Posts Tagged ‘Henrietta Lacks’
Thursday Links, Inc.
* Like Kirk said, don’t let them promote you: Rising to Your Level of Misery at Work.
* Best American Poetry Pseudonyms.
* All the Sensible Progressives agree: The Clinton email scandal is over, over, so over.
* Big-Name Plan B’s for Democrats Concerned About Hillary Clinton. I guess I’ll get started on Plan C.
* The Hal Salive Science Fiction and Fantasy Collection at the University of Otago in New Zealand.
* At long last, the billionaires have come for their ancient enemy, UNC’s English department.
* Rutgers Faculty Union Urges Inquiry Into Football Coach.
* Cooperation or Collusion? Lawsuit Accuses Duke and UNC of Faculty Non-Poaching Deal. I think they bought themselves a whole lot of legal trouble here.
* Amid all the weirdness of the U Iowa president hire, it’s just the tip of the iceberg. Gotta spend money to make money. University of Iowa Faculty Senate votes ‘no confidence’ in Board of Regents. “We’re just getting started.”
* Some good news in Wisconsin: MATC announces free tuition for low-income students.
* Here’s the truth: academia is an amazing sector with some of the best features of any job, even if it also has substantial problems. Folks on the way out might feel like they’re biting their thumb at something, and those still “stuck” on the inside of this troubled-but-terrific career might feel some welcome-if-temporary solidarity. But after that, it’s just more fodder for legislators, corporations, and the general public to undermine the academy. It helps nobody in the long run. No One Cares That You Quit Your Job.
* Mediocrity is the secret key that explains everything. Moving beyond the early focus on conformity, we propose that the threat of status loss may make those with middle status more wary of advancing creative solutions in fear that they will be evaluated negatively. Using different manipulations of status and measures of creativity, we found that when being evaluated, middle-status individuals were less creative than either high-status or low-status individuals (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, we found that anxiety at the prospect of status loss also caused individuals with middle status to narrow their focus of attention and to think more convergently (Study 3). We delineate the consequences of power and status both theoretically and empirically by showing that, unlike status, the relationship between power and creativity is positive and linear (Study 4). By both measuring status (Studies 2 and 3) and by manipulating it directly (Study 5), we demonstrate that the threat of status loss explains the consequences of middle status.
* Researchers have discovered a better way to wait in line, and you’re going to hate it.
* Half of Americans have diabetes or pre-diabetes. This is framed as good news: “…after two decades of linear growth, the prevalence of diabetes in the United States has finally started to plateau.”
* Words about slavery that we should all stop using.
* “Prison gets rich looking up preschoolers.”
* Kim Davis has defeated us all. Related: Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis Never Should Have Gone to Jail.
* The Final Discworld Book Is Bittersweet For Many Reasons. I haven’t read one of these in decades, but I’m still sad he’s gone.
* Brooklyn College’s Longtime Janitor Is Also Its Cocaine Dealer, Police Say.
* An interview with Ursula K. Le Guin.
* Salman Rushdie’s Bewilderment at Snapchat Inspired Him to Write Science Fiction.
* The Joy Machine: Stephen Colbert, Satire, and Faith.
* The High Burden of Low Wages: How Renting Affordably in NYC is Impossible on Minimum Wage.
* One lawyer’s crusade to defend extreme pornography.
* Washington’s Football Team Is the Donald Trump of the NFL.
* Wifework and the university.
* And Boots lives. I anticipate that this will make Zoey’s entire year.
Wednesday Links! Seriously a Lot!
* Like C.P. Snow’s two cultures of the humanities and the sciences, a new bimodal view of higher education is becoming increasingly important at the start of the twenty-first century: one that sees the goal of universities as developing “the whole person” and another that sees it as largely or even exclusively in terms of job training. The Two Cultures of Higher Education in the Twenty-First Century and Their Impact on Academic Freedom.
