Posts Tagged ‘Gmail’
Saturday Morning Post-SFRA Links! All! Tabs! Closed!
* SFRA is over, but ICFA season has only just begun! The theme for ICFA 2019 is “Politics and Conflicts” and the special guests are Mark Bould and G. Willow Wilson.
* And keep saving your pennies for SFRA 19 in Hawaii! Stay tuned for more information soon.
* Ben Robertson put up his SFRA talk on the MCU and abstraction as well as his opening statement for the Avengers vs. Jedi roundtable (which coined the already ubiquitous term “naustalgia”). My opening statement was this image, more or less…
* Other piping hot SFRA content at #SFRA18! It was a great conference.
* The Economics of Science Fiction.
* A book I’m in won a Locus Award: Check out Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler! Congratulations to Alexandra and Mimi.
* Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: an interview with Octavia E. Butler from 1986.
* CFP: TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance. CFP: Childhoods of Color.
* The early career academic: learning to say no.
* The Humanities as We Know Them Are Doomed. Now What? Jobs Will Save the Humanities.
* Revised Course Evaluation Questions.
* Essentially total victory for John McAdams over Marquette at the WI Supreme Court. I don’t talk about “Marquette stuff” on here because of the slippery nature of my status as an agent of the university, but noted for history. More here. Marquette “agrees to comply” but doesn’t concede wrongdoing.
“The undisputed facts show that the university breached its contract with Dr. McAdams when it suspended him for engaging in activity protected by the contract’s guarantee of academic freedom,” states the ruling, written by Justice Daniel Kelly.
* Things that happen in Silicon Valley and also the Soviet Union. So good.
* Since it isn’t, a simple question arises: where’s all the fucking money? Piketty’s student Gabriel Zucman wrote a powerful book, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (2015), which supplies the answer: it’s hidden by rich people in tax havens. According to calculations that Zucman himself says are conservative, the missing money amounts to $8.7 trillion, a significant fraction of all planetary wealth. It is as if, when it comes to the question of paying their taxes, the rich have seceded from the rest of humanity.
* If Elon Musk can save the trapped Thai soccer team though I’ll definitely forgive him for everything else, for at least a couple weeks. In the meantime…
* Trump’s ethnic cleansing operation is blowing past boundaries that would have been considered utterly sacrosanct only a few years ago. The Trump administration just admitted it doesn’t know how many kids are still separated from their parents. “In hundreds of cases, Customs agents deleted the initial records in which parents and children were listed together as a family with a “family identification number,” according to two officials at the Department of Homeland Security.” The teenager told police all about his gang, MS-13. In return, he was slated for deportation and marked for death. Toddlers representing themselves in court. USCIS is Starting a Denaturalization Task Force. Trump’s Travel Ban Has Torn Apart Hundreds of Families. Trump’s catch-and-detain policy snares many who have long called U.S. home. At 9 He Lost His Mom to Gang Violence. At 12 He Lost His Dad to Trump’s Immigration Policies. After being released from custody in El Paso on Sunday, the parents have now learned the whereabouts of their children, a shelter director said. But there are more hurdles before they’re reunited. Lawful permanent resident freed nearly three weeks after arrest. Sick Child Couldn’t Walk After U.S. Took Him From His Mom. Painful memories of Michigan for immigrant girl, 7, reunited with mom. The Awful Plight of Parents Deported Without Their Children. From behind bars, a father searches for one of the 2,000 kids still separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. Dad, I’m Never Going to See You Again. Feds failing to put migrant parents in touch with separated kids. Former Seattle Chief Counsel sentenced to 4 years in prison for wire fraud, aggravated identity theft scheme. “At night, Andriy sometimes wakes up screaming in the bunk bed he shares with his mother and baby brother.” “My Whole Heart Is There.” “My son is not the same.” “Are You Alone Now?” There was a pilot program. Transport Fees. A Migrant Mother Had to Pay $576.20 to Be Reunited With Her 7-Year-Old Son. Letters from the Disappeared. Listen. Border Agent Threatened to Put Immigrant’s Daughter Up for Adoption, ACLU Says. A New Border Crisis. Separated Parents Are Failing Asylum Screenings Because They’re So