Posts Tagged ‘Iain Banks’
All the Sunday Links
* Sad news: Iain Banks has died. A Few Notes on the Culture. A list of spacecraft in the Culture series.
* Coffee’s good for you again. Stay buzzed, America.
* This piece on MOOCs from Jonathan Dettman is really interesting, not least of all for its observations on running the university like a business:
According to this paradigm, the years spent at a university are not intended so much as to educate the student (either in the vocational sense or the liberal-arts sense of forming citizen-scholars), but rather to turn as many recruits as possible into “active alumni.” In the meantime, as much profit as possible should be extracted from the student, through amenities, food services, business partnerships, textbook sales, tuition, etc. Image and branding are extremely important to these efforts, but so is information. Universities now build data-driven profiles of prospective students in order to identify and recruit those most likely to be attracted to the university’s own carefully constructed market profile.
As I said on Twitter yesterday: they couldn’t have found a model that sounded a bit less… pyramid-schemey?
* On PRISM, or Listening Neoliberally.
* This piece on epigenetics in Discover is really interesting, but my god, the reporting. It’s hard to imagine a piece that sensationalized these findings more.
* Announcing the MOOC Research Institute. Can’t we scale this up? You know, crowdsource it.
* Claire Potter smells a rat in those academic paternity leave studies I’ve blogged about in the past.
* Black Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 have an unemployment rate of 21 percent, almost triple the national average.
* Simply put, 99 percent of the increase in employed persons seen in the last year was for individuals who had attended at least some college (this removes the negative change in employment for high school grads with no college to not produce a number above 100 percent). Among those who didn’t go to college, we actually lost 284,000 employed persons from May of 2012 to May of 2013. Within the college-going categories, about 60 percent of the increase went to those with a bachelor’s degree and 40 percent to those with an associate’s degree.
* The death of the cliffhanger.
* The screenplay writes itself: Gustl Mollath was put in a psychiatric unit for claiming his wife was involved in money-laundering at the Bavarian bank. But seven years on evidence has emerged that could set him free.
* The headline reads, “New long distance quantum teleportation system ‘extremely reliable.'” So, the ansible is real, then?
* Va. Republican Lt. Governor Candidate Said Birth Defects Were Caused By Sin. I give up.
* Because a bunch of us have been rewatching Star Trek lately: Voyager Inconsistencies. By the numbers it’s actually a little better than I thought.
* And the LEGO museum. At least there’s that.
Another Tuesday Night Linkdump
* Cooper Union’s shameless trustees.
* How to Tell if College Presidents Are Overpaid. They’re breathing. Their lips are moving.
* Unknown mathematician makes historical breakthrough in prime theory.
* Are you a liberal imperialist? Top ten warning signs.
* Pages currently appearing on Facebook include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus, Kicking your Girlfriend in the Fanny because she won’t make you a Sandwich, Violently Raping Your Friend Just for Laughs, Raping your Girlfriend and many, many more. Images appearing on Facebook include photographs of women beaten, bruised, tied up, drugged, and bleeding, with captions such as “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up” and “Next time don’t get pregnant.”
* There Was a Time When Ending Hunger Was a National Goal for Republicans and Democrats.
* This Michael Kinsley column on marriage equality is probably the single worst thing I’ve ever read on any of the subjects it attempts to discuss. Just totally incoherent on every level. Bonus points for the part at the end where he claims to have personally invented the very idea of gay marriage in the first place.
* Iain Banks says he wrote mainstream fiction to subsidize his science fiction habit.
* And this DVD looks and smells like pizza when it’s finished playing. But don’t get too excited; it smells like Domino’s.
Thursday Links
* North Carolina update: holy smokes. I mean really. I mean really.
* This is quite incredible. Even if a college uses all of its extra tuition revenue to increase the financial aid it awards, that money is not, on average, being used for low-income students. Instead, it’s used to attract other students the college wants.
* Between 2004 and 2012, NYU added 25 more administrators than faculty. Amateurs.
* Sweating the Details of a MOOC in Progress.
* Alas, Iain Banks. Just terrible. A tribute at Salon. And another at the Guardian.
* Exxon’s Duck-Killing Pipeline Won’t Pay Taxes To Oil Spill Cleanup Fund.
* A first-time narcotics offender, father to three, sold pain pills to a friend. His punishment: 25 years in prison. It’s just the latest evidence that U.S. drug policy is madness.
* In New York City, nearly 90 percent of the people arrested for marijuana possession are blacks and Latinos. In Chicago in recent years, only five percent of the people arrested for possession were whites. In many cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, police have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at seven times the rate of whites, and Latinos at three to four times the rate of whites. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville in Brooklyn, where 90 percent of the residents are blacks and Latinos, the marijuana arrest rate is 150 times higher than on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where Mayor Bloomberg lives where the 90 percent of residents are white.
* Presenting the absolute worst person in the world.
* What could possibly go wrong? Nonprofit that ‘Empowers Neighborhoods’ By Handing Out Free Guns is Coming to Dallas.
* Good news everyone! The LAPD is researching precrime.
* May 26th shall forever be known as Arrested Development Day.
* Robot finds accidental haiku in the New York TImes.
* And your historic grassroots insurgency successfully managed to keep Hillary Clinton from becoming president…for eight years. Mission accomplished.