Posts Tagged ‘Beyoncé’
Weekend Links, Omnibus Edition (Only $19.99/Month for the First Six Months at the Canavan Pro Tier)
* I watched The Stanford Prison Experiment (from 2015) yesterday, so of course I spent the rest of the day reading up on it. Some bonus Milgram!
* Capybaras break out of Toronto zoo, on the lam for 3 weeks.
* Behold: Pigoons.
* The fuzzy math of drone war.
* PTSD and embodied consciousness, or, modern warfare destroys the brain.
* “The board of trustees voted to cut African-American studies, philosophy, religious studies and women’s studies.” Clearly Bruce Rauner wants to weaken unions. But I suspect that his ambition goes further: the mantra of “flexibility” now in play in Wisconsin would seem to be a strategy to diminish or eliminate whole fields of academic endeavor: African-American studies, art history, classical studies, cultural studies, foreign languages, literature, philosophy, queer studies, women’s studies, whatever might be deemed impractical, unprofitable, unacceptable.
* Liberal-Arts Majors Have Plenty of Job Prospects, if They Have Some Specific Skills, Too.
* 25 Words Your Kindergartener Must Know Before First Grade.
* Ars is excited to be hosting this online debut of Sunspring, a short science fiction film that’s not entirely what it seems. It’s about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it’s the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to “go to the skull” before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn’t the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that’s what we’d call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.
* This paper seems like a B- at best: The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.
* “Shut up and don’t talk to me again, okay?” the flight attendant says in the video. “If you talk to me again, I tell the cops, and you get arrested in Miami.”
* There is a Dalek in the BBC that could actually help save your life.
* Department of precrime, parenting edition.
* 2 Valedictorians in Texas Declare Undocumented Status, and Outrage Ensues.
* Interesting times: Mitch McConnell Won’t Rule Out Rescinding His Endorsement of Donald Trump. Romney says Trump will change America with ‘trickle-down racism.’ #NeverTrump 2.0. Hundreds Say Donald Trump Has a Problem Paying His Bills. How Donald Trump Bankrupted His Atlantic City Casinos, but Still Earned Millions. The Next Two Weeks: Either Trump Or Unexpected Redemption Led by Wisconsin.
* Gawker Files for Bankruptcy After Losing Hulk Hogan Privacy Case.
* On crafting a victim-impact statement.
* Abandoned Yugoslavian Monuments.
* This sense of helplessness in the face of such entrenched segregation is what makes so alluring the notion, embraced by liberals and conservatives, that we can address school inequality not with integration but by giving poor, segregated schools more resources and demanding of them more accountability. True integration, true equality, requires a surrendering of advantage, and when it comes to our own children, that can feel almost unnatural.
* Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie.
* Last year, inmates served 79,726 dead days at a cost of $143 per person per day in 2015. In other words, people spent 218 years’ worth of unnecessary time in jail at a cost of $11 million to taxpayers.
* People who value time over money are happier.
* Headcanon watch: Han Solo was an untrained Force user. Stan Lee Is Playing the Watcher in Every Marvel Film.
* What Game of Thrones Changed About Its Big Antiwar Speech, and Why It Matters.
* Dan Harmon & Justin Roiland on Their Original Rick & Morty Season 2 Finale Plan, Season 3.
* How to Stage a Broadway Musical With Deaf Actors.
* Elon Musk and the Pentagon may be working on a real-life Iron Man suit.
* Enter the Wild, Disturbing, Alien-Busting World of the Astralnauts.
* Study: Most antidepressants don’t work for young patients.
* “I Was 20 Weeks Pregnant When They Told Me My Baby Might Never Be Able to Walk.” Gut-wrenching story. Serious trigger warning for miscarriage and for type-one diabetes.
* When I later asked him whether the “Mr. Nobody” moniker ever bothered him he said “No, why should it have? There are two things about me. First, I am a very happy person, though I’ve lived an unhappy life. And second, I’m happy until I have to say my name, which carries a great deal of negativity for me. What troubles most people is that I want to be anonymous, without an identity. To them, this idea seems absolutely dangerous.”
* Aphantasia: How It Feels To Be Blind In Your Mind.
* Welcome to Larry Page’s Secret Flying-Car Factories.
* The end of non-digital film.
* What’s the most “normal” place in the US?
* How the Police Identify Threats on Social Media. How Colleges Train for Active Shooters on Campus.
* Miracles and wonders: Man lives 555 days without a heart.
* I want to believe! Sorry But Medieval Armies Probably Didn’t Use Fire Arrows.