* Academic search season watch: How To Tailor a Job Letter (Without Flattering, Pandering, or Begging).
* Episode 21 of Rachel and Miles X-Plain the X-Men (with Kurt Busiek) is a great look at how Marvel’s sausage is made. Give it a listen if you’re a fan of the comics…
* Time for the Libya mea culpas.
* TNI Syllabus: Gaming and Feminism.
* What Happened To Jennifer Lawrence Was Sexual Assault.
* The Police Tool That Pervs Use to Steal Nude Pics From Apple’s iCloud.
* Steve Shaviro: Twenty-Two Theses on Nature.
* Even the Department of Education thinks their rating system will be a mess.
* Yale’s tax exempt New Haven property worth $2.5 billion.
* Thirty-two teens escaped from a Nashville youth detention center by crawling under a weak spot in a fence late Monday, and nine of them were still on the run Tuesday, a spokesman said.
* Change Of Habit: How Seattle Cops Fought An Addiction To Locking Up Drug Users.
* Three Myths About Police Body Cams.
* Jeff Mizanskey Is Serving Life in Prison for Marijuana.
* Scientists Find ‘Alarming’ Amount Of Arsenic In Groundwater Near Texas Fracking Sites.
* Can journalistic ethics include nonhuman perspectives?
* Better Identification of Viking Corpses Reveals: Half of the Warriors Were Female.
* All The Game Of Thrones Fan Theories You Absolutely Need To Know.
* NIH finally makes good with Henrietta Lacks’ family.
* Twenty Days of Harassment and Racism as an American Apparel Employee.
* Durham Public Schools dumps Teach for America.
* The Four-Year-Old’s Workday.
* Rape culture and Title IX at the University of Kansas.
* “Duke University seeks a talented, engaged student body that embodies the wide range of human experience; we believe that the diversity of our students makes our community stronger. If you’d like to share a perspective you bring or experiences you’ve had to help us understand you better — perhaps related to a community you belong to, your sexual orientation or gender identity, or your family or cultural background — we encourage you to do so. Real people are reading your application, and we want to do our best to understand and appreciate the real people applying to Duke.”
* Twitter has an algorithm that assigns gender to its users.
* Why top tech CEOs want employees with liberal arts degrees.
* In Virginia, thousands of day-care providers receive no oversight. After a child’s death, parents grapple with second guesses.
* Unlike most other states, Wisconsin does not recognize prisoners’ good behavior with credits toward accelerated release. Wisconsin had such a “good time” program for well over a century, but eliminated it as part of the policy changes in the 1980s and 1990s that collectively left the state unusually — perhaps even uniquely — inflexible in its terms of imprisonment. Why No “Good Time” in Wisconsin?
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Meet The Guy Who Spent Seven Months Killing Everyone In Fallout 3.
* When Disney forbade Stan Lee’s original cameo in Guardians of the Galaxy. When they cut Hawkeye’s bit from Captain America 2.
* Rule of law watch: The Dumb Line In New York’s Constitution That Could Elect A Governor Most Of The State Doesn’t Want.
* For the geeks: How Randall “xkcd” Munroe wrote What If?
* Time Travel Simulation Resolves “Grandfather Paradox.” Bah! We need to go back in time and prevent this simulation from ever being devised!
* The arc of history is long, but: HBO has commissioned some sort of new Flight Of The Conchords show.
* The Most Compelling Athlete In America Right Now Is Here To Play Chess.
* And just because it’s gerrycanavan.wordpress.com: Limits to Growth was right. New research shows we’re nearing collapse.
Thursday Links!
* Gasp! The MOOC ‘Revolution’ May Not Be as Disruptive as Some Had Imagined.
* Scenes from the class struggle in New York: CUNY and SUNY bigs get chauffeurs as tuition soars.
* The job skills employers crave!!!
