drive instead. Given the fact that auto travel is far more dangerous than air travel,three Cornell University economists found that TSA’s invasive, time-consuming airport screening policies resulted in about 500 additional highway fatalities annually in the years following 9/11—more than a fully loaded 747 per year.
* Google is working on a computer that is literally injected into your eye. Hard pass.
* Why America Can’t Quit the Drug War.
* What I Gained from Having a Miscarriage.
* On women’s bodies in academia.
* Educated people are usually critical of absolute truths, no matter if they come from statistics or religious revelation. Facts need to be understood within a larger cultural context in order to be deemed plausible or implausible. Today, however, we see an increasing tendency to describe the world not in terms of cultural values, but in terms of fundamental truths. In the cases of fundamentalism and neoliberal education of excellence, as I’ve shown here, this “deculturation” takes the form of a dangerous combination of religion and pseudoscientific thought peddled as excellence.
* There’s a Sci-Fi Novel Secretly Unfolding in Reddit’s Comments.
* 78% of Reddit Threads With 1,000+ Comments Mention Nazis.
* Sure, let’s clone Leonardo da Vinci. Things could hardly get worse.
* I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
* Historical memory is not about the past — it is about the future.
* And some scenes from the Anthropocene: Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There. Fort McMurray Wildfire: 80,000 Evacuated Over Out-of-Control Blaze. Fleeing Fire in Oil Country. Alberta Wildfires Expected to Double In Size and Burn for Months. The First Coral Reefs Are Starting to Permanently Dissolve. Facebook is a growing and unstoppable digital graveyard. Have a great week, everybody!
Written by gerrycanavan
May 9, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #accelerate, academia, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, air travel, airport security, Alberta, America, American Studies, American Studies Association, animal personhood, apocalypse, Aristotle, banking, Barack Obama, bathrooms, Big Book of Science Fiction, Binti, blogs, Book of Revelation, books, boycotts, bullshit, Canada, Captain America 3, Carly Fiorina, chimpanzees, China, Chris Matthews, Civil War, class struggle, climate change, climate refugees, cloning, Coetzee, common core, coral reefs, cultural preservation, Daredevil, Democrats, diabetes, diets, Donald Trump, drugs, ecology, Electoral College, Elsa, emails, espionage, excellence, Facebook, FBI, feminism, Flight of the Navigator, Fort McMurray, France, Frozen, Frozen 2, Fuller House, Fullest House, fundamentalism, futurity, Game of Thrones, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, Georgia, Godwin's Law, Google, grading, graduate students, Hamilton, Harry Potter, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, howl.fm, iPads, Israel, Jeff Vandermeer, journalism, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindness, lab-grown meat, Lauren Lapkus, Leicester City, Leonardo da Vinci, letters of recommendation, literature, Lord of the Rings, Madison, maps, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marxism, math, memory, MFAs, Middle-Earth, miscarriage, misogyny, Mother's Day, musicals, Nazis, neoliberalism, Nestle, Netflix, ninjas, Nnedi Okorafor, no confidence, North Carolina, ocean acification, Octavia Butler, oil, Palestine, Paolo Bacigalupi, parenting, philosophy, podcasts, politics, postdocs, pregnancy, pseudoscience, Quidditch, Reddit, refrigerators, Rent, Republicans, Russia, science fiction, security, sexism, skydiving, spies, standardized testing, sugar, superheroes, tenure, the Anthropocene, The Antioch Review, theory, Tolkien, trans* issues, transphobia, trolling, TSA, typing, University of Wisconsin, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, wearable tech, wildfires, Wisconsin, work, writing
Tuesday Night Links!
* Call for applications: The Le Guin Feminist Science Fiction Fellowship.
* Coming soon at Marquette: “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and “Anticipation” in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.” And this Thursday: Marquette English alum Adam Plantinga reads from his book 400 Things Cops Know.
* Great syllabus at Temple: Cli-fi: Science fiction, climate change, and apocalypse. The students’ blog is really good too, though I’m embarrassed that between the time I found this link and the time I posted it they added a post about me to the front page.
* “These are the best college majors if you actually want a job after graduation.” That “actually” is a great example of the kind of ludicrous framing that plagues these discussions; it’s talking about the difference between 90 and 95% employment.
* None of my new colleagues spoke to me as if I were a junior professional working my way through the tough lean days of youth. Most of them spoke to me, if at all, like I was a dog. Carrie Shanafelt on adjunctification in/and/as the profession.
