Posts Tagged ‘exoplanets’
Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
* The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction has a pre-order page! Open your wallets! Contact your local librarian! Get your Hugo nomination ballots ready!
* It’s a shame about Joan Rivers. The documentary about her is great. She was good on the Nerdist podcast too.
* Amazing, astounding: The Eaton Collection just got a $3.5 million gift.
* Through its increasing corporatization in the last two decades, the university in the United States has implemented an organizational ideology that has created a climate unfavorable for women faculty. By overvaluing and intensifying managerial principles, the university in the United States has strengthened discursive masculinity and has worsened women faculty’s likelihood of professional advancement. Consequently, the adoption and implementation of managerialism in higher education in the United States is a question of gender equity for the academic profession. Feminist educational scholars have been relatively quiet on the growth of managerialism in the university and its impact on gender equity. In particular, feminist scrutiny of managerialism’s discursive masculinity and its effects on gender equity in the university has been lacking. This conceptual article presents a feminist analysis of managerialism and its implications for women faculty in the United States; it examines how managerial culture and practices adopted by universities have revived, reinforced, and deepened the discourse of masculinity.
* inconsequential research kills don’t inconsequential research today
* The future’s just a little bit janky: Awesome Home-Built Elysium Exoskeleton Lifts 170 Pounds Like Nothing.
* The Freedom to Starve: The New Job Economy.
* California is the state of sunshine, movie stars— and Supermax prisons.
* This 3D-rendered Spider-Woman will haunt your dreams.
* People don’t like Spider-Woman’s butt because of Islam, says illustrator.
* The coming student debt apocalypse.
* The arc of history is long, but: Rams Cut Sam, First Drafted Openly Gay Player.
* In four federal lawsuits, including one that is on appeal, and more than a half-dozen investigations over the past decade, colleagues of Darren Wilson’s have separately contested a variety of allegations, including killing a mentally ill man with a Taser, pistol-whipping a child, choking and hog-tying a child and beating a man who was later charged with destroying city property because his blood spilled on officers’ clothes.
* When police catch “contagious shooting.” Even When Police Do Wear Cameras, Don’t Count on Seeing the Footage. Police Body Cameras Don’t Address the Real Problem: Police.
* Cop Charged With Sexually Assaulting Eight Women Under Threat of Arrest.
* All about how airlines cancel flights. Okay, but listen, I’m still mad.
* Headlines from the Anthropocene: Drought-Stricken California Makes Historic Move To Regulate Underground Water For The First Time. Are You Ready for a 35-Year Drought?
* Cataclysm in suburbia: The dark, twisted history of America’s oil-addicted middle class.
* The Moon Landing Went Far Better Than the Practice Landing.
* A previously unpublished chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
* Astronomers Discover A Planetary Impact Outside Our Own Solar System.
* And a radical communist provocation to shake your delicate sensibilities to the core: Shaking Down the Elderly for Student Loan Debt Should Not Be Allowed.
Tuesday Night Links
* Nation’s Uncles Enter Last Stage Of Prep For Thursday’s Thanksgiving Debates.
WASHINGTON—Sequestered in their homes today to review talking points on a range of topics from gay marriage to Gaza to the wisdom of purchasing a hybrid car, the nation’s uncles have reportedly entered their final stages of preparation for Thursday’s highly anticipated sit-down Thanksgiving dinner debates. “Now, now—now Bob—Bob!—you can’t just go saying… Hold on—you can’t just go saying that without considering the consequences,” said the loudmouth contrarians, talking into their mirrors as they vigorously rehearsed various interruptions and smug denunciations on subjects such as political bias in the media and whether or not underage nephews should be allowed to have a few sips of wine on a holiday. “If you thought about—thank you, Mary, it was delicious—if you thought about the consequences for one second, you’d realize how completely wrong that plan is. That’s exactly what these congressmen think, and that’s why we’re headed off a fiscal cliff. You see?” Sources confirmed the nation’s uncles are drafting their closing remarks around the theme of how the crust on the pumpkin pie could be “a little flakier.”
* 21 Pictures that Sum Up the Whole History of Science Fiction.
* Astronomers discover a planet so massive it defies classification.
* Forty years from now, America will be twice as rich on average as we are today. But most of that wealth will go to the very richest households. We only have a budget crisis if they refuse to pay higher taxes.
