Posts Tagged ‘homeschooling’
My My My My Corona
* How Much Worse the Coronavirus Could Get, in Charts. U.S. Hospitals Prepare for Coronavirus, With the Worst Still to Come. The Coronavirus Outbreak Is About To Put Hospital Capacity To A Severe Test. Here’s the Biggest Thing to Worry About With Coronavirus. The Extraordinary Decisions Facing Italian Doctors. Listen to me. The problem is your imagination. Stop using dystopia as your compass. Stop using metaphors. You have to live through this. Terrified Doctors Sound Alarm on Coronavirus. 40 coronavirus deaths in US as Disney parks to close, March Madness canceled. The Dos and Don’ts of ‘Social Distancing.’ This Is Not a Snow Day. Our new life of isolation. Cancel Everything. The coronavirus crisis will pass, but life may never be ‘normal’ again. Italy: Don’t Do What We Did. ‘It’s Just Everywhere Already’: How Delays in Testing Set Back the U.S. Coronavirus Response.
* Let’s Get Serious About Fighting the Corona Depression. Coronavirus Calls for an Emergency Rent Freeze and Eviction Moratorium. “We’re Not Going to Work Through Coronavirus.” The Dismantled State Takes on a Pandemic. That’ll solve it. Coronavirus Matters, The Stock Market Doesn’t, and Thinking It Does May Literally Kill Us. Coronavirus will bankrupt more people than it kills — and that’s the real global emergency. The Coronavirus Puts the Class War Into Stark Relief. Even Greg Mankiw thinks we need a UBI to get through this. Alone against the virus. In a Plague Year.
* Coronavirus is mysteriously sparing kids and killing the elderly. Understanding why may help defeat the virus. Why Covid-19 is so dangerous for older adults. We Simply Do Not Understand Why. ‘If I’m Going to Get Sick and Die, I Might as Well Do It at Disney World.’ Are the olds okay?
* Everything You Need to Know About Coronavirus Vaccines. The News Isn’t Great.
* The Coronavirus Is Upending Higher Ed. Here Are the Latest Developments. As the Coronavirus Scrambles Colleges’ Finances, Leaders Hope for the Best and Plan for the Worst. Academe’s Coronavirus Shock Doctrine. What about the health of staff members? What about international student visas? Help! I have to suddenly teach online! What should I do? And the link every academic has already seen: Please do a bad job of putting your courses online.
* Coronavirus Is The Nightmare Situation People Worried About When Trump Won. A Seattle lab uncovered Washington’s coronavirus outbreak only after defying federal regulators. A Map Of The Coronavirus Exposures In Trump’s Orbit In Just Two Weeks. The Trump Presidency Is Over.
* Prisons and jails are vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks. New York Prison Labor Makes Hand Sanitizer, Prepares to Dig Graves if Coronvirus Worsens. COVID-19 is shining a bright and extremely unflattering light on the condition of the social safety net in America.
* South Korea sect leader to face probe over deaths.
* A COVID-19 Homeschooling Curriculum.
* The ebook of Priscilla Wald’s Contagious is now free at Duke University Press.
* 12 Monkeys Is the Apocalypse Movie We Need Right Now. Teach the controversy, I say.
* Lightspeed Magazine has “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” for all your apocalyptic needs.
* http://sfra.org/Coronavirus-News.
* Probably the single biggest problem I have.
Let’s see what else is in the news.
* William Gibson on the apocalypse: It’s been happening for at least 100 years. Several Global Tipping Points May Have Arrived.
* What about this? I’ve been asked to be a co-editor with Nisi Shawl on the first volume of the Library of America’s edition of Octavia E. Butler’s works.
* CFP: A Critical Companion to Terry Gilliam. CFP: Science Fictions, guest ed. Takayuki Tatsumi.
* The Democrats’ Cult of Pragmatism. The People Who See Bernie Sanders as Their Only Hope. Joe Biden’s secret governing plan. Joe Biden is the Hillary Clinton of 2020 – and it won’t end well this time either. The other swing voter. Our First Hundred Days Could Be A Nightmare.
