Posts Tagged ‘law school’
Friday Links!
* Why the Fires in the Amazon Are So Bad. The Fires in the Amazon Were Set on Purpose. Leaked documents show Brazil’s Bolsonaro has grave plans for Amazon rainforest. Thank goodness someone lost their job over this.
climate-change induced extinction will not resemble your vague imaginary of a rapture-like mass death, it will look like an acceleration of the extractive processes of capital and world war, breaking biogeochemical cycles, and cascading ecosystem failures.
— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019
the world that remains will not be dead as some claim, but it will be severely diminished, and permanently scarred by the damage of an accelerating capitalist industrial civilization exploding into the biosphere. it is by definition unimaginable.
— isla (@islanoname) August 22, 2019
* But wait! There’s an easy solution to this! Can Mars Be Made Habitable in Our Lifetime?
* Elsewhere in the that’ll-solve-it bin: What if We All Ate a Bit Less Meat?
* 2 Scholars Will Leave MIT’s Media Lab Over Its Director’s Financial Ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
* Want to Be an English Professor? It Gets Harder Every Year.
* Mesa College English Professor Showed QAnon Video in Class, Students Say.
* Justice corner! The Justice Department Sent Immigration Judges A White Nationalist Blog Post With Anti-Semitic Attacks. ICE Shut Down a Hotline for Detained Immigrants After It Was Featured on Orange Is The New Black. Customers Handed Over Their DNA. The Company Let the FBI Take a Look. Precrime didn’t even work in the movie!
* What’s going on with Milwaukee’s population?
* ‘Forever chemicals’ detected at low levels in Milwaukee tap water for the first time.
* Entrepreneurs don’t have a special gene for risk—they come from families with money.
* The Ultimate List of What Star Trek You Should Watch Before Picard.
* Hasbro’s new Monopoly for Millennials game is an insulting experience.
Hot take:
The crap-AI essay grading system for the SAT is good actuallybecause it judges students on the thing that will most impact their lives,
which is being able to convincingly lie to poorly-designed AI.
— Actual Doctor Galaxykate (@GalaxyKate) August 22, 2019
* Tenured law professors behaving badly.
* The arc of history is long, but Major U.S. Phone Companies Agree to Plan to Combat Endless Robocalls.
* A Brief History of Peeing in Video Games.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 23, 2019 at 2:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, academic jobs, anti-Semitism, apocalypse, Bolsonaro, Brazil, Captain Picard, CBP, climate change, Department of Justice, deportation, DNA, eating meat, English, entrepreneurs, FBI, foreign languages, forever chemicals, games, ice, immigration, Jeffrey Epstein, language, law professors, law school, learning, Mars, Mesa College, millennials, Milwaukee Fair Housing Marches, MIT, Monopoly, outer space, peeing, precrime, robocalls, SAT, spam, standardized testing, Star Trek, tenure, terraforming, the Amazon, UPenn, water, wildfires
Star Wars Day Links! Yay!
* A brief history of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Star Wars Minus Star Wars. Is Luke Skywalker of ‘Star Wars’ inspired by Wisconsin war hero? Star Wars and Jihad. May the toys be with you. Me talking Star Wars at Salon. The only review I read, which seems 100% right to me (very light spoilers).
I realized recently, with surprise, that ROTJ is the only one that actually seems philosophically interesting to me. https://t.co/UzR5aMALac
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
Yeah, that, but also the weirdly unsettled politics of pacifism and forgiveness that undergird the Luke-Vader plot. https://t.co/99HGF12U2C
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
.@traxus4420 Oh, by “unstable end” I thought you meant more the “okay, well, I guess we did it!” aspect the EU novels viciously take apart.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
@SoylentHHH Yeah, that’s what’s so singular about it. He gets to be a ghost too, Yoda and Obi-Wan don’t even seem mad at him.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
@SoylentHHH From the standpoint of our usual narratives it’s almost obscene! It’s really striking.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
Is it “fear” when it’s something you know is definitely going to happen? https://t.co/9YZUbl819A
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
Fully prepared to spend the next ten hours before I see THE FORCE AWAKENS arguing RETURN OF THE JEDI is underrated.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015
* They Might Be Giants Look Back on Every Album They’ve Ever Made.
* This is maybe the most “Cold War” story of all time.
My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, “George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.” He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.
When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, “My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.“
* Running the Red Cross like a business.
* This seems true, at least as FYE as it is usually conceived goes, but all the same it’s not necessarily a great argument for FYE practitioners to make.
* The Humanities as Service Departments: Facing the Budget Logic.
* UMass brass cash in despite budget woes.
* 10 Revealing Tidbits We Found in Football Coaches’ Contracts.
* The law school collapse continues.
* Milwaukee’s Push to Move the Homeless From the Streets Into Permanent Housing. U.S. Department of Justice agrees to review Milwaukee police. Milwaukee to pay $5 million to settle suits over illegal strip searches.
* Today NASA Begins to Take New Astronaut Applications. Do You Qualify?
* My life story: Tsundoku.