* And there goes my absolute last shred of hope for humanity: It’s almost impossible to believe, but authorities along the northern Gulf of Mexico are having to investigate a rash of violent attacks on dolphins after bodies were found with gunshot wounds, cuts, and missing tails.
Monday 2
* Kenyan anti-colonial behavior: On Oct. 5, a British high court ruled that three elderly Kenyans who were tortured and abused by colonial authorities in Kenya in the 1950s can proceed with their case against the British government.
* Early voting starts today in Wisconsin.
* Longitudinal study of 1,000 Wisconsin high school graduates from the class of 1957 proves that the popular kids really were just better.
* The data show that over the entire 345 years, 22 percent of all authors were female. (Even though few papers in the JSTOR archive originated in the first 100 years, the researchers still felt that examining the entire data set was worthwhile.) The data also show that women were slightly less likely than that to be first author: About 19 percent of first authors in the study were female. Women were more likely to appear as third, fourth, or fifth authors.
According to the data in just the most recent time period, it is clear that the proportion of female authors over all is rising. From 1990 to 2010, the percentage of female authors went up to 27 percent. In 2010 alone, the last year for which full figures are available, the proportion had inched up to 30 percent. “The results show us what a lot of people have been saying and many of my female colleagues have been feeling,” says Ms. Jacquet. “Things are getting better for women in academia.”
Women still are not publishing, though, in the same proportion as they are present in academe as professors. The same year that the share of female authors in the study reached 30 percent, women made up 42 percent of all full-time professors in academe and about 34 percent of all those at the most senior levels of associate and full professor, according to the American Association of University Professors.
* Why your uncles believe crazy things: this guy.
Mainstream election experts say that Spakovsky has had an improbably large impact. Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine, and the author of a recent book, “The Voting Wars,” says, “Before 2000, there were some rumblings about Democratic voter fraud, but it really wasn’t part of the main discourse. But thanks to von Spakovsky and the flame-fanning of a few others, the myth that Democratic voter fraud is common, and that it helps Democrats win elections, has become part of the Republican orthodoxy.” In December, Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, wrote, “Election fraud is a real and persistent threat to our electoral system.” He accused Democrats of “standing up for potential fraud—presumably because ending it would disenfranchise at least two of its core constituencies: the deceased and double-voters.” Hasen believes that Democrats, for their part, have made exaggerated claims about the number of voters who may be disenfranchised by Republican election-security measures. But he regards the conservative alarmists as more successful. “Their job is really done,” Hasen says. “It’s common now to assert that there is a need for voter I.D.s, even without any evidence.”
* World’s Oldest Known Auschwitz Survivor Dies at 108.
* This year is the first year the presidential debates have ignored climate change since 1984. That’s right, friends, we’re doomed!
* And scientists are on the hunt for the Forest Moon of Endor. God, I hope they find it.
Friday!
* John Maynard Keynes, dirty hippie. Via MeFi.
Finally, Keynes’s essay challenges us to imagine what life after capitalism might look like (for an economic system in which capital no longer accumulates is not capitalism, whatever one might call it). Keynes thought that the motivational basis of capitalism was “an intense appeal to the money-making and money-loving instincts of individuals.” He thought that with the coming of plenty, this motivational drive would lose its social approbation; that is, that capitalism would abolish itself when its work was done. But so accustomed have we become to regarding scarcity as the norm that few of us think about what motives and principles of conduct would, or should, prevail in a world of plenty.
* The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as a case study for local journalism today: I’ve been told by people in a position to know that the paper has decided that covering all the news is beyond their scope now, with its shadow staff and limited resources. So, they have decided to go all-in on what some at the paper call “Pulitzer Pursuit.” That’s where their best reporters are tasked and that’s where their resources go.
* “Weird” is perhaps the mildest way to describe the growing number of threats and acts of intimidation that climate scientists face. A climate modeler at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory answered a late-night knock to find a dead rat on his doorstep and a yellow Hummer speeding away. An MIT hurricane researcher found his inbox flooded daily for two weeks last January with hate mail and threats directed at him and his wife. And in Australia last year, officials relocated several climatologists to a secure facility after climate-change skeptics unleashed a barrage of vandalism, noose brandishing and threats of sexual attacks on the scientists’ children.
* The Scam Wall Street Learned From the Mafia.
* And science fiction, infinite science fiction, but not for us: scientists have discovered two exoplanets a scant million miles apart.
Gerry Canavan 