Heartbroken. A Twitter Bot Has Joined the Immigration Battle to Fight ICE With Facts. A Twitter Bot Is Posting the Names and Locations of Immigrant Detention Centers Across the U.S. Over the course of three weeks, a major U.S. defense contractor detained dozens of immigrant children inside a vacant Phoenix office building with no kitchen and only a few toilets. The Immigrant Children’s Shelters Near You. Supreme Court just wrote a presumption of white racial innocence into the Constitution. The Trump administration is not answering basic questions about separation of migrant families. Immigration Attorney Says ICE Broke Her Foot, Locked Her Up. This is what Trump and ICE are doing to parents and their children. A practice so cruel that the United States ended it for a quarter-century. It’s only going to get worse. Torn apart. Don’t you know that we hate you people? (Only) 17 states sue Trump administration over family separations. News outlets join forces to track down children separated from their parents by the U.S. We might not even have ever known. New 1,000-Bed ICE Lockup Set to Open on Site of Notorious ‘Tent City’ in South Texas. Potemkin camps. Research suggests that the family of Anne Frank attempted to escape to the U.S., but their efforts were thwarted by America’s restrictive immigration policy. Exclusive: Trump administration plan would bar people who enter illegally from getting asylum. We’re Going to Abolish ICE. Woman Climbs Statue of Liberty to Protest Family Separations, Island Shut Down. How to Abolish ICE. And just for fun: ICE Training Officers in Military-Grade Weapons, Chemical Agents. Dogsitting.
* The Central American Child Refugee Crisis: Made in U.S.A.
* I’ve Been Reporting on MS-13 for a Year. Here Are the 5 Things Trump Gets Most Wrong.
* I feel pretty confident the buried story here is that Trump blackmailed Anthony Kennedy by threatening to destroy his son’s life; I suppose it’ll all come out during Truth and Reconciliation in the 2040s. Anyway this is just about the final end of America, buckle up.
* All of American history fits in the life span of only three presidents.
* Trump Confidant Floats Crazy RBG-For-Merrick-Garland SCOTUS Swap. I am a huge proponent of this deal but you’ll have to confirm Garland first. You understand.
* There’s no returning to a golden age of American democracy that never existed. Donald Trump, the resistance, and the limits of normcore politics.
* What can we learn from 1968?
* Trump Inauguration Day rioting charges against 200+ people abruptly dropped by U.S.
* A major Republican leader in the House has been accused of facilitating the sexual abuse of huge numbers of children in his previous career as a wrestling coach. No, not him, this is a new guy.
* Farmers in America are killing themselves in staggering numbers.
* Been Down So Long It Looks Like Debt to Me.
* In the richest country in all of human history.
* A country of empty storefronts.
* $117,000/year is now considered low income in San Francisco. Class and America.
* How Flint poisoned its people.
* ‘A way of monetizing poor people’: How private equity firms make money offering loans to cash-strapped Americans. With special appearance by Obama Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner!
* Rosa Parks’s Arrested Warrant.
* The Beautiful, Ugly, and Possessive Hearts of Star Wars.
* Every parent’s secret suspicion confirmed: She was worried how a ‘teacher of the year’ treated her 5-year-old son. So she made a secret recording.
* Lows of 80 degrees and higher, now commonplace, were once very rare. They occurred just 26 times from 1872 to 1999 or about once every five years. Since 2000, they’ve happened 37 times or twice every year on average. Probably nothing.
* It’s So Hot Out, It’s Slowing Down the Speed of Stock Trades.
* Flood insurance is completely broken.
* Companies buying back their own shares is the only thing keeping the stock market afloat right now.
* Facebook destroyed online publishing, then quit the business.
* The US Left Has Only Four Tendencies.
* Students in Detroit Are Suing the State Because They Weren’t Taught to Read.
* Doesn’t seem like a great sign, no.
* A great ideas as long as you know nothing about either writing or computers.
Turns out that’s an easy question to answer, thanks to MIT research affiliate, and longtime-critic of automated scoring, Les Perelman. He’s designed what you might think of as robo-graders’ kryptonite, to expose what he sees as the weakness and absurdity of automated scoring. Called the Babel (“Basic Automatic B.S. Essay Language”) Generator, it works like a computerized Mad Libs, creating essays that make zero sense, but earn top scores from robo-graders.