* Yet another trailer: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.
* The Trouble With Calling Jessica Jones an ‘Antihero.’ Show Me a Hero: Thoughts on Jessica Jones.
* Academic librarians: what do they do all day?
* Sylvia Plath — you know, for kids.
* Where the jobs are(n’t), 2015. The other me who went to grad school in philosophy instead is pretty unhappy right now.
* People Who Curse Have Better Fucking Vocabularies, According to Science.
* Followup: Report: Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Mystery Buyer Is Right-Wing Billionaire Sheldon Adelson.
* Another followup, from years back: Cop Who Sought Photos of Teen’s Erection in Sexting Case Commits Suicide Moments Before Arrest.
* I understand why they made the decision they made, but I don’t think this paradigm is really sustainable: All LA Schools Closed After Hoax Threat.
* An Unbelievable Story of Rape. Difficult but very powerful read.
I’ve listened to the first episode of the new season of SERIAL now, and it really strikes me as deeply unethical on just about every level.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015
Serial = bad media form for covering ongoing story; tainted by commercialization, also by exploitation of someone who appears mentally ill.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015
Idea that SERIAL’s “brand” is refusal of definitive conclusions also seems like serious problem for their ability to report going forward.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015
I’ll admit, though, I still feel burned by their irresponsibility in the previous story, and probably wouldn’t have liked anything they did.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 17, 2015
* A record 409 scripted TV series were produced this year, according to FX. Almost too many, don’t you think?
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal doing the Lord’s work on Schrödinger’s cat. BONUS.
* Hear 6 Classic Philip K. Dick Stories Adapted as Vintage Radio Plays.
* The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong).
* Did the utopian pirate nation of Libertatia ever really exist?
* And your daily dose of total institutional breakdown: Embattled state’s attorney refused to prosecute cop who admitted to perjury. Prosecutors have hijacked America’s criminal justice system while no one was looking. LAPD found no bias in all 1356 complaints filed against officers. And maybe the worst just in sheer audacity: Denmark passes law to seize jewelry from refugees to cover expenses.
Today’s 10-year-olds will be serving in the wars the next president starts. https://t.co/jhuRGQwFs6
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 16, 2015
Written by gerrycanavan
December 17, 2015 at 9:05 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic job market, actually existing media bias, administrative blight, administrative bloat, America, anti-heroes, astronauts, austerity, bomb threats, books, bridges, Cold War, college football, college sports, cussing, Daniel Defoe, DEA, Denmark, engineering, Episode 7, Expanded Universe, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, film, first-year composition, first-year English, Harry Potter, homelessness, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, J.K. Rowling, Jessica Jones, jihad, kids today, LAPD, Las Vegas, law school, Lex Luthor, Libertatia, Los Angeles, Marvel, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, music, my media empire, NASA, NCAA, neoliberalism, Netflix, nuclear war, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, perjury, Philip K. Dick, philosophy, pirates, police, police abuse, police corruption, police violence, Red Cross, refugees, rhetoric and composition, run it like a sandwich, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Schrödinger's Cat, science fiction, sexting, Star Wars, Superman, Sylvia Plath, television, terrorism, the courts, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the law, They Might Be Giants, total system failure, Tsundoku, University of Massachusetts, Utopia, war on drugs, war on terror, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, words
Playing Monday Catch-Up Links
* Jaimee finally has a webpage! You can see all her online poems here.
* Announcing the Tobin Siebers Prize for Disability Studies in the Humanities.
* Reminder: Mullen fellowship applications are due April 1.
* Relativism: The spontaneous ideology of the undergraduate.
* The trolley and the psychopath.
* Tired of the same old dystopias? Randomized Dystopia suggests a right that your fictional tyranny could deny its citizens!
* What if we educated and designed for resistance, through iterative performance and play?
* A good start: The University of Phoenix has lost half its students in the last five years.
* I began pursuing a Ph.D. in English at the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2006. My incoming cohort had nine students–seven in English Language and Literature, two in English and Women’s Studies. When we entered the program, all of us aspired to the tenure-track. The last of us just defended her dissertation this January, making ours the first cohort in several years with a 100% completion rate. Nine years out, only one of us has a tenure track professorship.
* #altac: Northeastern University seeks an intellectually nimble, entrepreneurial, explode-the-boundaries thinker to join the Office of the President as Special Assistant for Presidential Strategy & Initiatives. This job ad truly is a transcendent parody of our age, down to the shameless sucking up to the president of the university that constitutes 2/3 of the text.
* Budget cuts kill The Dictionary of American Regional English.
* The Long, Ugly History of Racism at American Universities.
* I Saw My Admissions Files Before Yale Destroyed Them.
* Confessions of a Harvard Gatekeeper.
* The Unmanageable University.
* What NYU Pays Its Top Earners, And What Most Of Your Professors Make.
* “There is no point in having that chat as long as the system is mismanaged,” said Steven Cohen, president of the Congress of Connecticut Community Colleges, which represents most faculty. Cohen pointed to central office costs that are rising as faculty numbers decline.