* Peter Railton’s Dewey Lecture.
* International Adjunct Walkout Day is tomorrow. More links below the map.
* So Your Fic is Required Reading.
* The Grand Wes Anderson Playlist.
* Paging Dr. Crake: “Why Genghis Khan was good for the planet.” A friend on Facebook who works on climate and energy told me that there’s even a theory that first contact with the Americas and the resulting mass death may have led to global cooling in the 16th and 17th centuries due to reforestation.
* Officials Urge Americans To Sort Plastics, Glass Into Separate Oceans.
* The law, in its majestic equality: People who have been stripped of benefits could be charged by the government for trying to appeal against the decision to an independent judge.
* Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden ‘black site. This is insane.
Every cop, judge, and public official who knew about this Chicago “black site” should be fired, banned from public life, and arrested.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) February 24, 2015
* UW, Morality, and the Public Authority.
* The High Price of a Public Authority in Wisconsin.
* If the public authority is actually an idea worth pursuing, then UW leadership should push to get it off the fast track. And it must give some substance to its so far empty defense of Chapter 36.
* Letter from an adjunct at UW.
* Legislative staffers report that total UC spending from all sources of revenue went up 40 percent from 2007-08 to the present fiscal year — far greater growth than seen in other large state institutions. This undercuts Napolitano’s claims of poverty and shores up critics who say UC has slack, unfocused management. Amazingly, officials struggle to detail exactly where much of UC’s current $26.9 billion budget goes. They can’t say how many faculty members primarily engage in research and how many primarily teach students — which is supposed to be UC’s core function.
* UNC moves to crush its poverty center.
* Idaho financial aid officer arrested for offering students scholarships in exchange for sex. Whenever I see a story like this I think about how many signatures they make me get to be reimbursed for things they told me to buy.
* SUNY grad says school made her prosecute her own sex attacker.
* Marquette economist says there’s no economic reason to argue for right to work in Wisconsin. Hahahahahahaha.
* Privilege and the madness of chance.
Supermarket shoppers are more likely to buy French wine when French music is playing, and to buy German wine when they hear German music. That’s true even though only 14 percent of shoppers say they noticed the music, a study finds.
Researchers discovered that candidates for medical school interviewed on sunny days received much higher ratings than those interviewed on rainy days. Being interviewed on a rainy day was a setback equivalent to having an MCAT score 10 percent lower, according to a new book called “Everyday Bias,” by Howard J. Ross.
Those studies are a reminder that we humans are perhaps less rational than we would like to think, and more prone to the buffeting of unconscious influences. That’s something for those of us who are white men to reflect on when we’re accused of “privilege.”
* Why Just Filling the Pipeline Won’t Diversify STEM Fields.
* These dream guns indicate the depth of white America’s fear of black resistance. But black people are allowed to take part “safely” in gun culture if we agree to become the avatars of respectable, state-sanctioned violence, with military recruiters in our high schools and colleges, and police recruiters outside subway stations and unemployment offices.
* The most important legal scholar you’ve likely never heard of.
* At New York Private Schools, Challenging White Privilege From the Inside. I think Freddie’s comments on this were pretty smart.
These people become invulnerable, their commodification impregnable: there is no critique from within privilege theory that they cannot turn around on others, and no critique from outside of it that they cannot dismiss as itself the hand of privilege.
* America Has Been At War 93% of the Time – 222 Out of 239 Years – Since 1776.
* “Let’s stop pretending going to Mars is for mankind.”
Much scientific discovery is for the betterment, amusement and curiosity of a lucky few in this world. Those without water, meanwhile, are temporarily forgotten
The sad part is we’re rich enough to do both and we choose to do neither.
* Rortyblog: Everyone should take it easy on the robot stuff for a while.
* Steven Spielberg Has Been Thanked More Than God in Oscar Acceptance Speeches. God actually only clocks in at #6.
* Dead for 48 minutes, Catholic Priest claims God is female. Oh, that must be why.
* Archaeologists Discover a Cheese That’s Almost 2,000 Years Older Than Jesus.
* When Instagram brings down your congressman.
* Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher. GASP.
* Jeb Bush Conveniently Started Promoting Fracking After Investing In It. GAAAAAAASP.
* Žižek on Syriza. He’s also being interviewed at LARoB this week.
