Posts Tagged ‘contracts’
Spriiiiiiiing Breaaaaaaaaak! Links
* Don’t miss the CFP for my upcoming Paradoxa special issue on “Global Weirding”!
* Of course you haven’t read Canavan until you’ve read him in the original French.
* Black Study, Black Struggle.
* Today in the end of our lives’ work. Delaware State cuts more than a quarter of its majors. But don’t worry, we’ve finally got the solution.
* Chairing a humanities department at the end of the world.
* Trying to put a number on adjunct justice.
* In the chit-chat of the checkup, as I lay back in the chair with the suction tube in my mouth, he asked: “What are you majoring in at college?” When I replied that I was majoring in philosophy, he said: “What are you going to do with that?” “Think,” I replied.
* I think you’ll find every possible jaundiced, post-academic riff on this story has already been made: French woman aged 91 gets PhD after 30 years.
* All about the SF sensation of SXSW, Dead Slow Ahead. And more!
* Great moments in unenforceable contracts.
* Ten Years after the Duke Lacrosse Scandal. A prison interview with the accuser.
* Reminder: NCAA Amateurism Is a Corrupt Sham, We Are All Complicit. March Madness means money – it’s time to talk about who’s getting paid. And here’s how to gamble on it.
* The trouble with people who lived in the past.
* Inside the Protest That Stopped the Trump Rally.
* How to steal a nomination from Donald Trump. The Pre-Convention. There is no point in even having a party apparatus, no point in all those chairmen and state conventions and delegate rosters, if they cannot be mobilized to prevent 35 percent of the Republican primary electorate from imposing a Trump nomination on the party. I can’t be contrarian about Donald Trump anymore: he’s terrifying.
* Meet the Academics Who Want Donald Trump to Be President.
* I do agree that presidential term limits make little sense, though my solution would be to abolish the office entirely.
* The oldest man in the world survived Auschwitz.
* What if Daylight Saving Time never ended?
* Teach the controversy: Richard Simmons May or May Not Be Currently Held Hostage by His Maid.
* As temperatures soar, new doubts arise about holding warming to 2 degrees C.
* The Sadness and Beauty of Watching Google’s AI Play Go. Game Two. Game Three. Game Five. But we got one!
* How The TV Show of Octavia Butler’s Dawn Will Stay True to Her Incredible Vision.
* Take your Baby-Sitters’ Club cosplay / fanfic blog to the next level.
* Photoshopping men out of political photos.
* Scenes from Iconic Films Hastily Rewritten So They Pass the Bechdel Test.
* Identical twins Bridgette and Paula Powers think of themselves as a single person.
* Paul Nungesser has lost his Title IX lawsuit against Columbia.
* Chris Claremont visits Jay and Miles X-plain the X-Men.
* Paging Lt. Barclay: Science proves the transporter is a suicide box.
* The Untold Tragedy of Camden, NJ.
* J.K. Rowling’s History of Magic in North America Was a Travesty From Start to Finish.
* Scientists discover ‘genderfluid’ lioness who looks, acts and roars like a male.
* Always a good sign: Star Trek Beyond Is Reshooting and Adding an Entirely New Cast Member. Meanwhile: Paramount lawyers call Star Trek fan film’s bluff in nerdiest lawsuit ever.
* Jacobin reviews Michael’s Moore Where to Invade Next. Jacob Brogan reviews Daniel Clowes’s Patience.
* From our family to yours, happy St. Patrick’s Day.
* Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along.
* And because you demanded it: What if James Bond Was a Chimpanzee?
Friday Links!
* TNI CFPs we have believe in: “The Stars.”
* How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future.
The child was too young to have a criminal record. Young enough, at 12, that to claim he was “no angel” would have been extraordinarily obscene. Yet it did not take long before media agencies began looking into his parents’ past. Around dinner tables across the country, some black uncle or aunt or mother or father or grandparent or brother or sister is asking why the parents weren’t there, didn’t or couldn’t do more to protect him. People will solemnly nod, but they will know the truth. For too many black childhood is a gestation period, an interlude between a period of less-than-innocent babyhood and maturation into full social pathology. Black children, but not just black children, are denied childhood. Instead, they come to be the stuff of nightmares, youths who are simply younger versions of the terror they will embody. “A hallucination of your worst fears.”