* Abigail Nussbaum reviews The Testaments.
* Captain Pike Star Trek Spinoff Series Reportedly in Development. Star Trek: Picard offers some answers on its worst episode yet. I don’t think things are quite this dire but the series is running out of time to right itself.
* Watchmen watch: Nothing ever ends.
* The circle of academic life.
* Pig starts farm fire by excreting pedometer.
* Autism therapy: His Reality Is a Mock Village Where Everybody Knows Him.
* A sad coda to an amazing story in the history of science: Nancy Wexler has confirmed that she has Huntington’s disease.
* Tough week for Alex Jones.
* And probably your word of the century: disinfotainment.
Weekend Links!
* New journal: Series: The International Journal of TV Serial Narratives.
* The full syllabus for my upcoming summer science fiction course is finished, if you’re interested. I’ve also updated the “online articles” section of my website with a link to Marquette’s online repository of my articles, which has some stuff people have been asking for (like my Snowpiercer essay).
* So why is TPP the only thing Obama has ever bothered to fight for?
* “The hardest things are the title and the name of the girl.” Oh, so it’s ridiculously easy.
* Judge finds probable cause for murder charge against officer who killed Tamir Rice.
* Judge orders University of Illinois to release Steven Salaita emails.
* The only thing anyone can talk about.
* Every Single Federal Employee’s Social Security Number Was Hacked: Report. Incredible. I almost wonder if this breach could actually be so large that the government has to shift responsibility for fraud away from individual consumers.
* At its worst, however, Left Forum is Comic Con for Marxists—Commie Con, if you will—and an absolute shitshow of nerds and social rejects.
* On the heels of last week’s shocking news that the Transportation Security Administration has a whopping 95 percent failure rate at finding bombs and weapons, we are now learning that the TSA further failed to identify 73 airport workers with links to terrorism.
* ‘Debt-Free College’ Is Democrats’ New Rallying Cry.
* The Milwaukee Bucks bailout and Gov. Scott Walker’s questionable math.
* Why are so many companies spending record sums of money buying back their shares instead of reinvesting more of their profits in their business and their workers? What could possibly explain it?
* I thought homeschooling my kids would be simple. I was wrong.
* “If she disobeyed, they had told her, they’d cut off her hair.”
* Barbasol’s inclusion was mostly a fluke — the movie’s art director, John Bell, said he grabbed it off a prop shelf with little thought; in the book, smugglers used Gillette — but the shaving-cream maker now calls it one of its biggest victories: John Price, a marketing vice president for parent company Perio, called it “one of the most recognized brand integrations of all time.”
* Here’s how much it would cost to build Jurassic Park.
* One phenomenon that has so far flown under the radar in discussions of peer-to-peer production and the sharing economy but that demands recognition on its own is one for which I think an apt name would be crowdforcing. Crowdforcing in the sense I am using it refers to practices in which one or more persons decides for one or more others whether he or she will share his or her resources, without the other person’s consent or even, perhaps more worryingly, knowledge. While this process has analogs and has even itself occurred prior to the digital revolution and the widespread use of computational tools, it has positively exploded thanks to them, and thus in the digital age may well constitute a difference in kind as well as amount.
* I know Reason is the enemy and all, but their report on this mishandled sex assault case at Amherst is genuinely stunning.
* New, large study confirms that approximately 1 in 5 women suffer sexual assault at college.
* A program designed to help female college freshmen resist sexual assault is creating a lot of buzz among victims’ advocates and college educators. Most were encouraged to learn that incidents of rape had been cut in half among participants in a Canadian study of the program, which involved four three-hour sessions in which the women learned to recognize the danger of coercive situations and to fight back, verbally and physically.
* Scenes from the class struggle at god Reddit is awful.
* Counterpoint: Anne Frank’s Diary Should Have Been Burned.
* RT @SaintRPh: Guy lives next to airport. Painted this on roof to confuse passengers as they fly overhead. He lives in Milwaukee.
* Secrets of the Milwaukee Accent.
* Reality is weird: Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron hated each other, but their stunt doubles got married.
