Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘high school sports

The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!

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* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!

* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.

Faith in science fiction and fantasy.

64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.

In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.

How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?

Marquette University

This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.

This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.

How does this school stack up?

The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.

* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.

Inside the African essay factories that churn out university coursework for 115,000 cheating British students every year.

Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.

Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.

* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.

* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.

Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.

* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.

* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.

* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.

* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”

Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.

Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.

It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.

* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.

Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.

How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.

Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.

7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.

Liberalism in Theory and Practice.

* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.

* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.

North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.

* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.

* The Climate Trail.

How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.

* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.

* Meanwhile, a Maryland teen has been labeled a child pornographer for sharing a video of her own sex act.

* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.

* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).

* In the age of the psychonauts.

* “It’s time to talk about James Mattis’s involvement with the Theranos scandal. He’s selling a book, not saving the country from Trump.”

* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”

* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.

The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.

* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.

* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!

* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.

* Dicey Dungeons rules.

* The Slinky was invented by accident.

* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.

Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.

* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.

* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…

* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.

* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.

* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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NYE Links!

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* Finally, my moment has arrived: Smuggling LEGO is the new smuggling diamonds.

The New Brand of Jesuit Universities.

* On Optimism: Looking Ahead to 2015.

* From climate denialism to climate cashing-in with nothing in between. Are We Approaching the End of Human History?

Thanks to energy drilling operations, northern New Mexico is now covered by “a permanent, Delaware-sized methane cloud.”

* Serial, episode thirteen: 1, 2, 3 coming today or tomorrow I think. A sort-of out-there blog post on what it could all mean: The Serial Podcast: The Possible Legal Implications of Jay’s Interview for Jay & Adnan.

UI Chancellor Responds To Salaita Report. This is actually a fairly significant walk-back of Wise’s position — I think she’s actually more progressive on academic freedom than Cary Nelson now — though since she’s still pretending Salaita wasn’t actually hired it doesn’t do much good for him.

Professors are teaching less while administrators proliferate. Let’s find out how all that tuition is being spent. Colleges Need a Business Productivity Audit. Of course the actual text of the article zeroes in on instruction first, which is not the source of the problem…

* It’s the original sin of college football, and you’ll never guess what it is. In Harbaugh hire, excessive pay would send wrong message. How one former coach perpetuated a cheating scheme that benefited hundreds of college athletes. Shut down middling college football programs and shift the money back to instruction.

* The arc of history is long, but: New Michigan Law Bars College Athletes From Unionizing.

* Another angle on the growing Title IX mess: Mothers of accused college rapists fight back.

Rise of the Simulations: Why We Play At Hard Work.

* Brent Bellamy reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization.

* 538 profiles the best damn board game on the planet, Twilight Struggle.

* Really interesting idea from Bleeding Cool about what might be happening with Marvel’s sliding timescale. I could honestly see them doing this, or something like it, at least until they start getting some rights back.

Profit from Crisis: Why capitalists do not want recovery, and what that means for America.

Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class.

Is Wisconsin destined to be a Rust Belt backwater?

Why Idris Elba Can’t Play James Bond.

* Seriously, though, sometimes you can’t just switch the skin tones and have the story turn out the same.

* Brands saying “Bae.”

Seven ‘great’ teaching methods not backed up by evidence.

.* BREAKING: Twitter Reaction to Events Often at Odds with Overall Public Opinion.

* Counterpoint: Black and African writers don’t need instructions from Ben Okri.

* To Discipline and Punish: Milwaukee Police Make Late Night Visits.

* I say teach the controversy: Kids and Jails, a Bad Combination.

High School Basketball Team Banned From Tournament Over ‘I Can’t Breathe’ Shirts.

* This Deadspin piece has really made me regret softening my anti-Vox stance in recent months.

* Sounds like the Afghanistan war has ended again. This is #3 or #4 at least, right?

* How to destroy a city: just build a highway.

* The CDC is saying we’re all going to get the flu.