* Police officer Darren Wilson is not a monster; he is the mundane and day-to-day face of white supremacy as experienced by people of color in the United States.
* Who Killed Robert McCulloch’s Father?
* Why Americans Call Turkey ‘Turkey.’
* BREAKING: Algorithms Can Ruin Lives.
* Kitty Queer. On the queer subtext of Chris Claremont’s long run on X-Men.
* Hooray! 83 episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 are now available to download.
* Can the NFL survive its concussion crisis?
* Great moments in not thinking of an elephant: “The only people with the right to object to immigration are Native Americans.” This has got to be the worst imaginable framing to argue on behalf of kindness or generosity towards immigrants.
* A theory of politics predicated on “how to convince your right-wing uncle to act on climate change” isn’t one. Unless “Uncle Richard” is Cheney, and not even then.
* Excerpts from Hillary Clinton’s contract rider.
* The Mysterious Antikythera Mechanism Is More Ancient Than We Thought.
* And maybe we should just try to figure out who’s cloning all these Hitlers.
A Few for Friday
I had a ton of links late last night in case you missed it, but here’s a few more for this morning:
* Ginsberg’s view is Malthusian. Administrators breed unless checked.
* Are all adjunct contracts illegal? Seems worth looking into…
* If the White House wants to pay attention to something important, they might start there rather than embracing the hope that market forces will automagically deploy the MOOC to finally relieve the technocrats of the burden of maintaining and extending public goods.
* Elsevier is a commercial firm that publishes some of the leading journals in many academic fields. In recent weeks, it has sent takedown notices to the academic social media network Academia.edu, as well as to the University of Calgary, the University of California-Irvine, and Harvard University. Why would Elsevier pick a fight with Harvard? That seems suicidal. Harvard could start up a nonprofit publishing firm for academic journals and not even notice the money was gone.
* When “Life Hacking” Is Really White Privilege.
* Top court strikes down Canada’s ‘overly broad’ anti-prostitution laws. Wow.
* This Guy Thinks All Pro Sports Are Rigged. I thought everyone knew this now…
* Obama suddenly dropping pardons. Thirteen! Just a few million to go.
* BREAKING: The point of voting is to build and maintain hegemony.
* And your tumblr of forever: 70sscifiart.tumblr.com.
Every Thursday Brings Us Closer to the End of Thursdays Links
* 92-Year-Old Who Once Faced Literacy Tests Sues North Carolina Over New Wave Of Voter Suppression.
* The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students.
* AAUP is looking to change the way it organizes professors.
* More Than Half Of Teachers Report Buying Hungry Students Food With Their Own Money.
* John Liu has a new pet issue in this mayoral race: Just ahead of Tuesday’s mayoral debate, the city comptroller proposed changing the city’s marijuana laws to make the drug legal for recreational use, then taxing it and using the revenue to help pay for the City University of New York. A study Liu commissioned on marijuana economics in New York found that legalizing the possession of one ounce of weed could increase city revenue by $400 million.
* Forbes lists its ranking of the most and least financially fit schools in America.
The Oxford English Dictionary says the first published use of “hello” goes back only to 1827. And it wasn’t mainly a greeting back then. Ammon says people in the 1830’s said hello to attract attention (“Hello, what do you think you’re doing?”), or to express surprise (“Hello, what have we here?”). Hello didn’t become “hi” until the telephone arrived.
* Impressionist Sings ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ As 19 Different Divas.
* U2′s Bono: Capitalism is only way to end poverty. Well, I guess that settles it.
* TNI considers the fine print.
Fine print has a habit of eliciting just such a moralizing tone. If somebody is caught out by terms contained in a section of fine print, our first thought is usually that it’s the person’s own fault for being so inattentive, reckless, or even downright lazy. “Always read the fine print.” With its definite article serving at once to distance and to universalize the practice, the old adage is deemed fair warning. And yet fine print asks specifically not to be read. It is a deliberately non-communicative speech act, erasing itself by miniaturization, accumulation, and esotericism.