* Meanwhile, in Jacobin: The strategy of Syriza’s leadership has failed miserably. But it’s not too late to avert total defeat.
* Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People.
* Starbucks to consider maybe possibly abolishing the “clopening” unless employees want to “step up.”
* The 2014 Nebula Award nominees have been announced.
* How did Twitter become the hate speech wing of the free speech party?
* Sexism and the tech industry: Women are leaving the tech industry in droves.
* The other other side of sperm donation: Sperm Donors Are Winning Visitation Rights.
* Comedy Bang! Bang! and WTF remember Harris Wittels. I thought Scott’s opening to Harris’s last CBB was especially good.
* Another big outlet takes a trip inside the men’s rights movement.
* Algorithmic States of Exception.
* Holy Hell This Power Rangers Reboot Is Dark As F*ck. Vimeo has taken down the NSFW version but you can still get it in the embed at Joseph Kahn’s Twitter for some reason.
* On a less disturbing note, I watched The Ecstasy of Order for my games class on Tetris today, and it was great.
* Men Complain Far More Than Women About Work-Family Conflicts.
*‘Two and a Half Men’: TV’s Worst Sitcom Ends As Terribly As It Lived, and I Watched Every Episode.
Two and Half Men hit a new low every season and then continued to sink even further underground.
* Birdman is your best movie of all time apparently. It’s already paying dividends. OR IS IT.
* “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a pretentious fraud, but it’s taken some time to understand the precise nature of his fraudulence.” Oh, come on, it wasn’t Grand Budapest but it was fine.
* I really needed to see this again today.
* Glenn Reynolds goes full Heinlein. Never go full Heinlein.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Over Five And A Half Billion Uruks Have Been Slain In Shadow of Mordor.
* And Britons would rather be an academic than a Hollywood star. Me too, but maybe I’ll hear Spielberg out.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 24, 2015 at 7:35 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alejandro González Iñárritu, algorithms, America, apocalypse, archaeology, austerity, Batman, Birdman, black sites, books, Catholics, CFPs, chance, cheese, Chicago, climate change, clopenings, college, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, Cops, democracy, denials, diversity, drugs, ecology, education, England, English majors, European Union, fellowships, film, first contact, free speech, Genghis Khan, genocide, Glenn Reynolds, God, Golden Girls, Greece, guns, Harris Wittels, hate speech, housework, How the University Works, Hugh Jackman, hydrofracking, Idaho, Instagram, Instapundit, Jeb Bush, Joseph Kahn, Kentucky, kids today, labor, libertarians, Lord of the Rings, majors, male privilege, Marc Maron, Marquette, Mars, men's rights, meritocracy, microstates, misogyny, music, my scholarly empire, National Adjunct Walkout Day, Nebula Awards, neoliberalism, now we see the violence inherent in the system, Octavia Butler, orcs, Oryx and Crake, Oscars, photography, playlists, police brutality, police state, police violence, poverty, Power Rangers, pregnancy, prison-industrial complex, privilege, public authority, race, racism, Rahm Emanuel, rape, rape culture, reboots, recycling, right to work, Robert Heinlein, robots, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, science fiction, Scott Walker, sex, sexism, Silk Road, sitcoms, sperm donation, Starbucks, Starship Troopers, states of exceptions, STEM, Steven Spielberg, strikes, superheroes, Superman, Syriza, tech economy, television, Tetris, the courts, The Ecstasy of Order, the humanities, the law, the Left, the Singularity, Title IX, Tolkien, torture, Twitter, Two and a Half Men, UNC, unions, University of California, University of Wisconsin, Ursula K. Le Guin, war, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, welfare state, Wes Anderson, white privilege, Wisconsin, Wolverine, work-life balance, WTF, Žižek
Saturday Links!
* There’s only one important story in the world right now, but you won’t hear anything about it in your mainstream media: Ant mega-colony takes over world.
* Found poetry: Below you’ll find a haiku extracted from a random Supreme Court opinion.
The contract therefore
survives scrutiny under
the Rule of Reason.
* “Where have all the thoughtful and original mainstream movies gone?” The answer is “They’ve long been obscured, left to rot and die on one screen in New York for six days before disappearing into VOD obscurity.” On the banal tyranny of blockbuster film.
* The cosmic tragedy of the technocratic fix: Nail polish developed at N.C. State alerts wearers to date rape drugs.