* And as if the IMF wasn’t bad enough.

“Why should the legality of a sale of secrecy depend entirely upon who initiates the transaction? Why is bribery legal but blackmail not?”

* Stop Kidding Yourself: The Police Were Created to Control Working Class and Poor People.

No Charges for Police Chief Who Used Badge to Try and Intimidate Teen into Posing Nude.

* …but believe it or not it is possible for a cop to get fired over a fatal shooting.

LAPD Launches Investigation Into ‘Dead, Dead Michael Brown’ Song Sung at Retired Cop’s Party.

The labor movement should rally against police violence, whether police unions like it or not. I think we should let this whole work stoppage thing play out personally.

* Emails and Racist Chats Show How Cops and GOP Are Teaming Up to Undermine de Blasio. The headline actually undersells the severity of a story where they talk about planting drugs on his daughter.

Horrifying civil liberties predictions for 2015.

* Elsewhere in the richest city in the richest nation ever in the history of the world.

Military Turns To Prison Labor For $100 Million In Uniforms — At $2-Per-Hour Wages.

What Stalled the Gender Revolution? Child Care That Costs More Than College Tuition.

* North Dakota to eliminate taxes because fracking fracking fracking forever fracking. What could go wrong?

* Real life Alien vs. Predator: Cuomo vs. the New York State Legislature.

But Cuomo has insisted he would agree to a pay hike only if the Legislature addressed a long series of criminal and ethical charges against many of its members by passing several reforms, such as a limit on outside incomes earned by lawmakers and a system of publicly financed campaigns.

The legislative leaders, however, responded that Cuomo was making demands he knew were unacceptable in a politically motivated effort to appear as a reformer because he’s under federal investigation for dismantling his anti-corruption Moreland Commission panel.

“Before we did this study, it was certainly my view that the dark net is a good thing.”

* Streetcars, maybe not so great?

* Heartbreaking story of a trans teen’s suicide, based on a suicide note that went viral. Now go hug your kid.

* Exciting new pioneers in research:

A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors
ALLEN C. GOODMAN (Wayne State University)
JOSHUA GOODMAN (Harvard University)
LUCAS GOODMAN (University of Maryland)
SARENA GOODMAN (Federal Reserve Board)

We explore the phenomenon of coauthorship by economists who share a surname. Prior research has included at most three economist coauthors who share a surname. Ours is the first paper to have four economist coauthors who share a surname, as well as the first where such coauthors are unrelated by marriage, blood or current campus.

* Company selling brain poison offers free public transportation on Brain Poison Day to prevent brain-poison-related driving mishaps.

* Bat-Kierkegaard: The Dark Knight of Faith.

* Want to feel old? This Is What the Cast of Doug Looks Like Now.

* For its first Star Wars spinoff Disney has selected the impossible task of recasting Harrison Ford. They chose… poorly.

* Austerity in everything: Science proves once-in-a-lifetime moments will just make you more depressed.

* And there’s more! You’re more likely to die on your birthday.

Living at a high altitude may make people 30% more likely to commit suicide.

* “Deputies said the shooting appears accidental”: Idaho toddler shoots and kills his mother inside Walmart.

* Wake up, sheeple! Back to the Future predicted 9/11.

* From io9Physics students at the University of Leicester claim to have calculated the amount of energy required to transform water into wine.

* Speaking in front of a white supremacist organization is what I did, but it’s not who I am. Those aren’t the values in my heart.

Celebrities That Look Like Mattresses.

* And I guess I always knew I’d die on a roller coaster.

darkKnightKierkegaard2

Written by gerrycanavan

December 31, 2014 at 7:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Friday Links

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* Mother Jones on “the White House’s private outrage at former Secretary of Energy Steve Chu’s impromptu decision to talk about climate change while visiting an island nation uniquely threatened by it.” How dare he…

* Six women filed a federal complaint with the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday alleging that Vanderbilt University, a prestigious school in Nashville, has failed to adequately respond to incidences of sexual assault on campus.