* The war against humanities at Britain’s universities.
* On NYU and the future of graduate student unionism.
* I teach philosophy at Columbia. But some of my best students are inmates.
* Why Is So Much of Our Discussion of Higher Ed Driven by Elite Institutions?
* It’s Time to End Tuition at Public Universities—and Abolish Student Debt.
* Following up on the future of rhetoric and composition. I also liked this one from Freddie: “It’s that mass contigency– the dramatic rise of at-risk academic labor like adjuncts and grad students– that creates the conditions that Cooke laments on campus. In the past, when a far higher portion of college courses were taught by tenured professors, those who taught college courses had much less reason to fear reprisals from undergraduates.”
* There is certainly an important and urgent conversation to be had about academic freedom and whether that is being constrained by trigger warnings and the like, but the discourse of students’ self-infantilization misdirects us from the larger picture. That, I think, is definitely not a story of student-initiated “cocooning,” but rather the transformation of the category of “student” into “consumer” and “future donor.”
* How Sweet Briar’s Board Decided to Close the College. But don’t worry, there’s a plan: Faculty Propose Sweet Briar Shift Focus to STEM.
* Law School Dean Average Tenure Is 2.78 Years, An All-Time Low.
* #disrupt morality: “America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business.”
* 3 Cops Caught On Tape Brutally Beating Unarmed Michigan Man With No Apparent Provocation. Private Prison Operator Set To Rake In $17 Million With New 400-Bed Detention Center. Teen Was Kept In Solitary Confinement For 143 Days Before Even Facing Trial. Inside America’s Toughest Federal Prison.
* What are your chances of going to prison?
* Dollars, Death and the LAPD.
The officers sued the LAPD for discrimination for keeping them in desk jobs. Last week a jury awarded them $4 million. In other words, the refusal to let them go back to the streets to shoot more people is, in the eyes of our court system, worth more than four times as much as the life of an innocent man. Much more than that when you consider that they drew and continue to draw near six figure salaries for sitting at a desk.
* The Radical Humaneness of Norway’s Halden Prison.
* UN erects memorial to victims of transatlantic slave trade.
* World’s most honest headline watch: Wall Street welcomes expected Chuck Schumer promotion.
* Antarctica Recorded Hotter Temperatures Than They’ve Ever Seen This Week.
* Framing China as an environmental villain only serves to excuse American inaction.
* Even with California deep in drought, the federal agency hasn’t assessed the impacts of the bottled water business on springs and streams in two watersheds that sustain sensitive habitats in the national forest. The lack of oversight is symptomatic of a Forest Service limited by tight budgets and focused on other issues, and of a regulatory system in California that allows the bottled water industry to operate with little independent tracking of the potential toll on the environment.
* Too Bad, That Rumor About A New Star Trek TV Show Is Absolutely False. But it’s not all bad news: they may have tricked Idris Elba into playing a Klingon.
* The True Story of Pretty Woman’s Original Dark Ending.
* The Deadly Global War for Sand.
* SMBC vs. the Rebus. And vs. modernity.
* I Started Milwaukee’s Epic Bloody Mary Garnish Wars.
* Photographer Johan Bävman documents the world of dads and their babies in a country where fathers are encouraged to take a generous amount of paternity leave.
* Dean Smith Willed $200 to Each of His Former Players to ‘Enjoy a Dinner Out.’ You’ll never believe what happened next. But!
Contrary to inaccurate media reports, Dean Smith’s generous gift to former student-athletes is NOT an NCAA violation.
— Inside the NCAA (@InsidetheNCAA) March 29, 2015
* Teaching human evolution at the University of Kentucky.
* We Should Be Able To Detect Spaceships Moving Near The Speed Of Light.
* Snowpiercer forever: Russia unveils plan for superhighway from London to Alaska.
* Kapow! Attack of the feminist superheroes.
* The future is now: Miles Morales and Kamala Khan join the female Thor and Captain “The Falcon” America as Avengers post-Secret Wars.
* Things Marvel Needs to Think About for the Black Panther Movie.
* Marxists Internet Archive: Subjects: Arts: Literature: Children’s Literature.
* Ruins found in remote Argentinian jungle ‘may be secret Nazi hideout.’
* 15 Secrets Hiding in the World of Game of Thrones.
* Listen to part of Carlin’s Summerfest 1972 show — before he got arrested.
* This 19th Century ‘Stench Map’ Shows How Smells Reshaped New York City.
* The ethics of playing to lose.
* And make mine del Toro:
You say horror is inherently political. How so?