* Understanding time travel in Game of Thrones. Distills down the leading Bran theories for your lunchtime consumption.
* I think I’ve done this one before, but: Class Struggle: The Board Game.
* It sounds like Larry David is thinking about Curb Your Enthusiasm again.
* Rolling Jubilee v. John Oliver in The Baffler.
* Creative Ways To Fix Your Broken Phone Screen.
* Let William Shatner Sell You a Commodore VIC-20.
* Animal liberation now! Harry Potter play to stop using live owls.
Thursday Links, Just for You
* 8 Characters I Created To Teach My Kid About Dental Hygiene That Have Unfortunately Come To Life.
* There’s organized crime, and then there’s organized crime.
Now, the Oklahoma Highway Patrol has a device that also allows them to seize money in your bank account or on prepaid cards.
It’s called an ERAD, or Electronic Recovery and Access to Data machine, and state police began using 16 of them last month.
Here’s how it works. If a trooper suspects you may have money tied to some type of crime, the highway patrol can scan any cards you have and seize the money.
This is literally highway robbery.
* In Rochester, a paid informant went undercover and drove a man suspected of being an Islamic extremist, Emanuel Lutchman, to a Walmart in December to buy a machete, ski masks, zip ties and other supplies for a would-be terrorist attack on New Year’s Eve. Because Mr. Lutchman, a mentally ill panhandler, had no money, the informant covered the $40 cost.
* Even The National Review thinks Cuomo’s anti-BDS executive order is trouble.
* Having a child is like rereading your own childhood.
* On Eve of Graduation, University of Chicago Student President Faces Expulsion.
* Inside the growing movement against campus militarization.
* Five eye-opening figures from the U.S. Education Department’s latest civil rights data dump.
1. In the 2013-2014 school year, 6.5 million children were chronically absent from school, missing 15 or more days of school.
2. 850,000 high school students didn’t have access to a school counselor.
3. 1.6 million students went to a school that employed a sworn law-enforcement officer, but no counselor.
4. Nearly 800,000 students were enrolled in schools where more than 20 percent of teachers hadn’t met state licensure requirements.
5. Racial disparities in suspensions reach all the way down into preschool: Black children represent 19 percent of all preschoolers, and 47 percent of all those who were suspended.
* Everyone has celebrated how Beyoncé’s celebrity power has elevated Warsan Shire’s work to global attention. But African literature should not only attain universal value when endorsed by the west, argues Ainehi Edoro.
* Dry Taps and Lagoons of Sewage: What America’s Water Crisis Looks Like.
* OrderOfBooks.com: Complete List of All Book Series in Order.
* Talk grows of replacing Trump at GOP convention. Talk of a convention coup rattles Republican politics. Walker Agonistes. Advisors Fear Trump Will Suddenly Announce VP Pick on Twitter. Google GOP Dot Com Truth. Trump is really bad at this. Calm Down, Trump Won’t Be President. Trump and Weimar America. “For what it’s worth, however, I would suggest that the least bad option is for all career lawyers in the Justice Department—and career officials in other agencies—to stay put and serve in a Trump administration.”
* The Anointed One, or the Comeback Kid? It’s time to admit Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarily talented politician. Here Comes Hillary the Hawk.
* The 11 states that will determine the 2016 election.
* The general problem is that the modern liberal nation-state and its characteristic institutions are simply no longer capable of delivering on their baseline promises and possibilities to any national population anywhere. Even in nations that appear by most measures to be successful, the state withers due its lack of vision. Liberalism cannot handle the extension of its rights to all who are entitled, and its major alleged champions increasingly endorse depraved forms of military and economic illiberalism in the name of its defense. The brief moment of reform in which capital seemed to be harnessed to social democracy is very nearly over, and the difference between illicit and licit economies now seems paper-thin at best. Very little policy gets made because it’s the right thing to do; most policy is about transfer-seeking. Every dollar is spoken for. Every play is a scrum in the middle that moves the ball inches, never yards. Political elites around the world either speak in laughably dishonest ways about hope and aspiration or stick to grey, cramped horizons of plausibly incremental managerialism. Young people all around the world recognize that there is little hope of living in a better or more comfortable or more just world than their parents did, and their grandparents must often live every day with the possibility of losing whatever they’ve gained, that they are one lost job or sickness away from falling without a safety net. In the United States, what this all means in a more immediate sense is that Donald J. Trump is only the beginning.
* Welcome to the Party, America! 11 Muslim women who have been PM or President.
* Here are the proposed names for the 4 newest elements on the periodic table.