* 22 Incredible Facts About The Life and Career Of Sir Christopher Lee.
* Thanks, global warming: Now polar bears are devouring dolphins.
* Nearly Half of Senior Tenured Professors Want to Delay Retirement. Yeah, you’ll never get rid of me.
* Some people just want to watch the world burn.
* Future really getting weird now.
* But sometimes the future gets it all right.
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Thursday Night Links!
* [Deletes blog, deletes Twitter, unplugs phone, burns everything]
* A little bit on the nose, don’t you think? Scott Walker Strikes ‘Truth,’ ‘Human Condition’ from Wisconsin Idea. The Walker administration has now backed off the plan. The Power of the Wisconsin Idea.
* Top 11 things to know about the proposed budget.
* Meet the Regents, Wisconsin, or Welcome to Our New University System Overlords.
* Ursula Heise on what happens when dystopia becomes routine.
* The FCC clears the deck on net neutrality, possibly for good.
* Questions for Harper Lee’s editor. Be suspicious.
* From Ph.D. to the professorship, the market moves downward. Of the graduates who get tenure-track jobs, most end up at universities ranked lower than the ones they attended. Virtually no one moves up. Even moving from a fourth-tier Ph.D. program to a tenure-track professorship at a third-tier one is nearly unheard of.
* 3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education.
* To portray Samus’ sudden refusal to carry out her genocide mission, the game has the player nurture and nourish life instead of ending it. The fundamental nature of Metroid’s game-design ethos is subtly changed to reflect the altered tone. Paths are no longer opened with destructive weapons; instead, progress can only be made when the player provides life-giving nourishment to a newborn whose entire family they’ve just killed. The significance is that the player cannot stand idly by while the metroid child eats; they must lead the child to the food and take part in feeding them. Understanding Metroid II.
The FRA gave the site of Tuesday’s crash a probability of 3.1 percent — or, all things being equal, about one crash every 32 years. (Ironically, the last crash at the intersection was just over 30 years ago.)
But in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, there’s a New Jersey Transit crossingwith a predicted-collision probability of 49.6 percent — a coin flip, more or less. In total, 31 crossings in the New York area have probabilities above 10 percent, plus another 31 in Chicago.
* Ursula K. Le Guin on the future of the left. Ursula K. Le Guin on men.
* Presenting the original pitch for Game of Thrones, with unspeakably gross Arya-Jon incest plot.
* The original pitch for The Muppet Show. More links after the clip!
* Why Transparent Has Lost The Trust Of The Trans Community.
* It’s time to stop letting sports team owners blackmail taxpayers for new stadiums.
* “Let’s talk about sex in English class.” Okay but let me get tenure first.
* “What Roman slave owners knew about managing staff.” Um.
* As Parents Get More Choice, S.F. Schools Resegregate. But only artisanal segregation is good enough for my kids. Meanwhile, in Mississippi: A School District That Was Never Desegregated.
* NYPD Has a Plan to Magically Turn Anyone It Wants Into a Felon.
* Strange Maps takes up The Man in the High Castle.
* The Truth About What Went Wrong With The Third Season Of Star Trek. Roddenberry himself takes most of the blame in this telling.
* The Amazing Village in The Netherlands Just for People with Dementia.
* Singlism and married privilege.
* Two takes on language and activism at Ravishly and Student Activism.
* Jonathan Chait and the Overton Window.
* Yung found that, during the government audits, the number of sexual assaults reported by those schools increased by about 44 percent. But after the audits were over, the number of reports dropped back down to their previous levels. The study also found that the vast majority of participating schools frequently reported zero cases of annual off-campus sexual assaults, even though the Clery Act requires officials to make a “good faith” effort to work with local police to get that data.
* Twitter CEO admits Twitter is terrible.
* What Happens When a Prominent Male Feminist Is Accused of Rape?
* Former Teacher At Elite L.A. Girls School Arrested For Sex Crimes.
* Twilight of the fraternities.
* You had me at “sci-fi alterations of 19th century portraits.”
* Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person.
* And the kids aren’t all right.
Gerry Canavan 