Much like fairy tales, there are two facets of horror. One is pro-institution, which is the most reprehensible type of fairy tale: Don’t wander into the woods, and always obey your parents. The other type of fairy tale is completely anarchic and antiestablishment.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 30, 2015 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, academia, adjunctification, administrative blight, airport security, aliens, amateurism, America, Amsterdam, Antarctica, Apple, Argentina, art, austerity, Black Panther, Bloody Marys, books, California, child care, children's literature, China, Chuck Schumer, college admissions, college basketball, comics, Connecticut, corruption we can believe in, Dean Smith, disability studies, discrimination, donors, drought, dystopia, ecology, environmentalism, equality, ethics, evolution, fairy tales, faster than light travel, fathers, female Thor, feminism, Firefly, flexible, food, for-profit schools, games, gay rights, George Carlin, graduate student life, Guillermo del Toro, Harvard, horror, How the University Works, How to Avoid Speaking, ideology, Idris Elba, Indian food, Indiana, Ivy League, Jaimee, Jason Shiga, Joss Whedon, juvenile detention, Kamala Khan, Kentucky, kids today, LAPD, law school, management, maps, Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Marxism, Michigan, Miles Morales, Milwaukee, modernity, morality, Nazis, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, nimble, Norway, NYU, Orwell, parental leave, pedagogy, playing to lose, poetry, police brutality, police violence, Pretty Woman, prison, prison-industrial complex, privilege, R.D. Mullen fellowship, race, racism, rebus puzzles, relativism, resistance, rhetoric and composition, ruins, Russia, sand, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, selfies, seven dirty words, slave trade, slavery, smells, Snowpiercer, solitary confinement, Star Trek, STEM, students as consumers, Summerfest, superheroes, surveillance, surveillance society, surveillance state, Sweet Briar, taste, teaching, tenure, The Falcon, the humanities, the Senate, Tolkien, trigger warnings, TSA, tuition, UNC, undergraduates, unions, United Kingdom, University of Phoenix, University of Wisconsin, Wall Street, war, water, words, Yale
Weekend Links!
* C21 2015 call for papers: “After Extinction.”
* More 2014 postmortems: The Democrats Have Two Choices Now: Gridlock or Annihilation. And in Michigan: Democrats Get More Votes, Lose Anyway. Davis Campaign Marked by Failed Tactics, Muddled Messages. Stop denying the truth: The Democrats got walloped. What happened to that Democratic turnout machine? Game Change ’14. What Does It Mean for Hillary? Stop Whining About Young Voters, You Jerks. Shockingly, my call to abolish the Constitution altogether has received little traction.
* Thankfully, it’s not all bad news: I was about to hype up a Scott Walker 2016 run. Then I watched his victory speech.
* Elsewhere in the richest, most prosperous society ever to exist in human history: Ninety-year-old man faces jail for giving food to homeless people.
Can we use freedom of religious expression to overturn this bullshit law against feeding the homeless in Florida? http://t.co/RAyanjofW9
— @jsench (@jsench) November 6, 2014
* The 85 richest people on the planet now have as much money as the poorest 3.5 billion.
* It’s Cheaper to Buy a Judge Than a State Senator.
* Uber Is Pushing Drivers Into Subprime Loans. If you want a vision of the future: Amazon Is Beta-Testing Uber to Deliver Packages.
* What I’m not concerned with here is achieving some final and total harmony between the interests of each and the interests of all, or with cleansing humanity of conflict or egotism. I seek the shortest possible step from the society we have now to a society where most productive property is owned in common – not in order to rule out more radical change, but precisely in order to rule it in.
* Why Poor Schools Can’t Win at Standardized Testing. Flipping Schools: The Hidden Forces Behind New Jersey Education Reform. Massachusetts Committed to Chasing Teachers Away.
* Are We Forgiving Too Much Student-Loan Debt? CHE is ON IT.
* What could possibly go wrong? Obama Vows to Work With Republicans on College Costs.
* Oh, right, that. Banks Urge Investors To Buy For-Profit College Stocks Now That The GOP Is Taking Back Congress.
* Seems like a great bunch of guys: For-Profit Groups Sue to Block Gainful Employment Rules. The estimate is that 65% of for-profit students are enrolled in programs that wouldn’t pass.
* Six years after the crisis that cratered the global economy, it’s not exactly news that the country’s biggest banks stole on a grand scale. That’s why the more important part of Fleischmann’s story is in the pains Chase and the Justice Department took to silence her.
* R0y Lichtenstein’s “Whaam!” painting is based on one of my panels from an old DC war comic. Roy got four million dollars for it. I got zero.
* Violence Is Currency: A Pacifist Ex-Con’s Guide To Prison Weaponry.
* How GamerGate Is Influencing MIT Video Game Teachers. I’m wrestling with how much this needs to take over the syllabus of my “Video Game Culture” seminar next semester.
* It’s hard to study Scientology.
* “For those of us born in a post-Reagan America, having operated within this system our whole lives, there can be no doubt that Michel Foucault’s thinking describes our present.”
* In search of oil realism. I’ve just submitted an abstract for a chapter title “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking,” so this is definitely on my mind.
* NYC pastor: Starbucks is flavoured with the semen of sodomites. It’s called pumpkin spice, sir.
* My evil dad: Life as a serial killer’s daughter.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the legal industry.