* In other words, it may be that cheating rates are so high because too many university curriculums and courses are designed for cheating. Indeed, I’ve often felt that one of the principal skills—and it is a skill—imparted by the American educational system is the ability to bullshit your way through assessment with minimal effort.
* Dolphins can recognize whistles from old tank mates from over 20 years ago, study finds.
* Man charged with stealing “entire road.”
* The faces of Manhattan Project.
* Being Unemployed For Over Nine Months Is The Same As Losing Four Years Of Experience.
* Most 2013 job growth is in part-time work, survey suggests.
* NIH Reaches Pact With Family of Henrietta Lacks.
* Brutal review of DC’s missteps since the Nu52 debacle.
* “You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo.”
* Just about the only thing that could get me excited about Man of Steel 2: Bryan Cranston Tapped to Play Lex Luthor?
* Monsters are real: Louisiana parish claims incarcerated 14-year-old consented to be raped by a corrections officer.
* And I am just completely horrified every time I come across statistics on Greece’s economy. Jesus.
Wednesday Night!
* So many amazing things happened today, from the simultaneous implosion of both the Perry and Cain campaigns to Occupy Cal and Occupy Harvard to riots at Penn State in support of Joe Paterno (of all people). And I can’t give proper attention to any of these amazing things because I spent 6 hours hanging out with John Hodgman on behalf of the Regulator Bookshop. Here’s a nice interview with the man himself from Independent Weekly‘s Zack Smith.
* Not to pile on poor Rick Perry, but abolishing the Department of Energy doesn’t make sense even on his own terms.
* Needing a weatherman to know which way the wind blows: Young adults agree that college is becoming increasingly unaffordable in today’s economy even as it is becoming more important, according to a recent poll released on Wednesday by Demos and Young Invincibles, two research and advocacy groups.
* For people looking to transition #Occupy back into traditional electoral politics—and for people who want to make sure that doesn’t happen—Occupy Des Moines is going to be pretty important.
* LGM celebrates Wake County’s repudiation of de-integration.
* Some podcasts from the ASA, including my advisor Priscilla Wald’s presidential address on Henrietta Lacks.
* Cormac McCarthy’s Yelp page.
* A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage.
* Howard is one of the chief architects of the “Cleveland Model” — an effort to create good jobs in depressed urban neighborhoods by fostering for-profit cooperatives founded on a principle of environmental sustainability. The neighborhoods targeted by Howard’s Evergreen Cooperative Initiative suffer from 40 percent unemployment, but he suggests tossing out any preconceptions one might have about whether or not desperately poor people care about the environment. Howard recounts one cooperative worker telling him, “I thought I’d have to move to Portland to become part of the green revolution, and now I can say that we lead the way in Cleveland.”
* The bastards have stolen your honey.
* And some breaking news via Bitter Laughter: The odds that you’d exist at all are practically zero. So enjoy it! A wise man once said, it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.
Wednesday Night!
It’s been a busy couple of weeks, but more regular (and, we might hope, somewhat more thoughtful) posting will resume soon.
* My hometown in the news! Randolph Man Indicted For Shooting His Pet Parrot.
* “Supergenes” in pill form will help you live to 100. Take it to the bank.
* Donna Edwards and John Conyers are proposing an amendment to the Constitution in response to Citizens United: the Free Speech for People Amendment. There’s more at Firedoglike.
* Real rules for time travelers.
* To scientists, however, Henrietta Lacks almost immediately became known simply as HeLa (pronounced hee-lah), from the first two letters of her first and last names. Cells from Mrs. Lacks’s cancerous cervix, taken without her knowledge, were the first to grow in culture, becoming “immortal” and changing the face of modern medicine. There are, Ms. Skloot writes, “trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body.” Laid end to end, the world’s HeLa cells would today wrap around the earth three times. All about Henrietta Lacks. More here and here.
* And I sincerely hope, whatever our differences, we can all agree that Watchmen 2, in any form, is a terrible no good very bad idea.
Gerry Canavan 