* Lawmakers Who Cut Funds For ALS Research Take Ice Bucket Challenge For ALS Research. Who Invented the Ice Bucket Challenge?
* Where Are the National Democrats on Ferguson? What could explain it?
12. She dove into the ocean, the blue waves enveloping her tapioca skin.
13. She was transfixed by the gleam of his uncooked chicken breast skin. So raw, so lumpy.
* Totally unrelatedly: More white people believe in ghosts than in racial discrimination.
* On an entirely different subject: Overall, the social networks of whites are a remarkable 93 percent white. White American social networks are only one percent black, one percent Hispanic, one percent Asian or Pacific Islander, one percent mixed race, and one percent other race. In fact, fully three-quarters (75 percent) of whites have entirely white social networks without any minority presence.
* Shorter Nate Silver: By legalizing corruption, we’ve essentially eliminated illegal corruption in the U.S.
* An online fund created to raise money for the Ferguson, Mo., police officer who killed Michael Brown has amassed more than $150,000, outpacing a similar account for the slain man’s family.
* Videotaped Police Shooting Shocked The Nation, But These Experts Say It Was Justified. BREAKING: Experts Know Which Side of Bread Is Buttered.
* Rortybomb: Ferguson and Libertarianism.
* California DMV says Google’s self-driving car must have a steering wheel.
Self-driving cars have the potential to change the way automobiles are made, and Google’s prototype car was just the first step toward that future. Cars today are built to crash, with tons of metal reinforcement, crumple zones, seat belts, and a million air bags. When everything is self-driving, and cars never (or at least rarely) crash, most of that safety equipment can be ripped out, resulting in a much lighter, more fuel-efficient vehicle.
Listen, I just don’t think you’re a great salesman.
* If White Characters Were Described Like People Of Color In Literature.
* Something to try? 4 Surprising Ways to Support a Child’s Self-Regulation & Avoid Melt Down.
* Poll: most Americans want to make it a crime for children to play without supervision. We don’t want a nanny state, apparently, just a state where every family has a nanny.
* How to solve a Fermi problem.
* And Russia Wants Bulgarians to Stop Vandalizing Soviet Monuments To Look Like American Superheroes. If I can’t dance…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2014 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, America, ants, blockbusters, charity, class struggle, college, corruption, Democrats, Facebook, Ferguson, Fermi problems, film, found poetry, Google, graffiti, ice bucket challenge, invention, kids today, libertarianism, Missouri, nanny state, North Carolina, parenting, poetry, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, protest, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, research, Russia, science, science fiction, self-driving cars, social networking, St. Louis, status update activism, superheroes, Supreme Court, the courts, the law, vandalism, VOD, writing
However Many Links You Think There Are In This Post, There Are Actually More Links Than That
* First, they cast Paul Rudd as Ant-Man, and I said nothing.
* de Boer v. Schuman re: Hopkins. It’s not the supply, it’s the demand.
* The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.
* Earth’s Quietest Place Will Drive You Crazy in 45 Minutes.
* If I worked at Kansas University, this post might get me fired.
* Rortybomb v. the social safety net.
* X-tend the Allegory: What if the X-Men actually were black? Essay version. Via.
* “Men’s Rights” Trolls Spammed Us With 400 Fake Rape Reports.
* The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency.’ It’s already here. 96 Percent Of Network Nightly News’ Coverage Of Extreme Weather Doesn’t Mention Climate Change. The year in fossil fuel disasters.
* “Unfathomable”: Why Is One Commission Trying to Close California’s Largest Public College? ACCJC Gone Wild.
* San Jose State University has all but ended its experiment to offer low-cost, high-quality online education in partnership with the massive open online course provider Udacity after a year of disappointing results and growing dismay among faculty members.
* Data Mining Exposes Embarrassing Problems For Massive Open Online Courses.
* CSU-Pueblo revising budget downward; up to 50 jobs at risk, loss of $3.3M.
* For-Profit College Oakbridge Academy Of Arts Suddenly Shuts Down.
* “This kid was dealt a bad hand. I don’t know quite why. That’s just the way God works. Sometimes some of us are lucky and some of us are not,” the billionaire told Politicker, calling her plight “a sad situation.”
* In Defense of ‘Entitlements.’
* Oh, I see, there’s your problem right there. Links continue below the graph.
* “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
* Scott Walker signals he will sign school mascot bill.
* Thieves steal risqué calendars, leave protest signs.