To demonstrate, he calls up a practice question for the GRE exam that’s graded with the same algorithms that actual tests are. He then enters three words related to the essay prompt into his Babel Generator, which instantly spits back a 500-word wonder, replete with a plethora of obscure multisyllabic synonyms:
“History by mimic has not, and presumably never will be precipitously but blithely ensconced. Society will always encompass imaginativeness; many of scrutinizations but a few for an amanuensis. The perjured imaginativeness lies in the area of theory of knowledge but also the field of literature. Instead of enthralling the analysis, grounds constitutes both a disparaging quip and a diligent explanation.”
“It makes absolutely no sense,” he says, shaking his head. “There is no meaning. It’s not real writing.”
But Perelman promises that won’t matter to the robo-grader. And sure enough, when he submits it to the GRE automated scoring system, it gets a perfect score: 6 out of 6, which according to the GRE, means it “presents a cogent, well-articulated analysis of the issue and conveys meaning skillfully.”
* Winners of the 2018 National Geographic Travel Photographer of the Year Contest.
* In 1934, an American professor urged that Jews be civil — to the Nazis.
* California reconsiders felony murder.
* William Shatner kicks off July 4th by implying that UW-Madison & Penn should consider firing 2 kid lit professors for disagreeing with him about whether it’s appropriate to note racism in Little House of the Prairie.
* Six decades after being told her mother was dead, she found her — 80 minutes away and 100 years old.
* Between 1984 and the mid-1990s, before better HIV drugs effectively rendered her obsolete, Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of dying people, many of them gay men who had been abandoned by their families. She buried more than three dozen of them herself, after their families refused to claim their bodies. For many of those people, she is now the only person who knows the location of their graves.
* How Universities Facilitate Far-Right Groups’ Harassment of Students and Faculty.
* A location scout’s view of California.
* Not all heroes wear capes: How an EPA worker stole $900K by pretending to be a CIA agent.
* How Pixar’s Open Sexism Ruined My Dream Job (Guest Column).
* Reality Winner pleads guilty.
* When copyright goes wrong, EU edition.
* Academic minute: Geoengineering.
* Anglo-Saxon Studies, Academia and White Supremacy.
* The Millennial Socialists Are Coming. How Ocasio-Cortez Beat the Machine. A Conversation with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Fights the Power. Next: Julia Salazar Is Looking to Land the Next Blow Against the New York Democratic Machine. The socialists are coming! But huge, if true.
* The clearest lesson, which holds now as it did then, is that to rearrange international order in an egalitarian way, you need an egalitarian and internationally oriented domestic politics in the richest and most powerful countries. Otherwise, your best-laid plans can be scuttled by something like what happened then—the neoliberal revolt of capital, the crushing of the labor unions, the turn to the construction of the current international regime of relatively free flow of goods, services, and capital, but not people. Today’s nationalist revolts, most notably the catastrophe in the United States, are another body blow to progressive internationalist aspirations. Ironically, they are directed in part against some of the pieties of the neoliberal order—although certainly not in any constructive or progressive direction.
* A Subreddit Dedicated to Thanos Is Preparing to Ban Half of Its Users at Random.
* lol
* The UK is committing national suicide to satisfy a laughably illegitimate referendum that never should have happened in the first place and no one is going to stop it.
* Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.
* If there is hope, it lies with the Juggalos.
It is tragic. I’m not a method actor, but one of the techniques a method actor will use is to try and use real-life experiences to relate to whatever fictional scenario he’s involved in. The only thing I could think of, given the screenplay that I read, was that I was of the Beatles generation—‘All You Need Is Love’, ‘peace and love’.
I thought at that time, when I was a teenager: ‘By the time we get in power, there will be no more war, there will be no racial discrimination, and pot will be legal.’ So I’m one for three. When you think about it, [my generation is] a failure. The world is unquestionably worse now than it was then.
* The first superhero movie is more than 100 years old.
* Rest in peace, Harlan Ellison. Rest in peace, Steve Ditko.
* NASA’s Policies to Protect the Solar System From Contamination Are Out of Date. We’re not going to is the thing.
* Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal.
* Man suspected of killing 21 co-workers by poisoning their food.