There are some constraints to naming, however. The IUPAC rules stipulate new elements must be named after either
* “A mythological concept or character (including an astronomical object)”
* “A mineral, or similar substance”
* “A place or geographical region”
* “A property of the element”
* “A scientist”
* Scientists Avoid Studying Women’s Bodies Because They Get Periods.
* What everyone earns working on a $200m blockbuster.
* A new study produced by Cambridge University statistician David Spiegelhalter suggests the cause of declining sex trends over the past 30 years is Netflix.
* What Happened to ‘The Most Liberated Woman in America’?
* Being Dinosaur Comics’s Ryan North.
* Snow Crash and Infinite Jest Both Predicted Our Cyberpunk Present.
* Fighting salary compression at the University of Washington. This is such a tough problem everywhere; the situation sounds much worse on every level at Marquette, for instance, than even what the article describes at Washington.
* Do Deaf Babies Need to be ‘Fixed’? I’ve found this debate utterly fascinating for years. I have no idea how to solve it.
* From Cleveland: Testing of backlogged rape kits yields new insights into rapists and major implications for how sexual assaults should be investigated.
* Behind Peter Thiel’s Plan to Destroy Gawker.
* Of course you had me at “Biologists Have Learned Something Horrifying About Prairie Dogs.”
* And this could be the biggest case of treason involving cheese — ever.
Monday Morning Links!
* Coming soon: Adam Kotsko’s long-awaited book on the devil, The Prince of This World. And from Annie McClanahan: Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.
* Important White House petition: “Include Adjuncts in Loan Forgiveness Program.”
* But here’s the rub: I am able to afford this faux middle-class life on $40,000 a year because I live around poverty. I didn’t write this, but basically anyone with a job like mine in a city like Milwaukee could have.
* Marquette University John McAdams and the Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty announced Monday that they have filed suit in Milwaukee County Circuit Court against the university for what the plaintiffs describe as “illegally suspending” McAdams more than a year ago.
* Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.
* Scientists Warn All Plant Life Dying Within 30-Yard Radius Of Ted Cruz Campaign Signs.
* Clinton is the second-most disliked general election candidate in modern history. Guess who is #1. Using this approach, the probability that Trump can catch up by November is 9%, and the probability that Clinton will remain ahead of Trump is 91%.
* Toddlers have shot at least 23 people this year.
* “Uber for MBAs Is a Worrying Sign.”
* How Gender Confirmation Surgery Actually Works.
* But in order to break into the top 10 percent of American drinkers, you would need to drink more than two bottles of wine with every dinner. And you’d still be below-average among those top 10 percenters.
* Suing? What for? The coffee was too cold. It’s supposed to be cold. Not THAT cold.
* Pop culture moment: we’ve been watching The People vs. O.J. Simpson and have been completely floored by how good it is. Thanks Lili Loofbourow for the rec!
* This month is also the Comedy Bang Bang live tour — with each date appearing on howl.fm the next day — so my pop culture dance card is kind of filled right now.
* I can’t decide if the White House Correspondents Dinner becomes more or less obscene when Obama is so good at it.
* Monkey bars alert: Playground concussions are on the rise. I’m really surprised parental use of cell phones isn’t suggested as a possible aggravating cause.
* Understanding epigenetic. Forgotten lessons of the American Eugenics movement.
* Andrew Sullivan is back, and he says your precious democracy is doomed. Doomed!
* And tell my kids I’m sorry: Scientists find more reasons that Greenland will melt faster. World on catastrophic path to run out of fresh water. And in case you’ve forgotten.
Weekend Links!
* Good news, everyone! “A typical person is more than five times as likely to die in an extinction event as in a car crash,” says a new report.
* What’s Really Killing Digital Media: The Tyranny of the Impression.
* U. of New Hampshire Concedes It Shouldn’t Have Bought $17,000 Table.
* Chicago State lays off a third of its staff.
* RiffTrax tackles The Force Awakens.
* The legally and ethically fraught world of post-mortem sperm donation.
* Raising a Child With Grit Can Mean Letting Her Quit.
* Yale Watch: Neither retaining Calhoun nor adding Franklin makes a lick of sense.
* Elisabeth Moss to Star in Hulu Straight-to-Series Drama Handmaid’s Tale.
* Heroic time-traveling weasel shuts down Large Hadron Collider to protect the weasel future.
* “Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician.” Meanwhile: Susan Sarandon: I’m more afraid of Hillary’s war record than Trump’s wall.
* And he’s will have had always had my vote: This Candidate for President Claims He’s Traveled Through Time.
Friday Links!