The Force Hits the Snooze The Force Checks Its Phone The Force Brushes Its Teeth The Force Cannot #%^ing Believe It Forgot It Was Saturday
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 6, 2014
I actually don’t think this sounds terrible. I like the hint of menace I hear in “The Force Awakens,” as if the Force itself could be the enemy in the new trilogy. Who put this unelected energy field in charge of everything, anyway? Abolish the Force.
* Abolish the CW: Physicists determine that being rescued by The Flash is worse than being hit by a car.
* If you want a vision of the future: Disney announces Toy Story 4. More below the hilarity.
TOY STORY 4: The toys suffer an unspeakable existential dread but a saccharine happy ending dulls the pain TOY STORY 5: The toys suffer an u
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
I’ve seen a lot but I really don’t know that I can face whatever they’re going to do to those poor toys in TOY STORY 4.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
“Woody, I can’t believe we’re sitting on Andy’s grave.” “Everything dies, Buzz. Everything but us.” #ToyStory4 #youknowforkids
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
The year is 1,000,000 AD. All life on Earth is extinct. In a putrid hole somewhere in the empty ruins, half-buried in trash, Woody and Buzz
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 7, 2014
* I regret to inform you the ideology at its purest contest has closed. Thank you for your submission, but we have a winner.
* In a era without heroes, his website was our last hope: Meet the Mysterious Creator of Rumor-Debunking Site Snopes.com.
* The original version of Being John Malkovich, which I have fond memories of, would have been almost completely unwatchable.
* The Slow Unveiling of James Tiptree Jr.
* About 200,000 years ago, it was determined that spaceships could be powered by ennui.
* The Innocence Project was the last thing I believed in. Now I’m finally purged of hope.
* And they say this society can no longer achieve great things: Reality TV’s New Extreme: Being ‘Eaten Alive’ by a Giant Anaconda Snake.
Written by gerrycanavan
November 7, 2014 at 8:37 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, #nodads, academia, Africa, Alice Sheldon, Amazon, animals, art, austerity, banks, Barack Obama, Being John Malkovich, Center for 21st Century Studies, CFPs, class struggle, college, Colonization, comics, communism, debt, decadence, democracy, Democrats, Disney, elections, Episode 7, First Amendment, for-profit schools, Foucault, Gamergate, games, general election 2016, gerrymandering, Great Recession, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, hydrofracking, ideology at its purest, imperialism, Innocence Project, James Tiptree Jr., kakistocracy, law school, lawyers, let's just start over, mass extinction, Massachusetts, Michigan, midterm election 2014, Milwaukee, Morgan Spurlock, neoliberalism, New Jersey, now we see the violence inherent in the system, oil, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Philadelphia, politics, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, pumpkin spice, reality TV, religious freedom, Republican primary 2016, Republicans, revolution, Roy Lichtenstein, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, Scientology, Scott Walker, serial killing, snopes.com, Star Wars, Starbucks, student debt, superheroes, teaching, Texas, the Anthropocene, the Constitution, the courts, the Flash, the Force, the law, the rich are different, the richest nation in the history of the world, Toy Story 4, Uber, urban legends, UWM, violence, war on education, web comics, Wendy Davis, what it is I think I'm doing, Wisconsin, worst financial crisis since the last one, young voters, zoos
Tuesday Links
* Local police involved in 400 killings per year.
* Police in Ferguson, Missouri, once charged a man with destruction of property for bleeding on their uniforms while four of them allegedly beat him. But cops agree: cops haven’t used excessive force in Ferguson. 40 FBI agents are in Ferguson to investigate the shooting of Michael Brown, and they already know who did it. ‘Let’s Be Cops,’ cop movies, and the shooting in Ferguson. Reparations for Ferguson. John Oliver: Let’s take their fucking toys back. A movement grows in Ferguson. Ferguson and white unflight. Michael Brown’s autopsy suggests he had his hands up. An upside flag indicates distress. More links from Crooked Timber.
* Man Dies After Bloody, 10-Minute Beating From LAPD Officers. Texas Incarcerates Mentally Disabled Man for 34 Years without Trial.
* Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit: The Neoconservative Origins of Our Police Problem. The Militarization of U.S. Police: Finally Dragged Into the Light by the Horrors of Ferguson. For blacks, the “war on terror” hasn’t come home. It’s always been here. Mapping the Spread of the Military’s Surplus Gear. A Militarized Police, a Less Violent Public. Even the liberal Kevin Drum agrees: We Created a Policing Monster By Mistake. “By mistake.” So close.
* Meanwhile: Detroit police chief James Craig – nicknamed “Hollywood” for his years spent in the LAPD and his seeming love of being in front of the camera – has repeatedly called on “good” and “law-abiding” Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.
* Law professor Robert A. Ferguson’s critique of the U.S. prison system misses the point that its purpose is not rehabilitation but civic death.
* Poor, Non-Working Black and Latino Men Are Nearly Non-Existent.
* A quarter century later, the median white wealth had jumped to $265,000, while median black wealth was just $28,500. The racial wealth gap among working-age families, in other words, is a stunning $236,500, and there is every reason to believe that figure has widened in the five years since
* A brash tech entrepreneur thinks he can reinvent higher education by leeching free content from real schools. Sounds legit!