* There could be as many as 7000 tigers living in American backyards.
* “When I Was Alive”: William T. Vollmann’s Climate Letter to the Future.
* Remembering Google Reader, five years on.
* Very cool: If you use Gmail, know that “human third parties” are reading your email.
* A classic edition of “our brains don’t work”: that’s because your freaking visual system just lied to you about HOW LONG TIME IS in order to cover up the physical limitations of those chemical camera orbs you have on the front of your face.
* Sports corner! The Warriors Are Making A Mockery Of The NBA Salary Cap. A Literary Lineup for the World Cup. We Timed Every Game. World Cup Stoppage Time Is Wildly Inaccurate. Catching “the world’s most prolific criminal fixer of soccer matches.”
* Physics says that our perception of smoothly flowing time is a cosmic accident. So why do we think the future always comes after the past?
* A Dunbar number for place: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places.
* Some monkeys in Panama may have just stumbled into the Stone Age. Don’t do it, guys, it’s not worth the hassle.
* I was basically my own editor for 25 years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. And then the publisher decided he didn’t like what he saw.
* Life as a professional dungeon master.
* Naked Japanese hermit forced back into civilization after 29 years on deserted island.
* An Oral History of ASSSSCAT.
* Peyton Reed (director of Ant-Man and the Wasp) remembers writing Back to the Future: The Ride.
* The Roxy, West Hollywood, CA, July 7, 1978.
* Someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas.
* The arc of history is long but seriously they really took their time with this.
* What should we read if we want to be happy?
* And Incredibles 3 looks wild. Don’t miss Old Man Incredible! I’m here for it.
Monday Morning!
* Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.
* Smartly realizing that nothing is going to change on the climate change beat, NPR guts its environmental reporting.
* Epigrams for my research agenda: That’s to say nothing of the fact that the people involved in GamerGate that Grieco defends are, in fact, not poor bullied kids. They are, overwhelmingly, employed, educated, privileged adult men, many of whom work for some of the most powerful and profitable industries in our economy. Their beloved sci fi and comic books and fantasy genres and media– those aren’t reviled and disrespected properties that people are ashamed to like. They’re economically dominant and critically lauded, and given the way the internet makes culture spread more broadly and intensely than ever before, are probably the most powerful force in the history of the arts.
* Different Bodies & Different Lives In Academia: Why The Rules Aren’t The Same For Everyone.
* Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns.
* 6 Brilliant Art Projects That Ruin Classic Kids’ Characters.
* Turn Your Princess-Obsessed Toddler Into a Feminist in Eight Easy Steps.
* All The Wealth The Middle Class Accumulated After 1940 Is Gone.
* Top Health Official Warns That Ebola Quarantines Could Backfire. And yet.
* Spock was right: Concern for equality linked to logic, not emotion.
* National insanity watch: Students at a Nebraska High School Can Now Pose With Guns in Their Senior Portraits.
* I want to talk about how badly we’re failing the boys who can’t see their way out of a totally lethal, totally toxic distortion of masculinity — the kind that says that if boys aren’t manly, or gentlemanly, they can be gunmanly.
* Forty percent of mass shootings start with the gunman targeting his wife, girlfriend, or ex. And access to firearms makes it seven times more likely that a domestic abuser will kill his partner.
* Yes, Mass Shootings Are Occurring More Often.
* Elon Musk: Developing artificial intelligence would be as dangerous as ‘summoning a demon.’
* The “Southern Belle” Is a Racist Fiction.
* LARoB interviews David Mitchell.
* Why Google wants to replace Gmail. They should have nationalized Google fifteen years ago.
* Now we see the violence, &c: Wisconsin cops deploy armored vehicle to collect fines from 75-year-old man for messy land.
* “The city’s new budget includes $25,000 to buy one-way bus tickets for homeless people.” “Hawaii even passed a measure that offers paid flights off the state to homeless people.” (via)
* Law Lets I.R.S. Seize Accounts on Suspicion, No Crime Required.
* Building a Better Panopticon: The Wire as melodrama.