Boston Adjuncts Ask: Is There Life After Bentley U.?

Contingency and the Psychic Wage.

Baby Sent to Foster Care for 57 Days Because Parents Are Blind.

* Here come the ACA scammers. Meanwhile, in Obamacare follies: the “administrative fix.” The shorthand explanation for what’s going on here is that everybody — the insurance companies, members of Congress, and Obama — is bullshitting.

There is plenty of violence in the world of hunter-gatherers, though it is hardly illuminated by resorting to statistical comparisons between the mortality rates of a tiny tribal war in Kalimantan and the Battle of the Somme or the Holocaust. This violence, however, is almost entirely a state-effect. It simply cannot be understood historically from 4000 BC forward apart from the appetite of states for trade goods, slaves and precious ores, any more than the contemporary threat to remote indigenous groups can be understood apart from the appetite of capitalism and the modern state for rare minerals, hydroelectric sites, plantation crops and timber on the lands of these peoples. Papua New Guinea is today the scene of a particularly violent race for minerals, aided by states and their militias and, as Stuart Kirsch’s Mining Capitalism shows, its indigenous politics can be understood only in this context. Contemporary hunter-gatherer life can tell us a great deal about the world of states and empires but it can tell us nothing at all about our prehistory. We have virtually no credible evidence about the world until yesterday and, until we do, the only defensible intellectual position is to shut up.

Should your child play football? Poll: 40 Percent Say Tackle Football Should Be Banned Before High School. Former KU fullback Chris Powell sues NCAA over head trauma.

* The Eighth Doctor finally gets his sendoff in a prequel to the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special.

* Malcolm Harris against the unpaid internship for credit. I think there’s still a place for educational internships, but at nothing like the rates we see today, and it should never be used to displace waged workers or make the company money.

* The lives and deaths of hard drives.

* Shocked that Google Books is fair use. College and university administrators, take note!

How to Talk to Your Daughter About Her Body.

* And I took so long posting this link dump the latest Andy-Kaufman-is-alive hoax has already fallen apart.

Teaching Links

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More Thursday Links: MOOCs, Consent Culture, Community, and More

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* What I find rather fascinating is that there’s quite clearly no business model for MOOCs. Sure, there’s a model in which a bunch of grifters get paid, but there’s no model such that prestigious state and private universities actually make money off of them. Institutions are selling a pedigree, credentialing, networking, social experience, education, and a brand. MOOCs pretty much nullify all of those things. But grifters gonna grift, and administrators gotta justify their existence. In a followup post, he goes on:

What’s lost in this discussion is that the cost per student per course for most professors, even relatively senior ones at relatively prestigious institutions, is relatively low. The large introductory courses MOOCs are imagined to replace really don’t cost anything, even with a (relatively) highly paid full professor doing the teaching. When I taught at UC Irvine I earned a decent pay and had a decent course load. Over the course of the year I probably taught 500 students. Throw in a couple of TAs for the big auditorium courses and total instructional labor cost was probably $140 per student. Yes, plus benefits and other overhead. But the point is the cost of paying me was tiny relative to the tutition they were paying for those courses. There aren’t cost savings here, because the costs are already really low (per student) for these kinds of courses. And the only way to have them be revenue raisers is to sell out the brand, which won’t work either.

* Who runs higher ed in California? Steinberg’s plan appears to have been closely guarded. While Pilati said she learned of it late last week and one of Coursera’s co-founders saw a draft of the bill a few weeks ago, a spokesman said the chairwoman of the Senate education committee was not aware of the plan until her office was contacted Tuesday by reporters, and the head of the Cal State system had not seen a draft of the bill Tuesday afternoon.

* Related: How does UC choose a new president?

This year, however, neither a faculty representative nor a staff adviser was appointed to the special committee, which came as a surprise to many people, including Binion, Brewer and Smith.