* Change we can believe in? CBS, Produce a new Star Trek Series Featuring Wil Wheaton as the Lead role/Captain of a federation Vessel. Any true fan would know that Wesley quit Starfleet to pursue his destiny with the Traveler, but perhaps I’ve said too much.
* Coming soon to the Smithsonian Galleries: Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction, 1780-1910.
* Yahoo really wants you to think Donald Glover is in the next season of Community. That “I am serious. I am Yahoo Serious.” tag is pretty gold, though.
* And while I’m on the subject: I know it’s not for everyone, but if you ask me this may have been the most quintessential Harmontown of all time: melancholy, silly, ranty, with some great improv D&D. Give it a listen if you like Dan Harmon.
* The twenty-first century gold rush: debt collection.
* No Child Left Behind achieves its destiny: virtually every school in the state of Washington is a “failing school.”
* All students at MPS now eligible for free meals.
* New Media: Time, Inc rates writers on how friendly they are to advertisers.
* Technocratic tweaks that will definitely solve everything: what if presidents only had one term? The icing on the cake is that if anything this would probably have the opposite effect.
* The problem with self-driving cars: they’re still cars.
* Paul Campos with the latest on the law school scam.
* This November, the organizing committee of the MLA Subconference comes to Milwaukee.
* The Post-Welfare State University.
* Students who graduated in 2008 earned more credits in the humanities than in STEM, the study found. Humanities credits accounted for 17 percent of total credits earned by the typical graduate. In contrast, STEM credits accounted for 13 percent.
* Not only are men more likely than women to earn tenure, but in computer science and sociology, they are significantly more likely to earn tenure than are women who have the same research productivity. In English men are slightly (but not in a statistically significant way) more likely than women to earn tenure.
* The Adjunct Crisis: A Reading List.
* Top Legal Scholars Decry “Chilling” Effect of Salaita Dehiring.
* Huge asteroid set to wipe out life on Earth – in 2880. 865 years, that’s all we’ve got…
* Mining Spill Near U.S. Border Closes 88 Schools, Leaves Thousands Of Mexicans Without Water. Meet The First Pacific Island Town To Relocate Thanks To Climate Change. The Longest River In The U.S. Is Being Altered By Climate Change.
* The venture capitalist are now weaponizing kids. Of course, when you find out how much raising a kid costs, child labor starts to make a lot of sense. Plainly parenting is a market ripe for disruption.
* What is your greatest strength as an employee? Bonus SMBC: on internship as neologism.
* How air conditioning remade modern America.
* How to Hide a Nuclear Missile.
* The winners of the 2014 Hugos.
* The rumor is that Doctor Strange will be part of a new Marvel paradigm that rejects origin stories.
* Twitter’s management is very, very eager to ruin Twitter. Can Facebook catch up in time?
* Primary 2016 watch: Only Al Gore can save us now.
* And they’ve finally gone too far: Edible LEGO. Some lines man was just never meant to cross.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 19, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Afghanistan, air conditioning, Al Gore, America, apocalypse, asteroids, Barack Obama, books, Bush, cars, Center for 21st Century Studies, change we can believe in, charter schools, child labor, civil death, class struggle, climate change, community, consumer debt, Dan Harmon, debt, debt collection, Democratic primary 2016, Detroit, Doctor Strange, Don't mention the war, Donald Glover, Duke, ecology, education, entrepreneurs, Facebook, FBI, Ferguson, film, futurity, Gaza, Google, guns, Harmontown, Hillary Clinton, honesty, How the University Works, Hugo awards, income inequality, incumbents, internships, Iraq, Israel, kids today, LAPD, law school, LEGO, long reads, Marvel, Michael Brown, military-industrial complex, Milwaukee, Minerva, Missouri, MLA, MLA Subconference, MOOCs, museums, neoconservativism, No Child Left Behind, now they've gone too far, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, origin stories, Palestine, parenting, pedagogy, podcasts, police brutality, police coups, police riots, police state, police violence, politics, pollution, poverty, prison, prison-industrial complex, race, racism, Robin Williams, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, school lunch programs, science fiction, self-driving cars, St. Louis, Star Trek, Steven Salaita, teaching, technocrats, tenure, Texas, the presidency, the Smithsonian, time, true crime, Twitter, war on schools, Washington, water, wealth, welfare state, Wil Wheaton, Wisconsin, Yahoo
Wed!nes!day! Links!
* The greatest Tumblr of all time forever: Wes Anderson’s X-Men. Above: Bill Murray as sad Professor X.
* A Snowpiercer Thinkpiece, Not to Be Taken Too Seriously, But For Very Serious Reasons.
* Ours is truly an age of miracles: How to cut a bagel into two interlocking rings.