* DC Passes Great Minimum Wage and Paid Sick Days Bills. What’s in Them?
* France institutes a carbon tax.
* Community Season 5 Feels Like An Old Friend Has Finally Come Home.
* 62 Percent of Restaurant Workers Don’t Wash Their Hands After Handling Raw Beef.
* Shock in Ohio: No evidence of plot to register non-citizen voters. That only proves how successful the conspiracy has been!
* Wow: Tampa Toddler Thriving After Rare 5-Organ Transplant.
* The Decline of the US Death Penalty. Still illegal to murder people in Detroit (maybe). 15 Things That We Re-Learned About the Prison Industrial Complex in 20123. Data Broker Removes Rape-Victims List After Journal Inquiry.
* The true story of the original “welfare queen.”
* Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.
* The 16 Colleges and Universities Where It’s Hardest to Get an A.
* Michael Pollan on plant intelligence.
* Signs Taken as Wonders: Žižek and the Apparent Interpreter.
* Marriage equality reaches New Mexico.
* A vigil planned as a peaceful remembrance of a teen killed in police custody ended with tear gas and arrests Thursday night in downtown Durham.
* An oral history of the Cones of Dunshire.
* On scarcity and the Federation.
* “Characters” trailer for The Grand Budapest Hotel.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 19, 2013 at 9:20 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, accreditation, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, Afrofuturism, allegory, Ant-Man, apocalypse, Bitcoin, calling in, carbon tax, catastrophe, Charlie Stross, charts, City College of San Francisco, class struggle, climate change, college, comics, community, CSU Pueblo, Dan Harmon, deafness, death, death penalty, Detroit, Durham, ecology, entitlements, film, for-profit schools, fossil fuels, France, gay rights, God works in mysterious ways, grade inflation, graduate student life, How the University Works, hygiene, illness, income inequality, insanity, Johns Hopkins, Kansas State University, labor, LEGO, manifestoes, marriage equality, Mars, Marvel, mascots, Mayor Bloomberg, meat, medicine, men's rights activism, Michael Pollan, minimum wage, misogyny, MOOCs, mundane SF, Native American issues, New Mexico, no future, Ohio, over-educated literary theory PhDs, paid sick days, Parks and Recreation, Paul Rudd, photographs, plants, police brutality, politics, post-scarcity, prison-industrial complex, protest, race, rape, rape culture, restaurants, rich people, San Jose State, scarcity, science fiction, science is magic, Scott Walker, Settlers of Catan, sexism, silence, social media, stamps, Star Trek, television, tenure, The Cones of Dunshire, the future is now, The Grand Budapest Hotel, the social safety net is for closers, the way we die now, true crime, voter fraud, voter suppression, Washington DC, welfare queens, Wes Anderson, words, X-Men, Žižek
Friday Friday
* This is the fourth installment of a continuing series in which American events are described using the tropes and tone normally employed by the American media to describe events in other countries: America’s Annual Pilgrimage Begins.
* Massasoit was an adroit politician, but the dilemma he faced would have tested Machiavelli. About five years before, most of his subjects had fallen before a terrible calamity. Whole villages had been depopulated. It was all Massasoit could do to hold together the remnants of his people. Adding to his problems, the disaster had not touched the Wampanoag’s longtime enemies, the Narragansett alliance to the west. Soon, Massasoit feared, they would take advantage of the Wampanoag’s weakness and overrun them. And the only solution he could see was fraught with perils of its own, because it involved the foreigners—people from across the sea. The Indians who first feasted with the English colonists were far more sophisticated than you were taught in school. But that wasn’t enough to save them.
* The National Security Agency has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches, according to a top-secret NSA document.
* SeaTac $15 Minimum Wage Barely Passes In Final Vote Tally, Recount May Follow.
* Marissa Alexander has been released from jail.
* Self-censorship and repressive regimes.
* The horror of scale: What scared H. P. Lovecraft.
* And okay, I’ll check it out: As presidents leave office, they also leave a letter for their successors. In Oni Press’ new comic Letter 44, the newest president is taken aback when he reads the letter from the man who preceded him — a man who seemed to tank the economy and embroil the nation in needless wars — but was actually secretly preparing America for an imminent alien invasion.
* A British Teacher’s Archive of Confiscated Toys.