* And some grade-A crazy from Orson Scott “Please, Boycott Ender’s Game, I’m Begging You” Card.
Monday
* Today in my classroom: Freida Hughes’s poem “My Mother.” I used this at the tail end of our discussion of Sylvia Plath today and found it really useful as a way of interrogating just what it is we do as critics.
* This American Life Features Error-Riddled Story On Disability And Children. Of course, it was a Planet Money piece.
* Think about it: MOOAs are the perfect solution to the rising cost of higher education. We take superstar administrators and let them administer tens, maybe even hundreds, of thousands of faculty at a time. The Ivy League and Nescac colleges could pool their upper management as could, say, Midwestern state colleges that start with “I” or “O.”
If the administrators cannot compete and be effective online, then it’s time to get out of the way for the people who can. After all, no student ever thought it was worth $55,000 a year for time in a room with a particular dean or vice president, but we might be able to convince them, at least for a while longer, that the educational experience of the classroom is worth it.
* Median Salaries of Higher-Education Professionals, 2012-13.
* Committee tasked with creating standards for for-profit colleges folds under industry pressure.
* And thus began the great Georgia-Tennessee War.
* The Great Melting: Polar Ice Across The Arctic And Antarctic.
* Today in dystopia: White Student Union at Towson University will conduct nighttime campus patrols. What could possibly go wrong?
* 5 Products That Should Fear Google’s Next Killing Spree.
* The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
* Today in fanboy supercuts: Watch all six Star Wars movies at once. It actually is sort of revealing.
* There’s a dark cloud hanging over the science of climate change, quite literally. Scientists today have access to supercomputers capable of running advanced simulations of Earth’s climate hundreds of years into the future, accounting for millions of tiny variables. But even with all that equipment and training, they still can’t quite figure out how clouds work.
* Matternet Founder Paola Santana Wants To Replace The Postal System With Drones.
* Out of sight, out of mind: the story of every known victim of drone bombings in Pakistan.
* The University of Maryland at College Park doesn’t have a copy of the contract it signed to join the Big 10, The Washington Post reported. The Post filed an open records request for the contract, and was told that the university didn’t have a copy. The Big 10, which is not subject to open records requests, keeps all such copies. Maryland officials said that not keeping a copy was in line with Big 10 policies, which are designed to reflect that most of its members are public universities, subject to open records requests.
* A growing body of evidence shows, however, that we have grossly underestimated both the scope and the scale of animal intelligence. Can an octopus use tools? Do chimpanzees have a sense of fairness? Can birds guess what others know? Do rats feel empathy for their friends? Just a few decades ago we would have answered “no” to all such questions. Now we’re not so sure. Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species. Scientists are now finally meeting animals on their own terms instead of treating them like furry (or feathery) humans, and this shift is fundamentally reshaping our understanding. See also: Clever Hans the Math Horse.
* Presenting the invisible bike helmet.
* Wal-Mart Stores Inc has sued a major grocery workers union and others who have protested at its Florida stores, the latest salvo in its legal fight to stop “disruptive” rallies in and around its stores by groups seeking better pay and working conditions.
* “Do you know that unless you’re willing to use the R rating, you can only say the ‘F’ word once? You know what I say? F*ck that. I’m done.” And it’s new to me: Jimmy Kimmel’s unnecessary censorship.
A Headline Writer Lives for a Story Like This
Choose your poison: “Kidnapper Sues Victims Who Escaped for Breach of Contract” or “Man Sues Couple He Kidnapped After They Got Him to Fall Asleep While Watching ‘Patch Adams.'” There’s no wrong answer here.
Very Quick Tuesday Night Links
* Previously unseen Jack Kirby creations.
* Joss Whedon will direct The Avengers! This will either be completely awesome or a completely awesome disaster.
* Could password masking really cost $16 billion dollars in productivity each year?
* Sarah Palin’s tour rider. Bendable straws not optional.
Gerry Canavan 