* Now we see the violence inherent in the system: Cheered by tourists, tolerated by regulars, feared by those who frown upon kicks in the face, subway dancers have unwittingly found themselves a top priority for the New York Police Department — a curious collision of a Giuliani-era policing approach, a Bloomberg-age dance craze and a new administration that has cast the mostly school-age entertainers as fresh-face avatars of urban disorder.
* Feminist Science Fiction Is the Best Thing Ever.
* BREAKING: Law school is the absolute worst.
* The Ebola epidemic has reached Lagos. That’s horrifying.
* How NCAA’s Concussion Deal Affects Current, Former, and Future Athletes.
* Spending Shifts as Colleges Compete on Students’ Comfort.
* The University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth owes $200,000 in damages to a professor of English who says she was denied a promotion based on her race and gender, a state equal opportunity board has ruled. That’s on top of the board-ordered back pay and promotion the university has already awarded Lulu Sun.
* Can World of Warcraft Save Higher Education? Can it? Can it?
* Write Your Own Irish Memoir!
* Yes we can: Sonic Cannons Are Going To Wreck US East Coast Ecology In Search Of Oil.
* There is ‘No Constitutional Right Not to Become an Informant.’
* The net affect of the ordinance is that most of Milwaukee is off-limits to sex offenders.
* Over the past few weeks the stories of child refugees fleeing unspeakable violence in Central America, as well as their uncertain fate in the hands of U.S. policymakers, has been the focus of headlines around the country. What has been more difficult to follow is what is happening to the influx of refugee mothers who have recently fled to the U.S. with their children, many just toddlers and babies. I went down to Artesia, New Mexico last week to see for myself what has become of these vulnerable families.
* On sticking to your guns: Hess’s Triangle.
* Kapitalism, With Kim Kardashian.
* And, alas, it’s not all good news: BP Oil Spill Is Much Worse Than People Think, Scientists Say.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 30, 2014 at 8:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, apocalypse, austerity, bagels, Barack Obama, Bill Murray, books, BP, capitalism, children's books, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, climate change, collapse, concussions, Deepwater Horizon, disease, Ebola, ecology, efficiency, feminism, feminist science fiction, freedom, games, Hess's Triangle, How the University Works, immigration, Ireland, Kim Kardashian, law school, Milwaukee, misogyny, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, Nigeria, now we see the violence inherent in the system, oceans, oil, oil spills, outbreak narratives, outer space, pedagogy, police state, racism, science fiction, science is magic, sex offenders, sexism, Snowpiercer, stop snitchin', students as consumers, subway dancers, subways, surveillance society, tenure, the Constitution, the courts, the law, the wisdom of markets, thugs, Tumblr, University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Wes Anderson, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, X-Men, young adult literature, zunguzungu
Sunday Links!
* The science fictional sublime: the art of Penguin science fiction.
* From the syllabus of my wonderful Cultural Preservation class: “Can Auschwitz Be Saved?” and “The Myth of the Vanquished: The Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum.”
* Great moments in the law school scam. Wow.
* Fraternity expels 3 linked to statue noose, suspends Ole Miss chapter.
* Where the money goes: what $60,000 tuition at Duke buys you.
* The Definitive Guide to Never Watching Woody Allen Again.
* Pedophiles Are Still Tearing Reddit Apart.
* The Vampire Squid Strikes Again: The Mega Banks’ Most Devious Scam Yet.
* The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy will launch in 2015.
* Always worth relinking: StrikeDebt’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual.
* On most policy questions of any importance, there are enough academics doing work to generate far more policy ideas than can seriously considered by our political system. When it comes to systemic risk, we have all the ideas we need–size caps or higher capital requirements–and we have academics behind both of those. The rest is politics. What we really need is for the people with the big megaphones to be smarter about the ideas that they cover.
* Milwaukee’s childhood lead poisoning prevention program running out of money. Income inequality grew rapidly in Milwaukee, study finds.
* Actually, climate trolls, January ended up being the fourth-warmest on record.
* EPA moves to toughen pesticide safety standards for the first time in 20 years.
* Scientists are appalled at Nicaragua’s plan to build a massive canal.
* South Carolina Legislators To Punish College For Assigning Gay-Themed Fun Home Comic To Freshmen.
* A sequel film for Farscape is in the early phases of development.
* NBC officially giving up, bringing back Heroes.
* How wrong is your time zone?
* Presenting the lowest possible score in Super Mario Brothers.
* The Amtrak Writers Fellowship.
* And now they’re saying the Voynich Manuscript might not be a hoax after all. Oh, I hope so.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 23, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Amtrak, animals, Auschwitz, banking, banks, books, canals, charts, class struggle, climate change, codes, comics, cultural preservation, David Graeber, debt, Donkey Kong, Duke, ecology, EPA, fantasy, Farscape, film, fraternities, fun, Fun Home, games, gay rights, Heroes, Hiroshima, history, How the University Works, income inequality, judging books by their covers, law school, lead poisoning, LEGO, Matt Taibbi, memory, Milwaukee, museums, NBC, Nicaragua, Nintendo, nuclearity, Old Miss, pedophilia, Penguin, pesticides, photography, politics, race, racism, Reddit, scams, science fiction, South Carolina, Strike Debt, Super Mario, Super Mario Brothers, television, The Dark Knight Returns, the Holocaust, the sublime, time zones, trains, tuition, Voynich Manuscript, Woody Allen, writing
Wednesday Links
* College Men: Stop Getting Drunk. In response to this.