The Wire extends and elaborates melodrama in remarkable ways. But, as Williams says, melodrama remains a broadly liberal medium — and as Williams doesn’t say, liberalism and neoliberalism are not especially distant cousins. Liberalism can critique neoliberalism for its inequities, its cruelties, and its callousness. But to neoliberalism’s call for data and surveillance, liberalism can only respond with a call for better data and more nuanced surveillance; to neoliberalism’s doctrine of individuality as sameness, liberalism can only offer a deeper individuality subsumed within a deeper sameness. The Wire is undoubtedly one of the greatest melodramas extant, and an object lesson in how powerful the form can be. Its limitations aren’t a failure on the part of its creators so much as an indication that melodrama, having gotten us to this particular liberal democratic impasse, is unlikely, on its own, to get us out.
* Hackers of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.
* And I learned today that Star Trek secondary canon features a running subplot where an unfrozen Wall Street guy slowly takes over the Federation. This is going in the Khan essay for sure…
Wednesday Links!
* Who accredits the accreditors? The U.S. Department of Education on Wednesday notified the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges that it is out of compliance in several areas related to its sanctioning of City College. The commission must take “immediate steps” to avert the suspension or termination of its federal recognition as an accrediting body, according to a letter from the department.
* Where is all that extra tuition revenue going?
During this time, he finds that both gross and net tuition revenue rose by nearly 40% in real, inflation-adjusted terms. How did university administrators decide to spend this money? If you guessed “on hiring lots more underlings, and giving enormous raises to themselves,” you have just won an authentic Gordon Gee bow tie. Gale finds that University president salaries rose by 50%, and total employee compensation went up by 22%, yet full-time instructor salaries (this includes both tenure-track and non-tenure track people) barely rose at all. Indeed the latter category may well have declined if non-full time adjunct faculty had been included.
* Relax, The United States Isn’t Actually Having A Fertility Crisis.
* How could this BE: Just two and a half months after a historic vote to close 50 schools, Chicago is laying the groundwork to bring more charter schools to the city.
* Google argues that Gmail users have no reasonable expectation of privacy. I bet Gmail users would differ on that.
* Olympics committee says you can’t let a little thing like virulent anti-gay laws get in the way of a good show.
* And what kind of Dungeons and Dragons character would you be? As an academic, of course I came out True Neutral Human Wizard (I mean, I’ve already got the robes). I’d tell you my stats but that would reveal what is apparently a dangerously high opinion of myself.
A Bunch of Links for Thursday
* In the future, you can make telephone calls from inside your email. Also, in the future Google knows everything there is to know about you.
* Oh, crap: My adjunct story starts with the highly self-indulgent decision to pursue a PhD in comparative literature. To me, this meant I’d get to study great writers who happened to express themselves in different languages. To hiring committees, it meant I had GENERALIST tattooed on my forehead—the academic equivalent of a scarlet A.
* Vimeo has a sneak preview of The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town.
* Happy 35th birthday, global warming. Personally, like the first commenter, I count from Arrhenius.
* How the Pirates make more money losing. Via the MetaFilter thread on accounting tricks in Major League Baseball.
* Surviving and Thriving in Durham: a Tumblr blog.
* Slayage has a special double issue on Dollhouse.
* There’s a new Grow game, Grow Valley. (Here’s the walkthrough.) You may also Metagun, which Rock Paper Shotgun describes as “a game about a man who fires a gun that fires men who fire guns. At you.”
* The eleven most scandalous stories about Saved By The Bell from Dustin “Screech” Diamond’s autobiography. Not a hoax, not an imaginary story. Via MetaFilter.
* And you had me at “Rod Serling action figure.”
You Have Five Seconds
As if you needed any other reason to switch to GMail, it now features an “Undo Send” option, something I have longed for ever since I stopped using AOL ten years ago. GMail! Catch the fever.
Still So Many Tabs
Still so many tabs.
* Gmail has a new ‘offline’ feature. I’m about to give it a whirl.
* Vermont: the least religious state. If only it weren’t so cold…
* Lesbian separatist communities are dying out.
* A Republican who gets it: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky – one of the country’s highest-ranking Republicans – will warn his party leadership later this afternoon that the GOP is rapidly turning into a regional party that can’t compete with Democrats at the national level.
* Having become a recent acolyte of This American Life, I can now say taht Kasper Hauser’s TAL parodies are fairly well-executed.
Gerry Canavan 