* K Punk watches Catching Fire.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the Hunger Games is the way it simply presupposes that revolution is necessary. The problems are logistical, not ethical, and the issue is simply how and when revolution can be made to happen, not if it should happen at all. Remember who the enemy is – a message, a hailing, an ethical demand that calls out through the screen to us …. that calls out to a collectivity that can only be built through class consciousness ….
* Judith Butler defends the humanities.
* And the New Yorker profiles David Graeber, “Robin Hood for the Debt Crisis.”
Written by gerrycanavan
November 29, 2013 at 7:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic biases, actually existing media bias, aliens, America, Catching Fire, censorship, class struggle, colonialism, comics, David Graeber, debt, debt jubilee, guns, H.P. Lovecraft, history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake, How the University Works, Judith Butler, Letter 44, lies my teacher told me, Marissa Alexander, Massasoit, minimum wage, Native American issues, NSA, Occupy, patriarchy, politics, pornography, revolution, Seattle, Thanksgiving, the humanities, The Hunger Games, the sublime, totality, toys, UFOs, Washington, what it is I think I'm doing
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.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 27, 2013 at 11:56 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Aaron Swartz, academia, actually existing academic biases, artificial intelligence, automation, Boston College, capitalism, Catholicism, chance, Claire McCaskill, college, contraception, equality, financialize everything, Florida, gay rights, How the University Works, intelligence explosion, Jesuits, Kay Hagan, labor, leisure, marriage, Mexico, MOOCs, Open Access, photography, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, privatize everything, refugees, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, superprofessors, Supreme Court, syllabi, the kids aren't all right, the law, the past is another country, the Singularity, theory, time travel, war on education, Won't somebody think of the children?, work, xkcd
Random Monday Links
* Today Jim Henson has been dead for 21 years. In other news, the world has been completely terrible for 21 years.
* American popular culture hits rock bottom: Seth MacFarlane will reboot The Flintstones.
* Pollutocrat Koch fueling far right academic centers at universities nationwide.
* Is there any governmental body more useless than the FEC? I mean really.
* I grow old: AIM is dead.
* From the too-bad-it-will-never-happen file: I, Amy Myers, do hereby challenge Representative Michele Bachmann to a Public Forum Debate and/or Fact Test on The Constitution of the United States, United States History and United States Civics.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 16, 2011 at 9:05 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic biases, AIM, corruption, debates, Donald Trump, elections, Family Guy, FEC, Flintstones, general election 2012, I grow old, Jim Henson, John Ensign, Koch brothers, Michele Bachmann, Muppets, nostalgia of a particular sort, obituary, politics, reboots, remakes, rock bottom, Seth MacFarlane, the Constitution, wingnuts
Reality’s Well-Known Liberal Bias
It’s been a while, but it looks like it’s time for another round of “Is Academia Biased Against Conservatives?”
Jonathan Chait and Paul Krugman step up to the plate to rebut, which I present only on the basis of the shout-out in the last paragraph of Chait’s post:
Conservatives like to present this as an issue of Marxist English professors, but the reality is that scientists, mathematicians, and people trained in rigorous thinking of all kinds are overwhelmingly rejecting them.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 9, 2011 at 10:08 am
Chickens and Eggs
Inside Higher Ed considers whether liberal and leftist academics are born or made.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 5, 2010 at 9:20 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic biases, my particular demographic, politics, the Left
Thursday! Again!
Thursday again! How does this keep happening?
* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.
* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.
* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor’s office might actually kill this; very glad it didn’t.
* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.
* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller’s assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.
* Obama speaks in Cairo.
* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media’s continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.
* The recession: a global view. It’s important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.
* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards’s (and later Hillary Clinton’s) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.
* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.
Written by gerrycanavan
June 4, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with abortion, actually existing academic biases, Are the primaries over yet?, Barack Obama, China, comics, country first, David Carradine, eliminationism, gay rights, George Tiller, health care, Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Kill Bill, Lindsey Graham, marriage equality, mass media, New Hampshire, obituary, Planetary, politics, recession, Republicans, suicide, the economy, Tiananmen Square
Discover the Networks
Acknowledging that 20 years and millions of dollars spent loudly and bitterly attacking the liberal leanings of American campuses have failed to make much of a dent in the way undergraduates are educated, some conservatives have decided to try a new strategy.
They are finding like-minded tenured professors and helping them establish academic beachheads for their ideas.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 22, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with academia, actually existing academic biases, conservatives, David Horowitz, over-educated literary theory PhDs