* Boulder Hires Visiting Scholar of Conservative Thought. Sounds a bit like a quota system to me. If conservative thinkers can’t compete in the marketplace, why should we subsidize them with guaranteed positions?

* Because high school football is at the center of the social, psychological and even economic life of Steubenville, youth are treated like demigods, with the adults acting like sentries guarding the sacred program. Whatever the results of the trial, it speaks volumes that the young woman is in lockdown in her own home under armed guards because of death threats.

* But How I Met Your Mother is decidedly vague on the question of whether Barney’s seduction techniques or the kinds of sex he’s had with someone have ever hurt someone, in part because that would require the show to reckon more carefully with the consequences of the very thing that made Barney a breakout character: his riff on the pick-up artist playbook. Admitting that Barney Stinson might have had sex with someone without appropriately gaining her consent would make the character decidedly unlegendary—as would the idea that Barney was miserable after one of his conquests precisely because he realized that he hadn’t obtained consent, and felt guilt, shame, and remorse.

* When Playboy landed an interview with Lena Dunham for its latest issue, it sat down one of the most successful writer-director-producer-actresses on television today and gave her a hypothetical: “If you woke up tomorrow in the body of a Victoria’s Secret model, what would you do for the rest of the day?”

* So does this research prove that Nabokov was indeed burying historical clues in his fiction? Yes and no.

When complimented in an interview for having “a remarkable sense of history and period,” Nabokov responded: “We should define, should we not, what we mean by ‘history.’” The author then expressed his reservations about “history,” which could be “modified by mediocre writers and prejudiced observers.” History as Nabokov knew it held certain ethical traps to which Pitzer’s own historical analysis comes dangerously close. Discussing Lolita, Pitzer claims that “if Humbert deserves any pity at all, Nabokov leaves one focal point for sympathy: Annabel Leigh, Humbert’s first love, who died of typhus in Corfu in 1923.” According to Pitzer, “thousands of refugees had taken shelter on Corfu in camps.” She also entertains the possibility that Humbert Humbert is Jewish: “As surely as Humbert’s sins are his own, and unforgivable, it is also true that he has been broken by history.” Throughout history, the wounds of history have often been called upon to justify further atrocities and solicit sympathy. While earning him the criticisms of many Russian émigrés, it is perhaps precisely Nabokov’s artistic distance from and skepticism about “history” that prevented him from falling into the trap that Solzhenitsyn did later in his life when he embraced both Putin and ardent nationalism. “I do not believe that ‘history’ exists apart from the historian,” Nabokov said. “If I try to select a keeper of records, I think it safer (for my comfort, at least) to choose my own self.”

* How Season Four of Community Reveals a Major Flaw of the First Three Seasons.

* Tomorrow is #tooFEW day at Wikipedia. I’m really interested to see how this goes off, and if it prompts a backlash or an arms race.

* And Nate Silver is ready for the 2016 polls. Dear god help us.

Abolish Headbrick

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The most extensive examination to date of deceased athletes’ brains shows that most had signs of brain damage after suffering repeated head injuries—including two high school football players who died in their teens.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 3, 2012 at 3:32 pm

Sunday Morning Links

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* 20 lies and counting from Scott Walker.

* Alas, Huckabee: Let us not mince words. There are at most five plausible Republican presidents on the horizon—Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour, former Utah governor and departing ambassador to China Jon Huntsman, former Massachusetts governor Romney and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty. Even the conservative George Will thinks the GOP primary is “cluttered with careless, delusional, egomaniacal, spotlight-chasing candidates to whom the sensible American majority would never entrust a lemonade stand, much less nuclear weapons.” (via)

* Guv Bev Perdue has vetoed NC Republicans’ health care nullification bill.

* Now you can play Rock-Paper-Scissors against a computer at the New York Times. Warning: no Spock or Lizard options yet.

* Is it time to liberate Canada?

* And in “Oh, how terrible” news: Prep star hits game-winning shot for perfect season, falls and dies.