* CFP: 21st Century Englishes Graduate Student Conference. CFP: Premodern Ecologies. CFP: 41st Meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies, “Harbors and Islands: Explorations of Utopia, Past and Present.” CFP: To the Ends of the Earth.
* TGIF: These Are the Most Serious Catastrophic Threats Faced by Humanity.
* Toward a New Theory of the Bad Dad and Husband. Next time, Slate, say it to my face!
* I’m adding Professor of Future Crimes to my supervillain flourish, right after “Master of Magnetism.”
* Meanwhile, in crimes against the future: Evidence points to widespread loss of ocean oxygen by 2030s. That’s bad.
* Mother driving down Milwaukee highway is shot dead by two-year-old son in backseat.
* Wisconsin Ranks 48th In Nation In Arts Spending.
* Nintendo’s next console is coming March 2017, and Zelda along with it.
* Socialism and Fantasy: China Miéville’s Fables of Race and Class.
* Last Year’s Hugo Award Drama Is Not Going Away Any Time Soon.
* Imre Szeman: From Petrocultures to Other Cultures.
* Mind F*ck Alert: Plants May Have Memories.
* Outstanding Achievements in the Field of Oh My God You’re Terrible: Hastert becomes the single most powerful member of the House. He uses that power to earmark money for a project that vastly increases the value of land he secretly owns. This gives him the millions he will need to buy silence from some he sexually abused as a youth, thus enabling him to stay in power for years.
* How To Cheat For 20 Years In The NCAA And (Almost) Get Away With It. Who’s Going to Be Punished for the Worst Academic Scandal Anyone Can Remember?
* On being undocumented at Marquette.
* There comes Hamilton: The Movie.
* Words are the Weapons, the Weapons Must Go: The Cuban Revolution and the American Left.
* Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Literature but Were Afraid to Ask Žižek.
* UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi on investigatory leave due to ‘serious questions.’
* Bioviva press release announces Bioviva is great: Elizabeth Parrish, CEO of Bioviva USA Inc. has become the first human being to be successfully rejuvenated by gene therapy, after her own company’s experimental therapies reversed 20 years of normal telomere shortening.
* Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?
* How Medicaid forces families like mine to stay poor.
* Over 9,000 Years Later, Kennewick Man Will Be Given a Native American Burial.
* LEGO Imperial Star Destroyer: the ISD Tyrant.
* Grant Morrison’s Superman Stories: A Reconfigured Reading Order.
* Mother’s Day gets the mother of all critical maulings.
* When Your Dream Project Is A Financial Failure: Disney’s Treasure Planet.
Resolved: Thursday Links Will Take All Our Links
* Tonight! DC! 6:30! Resolved: Technology Will Take All Our Jobs!
* Help, University Administration Is Terrible! Kids these days.
* Statement by PROFS in response to JFC omnibus motion #521, item #39. Foxes in the Henhouse: The Republican Takeover of the University of Wisconsin System. A turning point for the UW Colleges.
* Forgetting Lolita: How Nabokov’s Victim Became an American Fantasy.
* Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth: Time for a Teaching-Intensive Tenure Track.
* How the Red Cross Raised Half a Billion Dollars for Haiti and Built Six Homes.
* Every United Airlines flight was grounded this morning in the US.
* More People Work at Fusion Than Are Reading Its Most Popular Post.
* The problem is that the IRB system is so fundamentally misconceived that it is virtually a model of how to regulate badly.
* French Court Rules It Is Unconstitutional To Cut Off Water To Anybody.
* Teen got arrested after cop tried to pick her up, failed. Warrants issued for people who cheered at Senatobia graduation. In the last seven years at least 29 police K-9s have sweltered to death after officers left the dogs inside hot patrol vehicles.
* School kitchen manager fired for giving lunches to hungry students.
* Sepp Blatter resigns. Something something joke about George Lucas character names.
* The Secret 1949 Radiation Experiment That Contaminated Washington.
* How Ridic Are the New Scrabble Words?
* How Ridic Are Call-In Shifts?
* Alternative Idea for Resolving Sexual-Assault Cases Emphasizes Closure. “Administrators promised to keep her charges confidential and to protect her from retaliation.” For what it’s worth, I had some general thoughts on Title IX earlier this week that I Storified on the off-chance anyone is interested. I don’t think the outlook is good.
* The inside story of how the Clintons built a $2 billion global empire. Is Hillary Clinton in trouble?
* Draft, uh, let’s say Bloomberg.
* New Study Confirms Self-Evident Truth: Time Warner Is Literally The Worst.
* Hell is working at the Huffington Post.
* And the arc of history is long, but Arrested Development season five will air in spring 2016.
Gerry Canavan 