* How Young Is Too Young for Multiple-Choice Tests? (A) 5 (B) Never.
The image of 4- and 5-year-olds struggling to figure out how to take a multiple-choice test is heartbreaking enough, but the image that stuck with me was that of the children trying to help one another with the test and being told that they’re not allowed to do so.
* Paul Campos and Matt Leichter crunch some numbers on the law school bubble.
* Graduate Students Urge Changes in Comprehensive Exams.
* Sold Out: Privatizing the university in the UK.
* North Carolina Suspends Welfare Program Thanks To The Shutdown.
* The Handmaid’s Tale debuts as ballet in Winnipeg. Judging from the picture attached to the article I have some questions about the accuracy of this adaptation.
* How can anyone say this is anything but an utter debacle? Delaware health officials celebrate first health exchange enrollee.
* Once-A-Decade Typhoon Threatens Already-Leaking Fukushima Nuclear Plant.
* And a new study claims the Iraq war claimed half a million lives. Down the memory hole, you!
Written by gerrycanavan
October 16, 2013 at 12:42 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, alcohol, America, Barack Obama, binge drinking, Bush, class struggle, college, Delaware, Don't mention the war, Fukushima, government shutdowns, health care, How the University Works, Iraq War, Japan, kids today, law school, Margaret Atwood, military-industrial complex, neoliberalism, North Carolina, nuclearity, politics, privatize everything, radiation, rape, rape culture, standardized testing, student debt, The Handmaid's Tale, war on education, Winnipeg
‘Most Legal Work Maintains Systems of Maldistribution, It Does Not Transform Them’
Written by gerrycanavan
October 13, 2013 at 8:29 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with class struggle, law school, politics, the courts, the law, the status is not quo
And a Few Wednesday Links
* Law school in America moves toward an open admissions policy. Where are the accreditors? This is insane.
* Russia really wants everyone to boycott its Olympics.
* Darrell Issa more or less proposes naming all water after Ronald Reagan.
* In other words, gold pays off when there is an outbreak of goldbug-ism. Gold is a bet that there will be more goldbugs in the future than there are now. And since the “gold will be money again” story is very deep and powerful, based as it is on thousands of years of (no longer applicable) historical experience, it is highly likely that goldbug-ism will break out again someday. So if you’re the gambling type, or if you plan to start the next Zero Hedge, or if your income for some reason goes down when goldbug-ism breaks out, well, go ahead and place a one-way bet on gold.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 31, 2013 at 11:27 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, accreditation, America, Darrell Issa, domestic surveillance, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, gay rights, How the University Works, law school, NSA, Olympics, philosophy, Reagan, Russia, surveillance society, technology, the Internet, water
Tuesday Links
* “‘The best way to interview is nonpregnant and ringless,’” that respondent said, adding she was only able to land a job after she kept her family secret during the interview process.
* Cheating on a quiz I can understand, but cheating in a quiz bowl? Oh, Harvard.
* Mad Men characters reimagined as Muppets.
* Ideology and fact-checking at the New Yorker.
As I pointed out in “Anderson Fails at Arithmetic,” this allegation misleads the reader in two ways. Inequality has been reduced enormously under Chávez, using its standard measure, the Gini coefficient. So one can hardly say that in this aspect, Venezuela remains the “same as ever.” Making Anderson’s contention even worse is the fact that Venezuela is the most equal country in Latin America, according to the United Nations. Anderson’s readers come away with exactly the opposite impression.
* The Jobs Crisis at Our Best Law Schools Is Much, Much Worse Than You Think: At some top tier schools, more than a fifth of students are underemployed.
* Investigators say Wilson County Deputy Daniel Fanning on Saturday was showing his weapons to a relative in a bedroom of his Lebanon home when the toddler came in and picked up a gun off the bed. Sheriff Robert Bryan says the weapon discharged, hitting 48-year-old Josephine Fanning. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
* High school students in Newark will walk out of classes today at noon, marching to Rutgers Law School to attend a State Assembly budget hearing on education funding.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 9, 2013 at 10:35 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Ant-Man, Batman, blue, Bobby Jindal, cheating, class struggle, college basketball, college sports, comics, discrimination, Doctor Strange, Dr. Seuss, Evil Dead, fact-checking, games, gender, general election 2016, God, guns, Harvard, How the University Works, Hugo Chávez, ideology, income inequality, Kenneth the Page, law school, lawyers, Mad Men, Marvel, misogyny, money corrupts, Muppets, NCAA, New Jersey, New Yorker, Newark, nonpregnant and ringless, pink, politics, quiz bowls, Republicans, scandals, sexism, taxes, the kids are all right, theodicy, toys, underemployment, Venezula, war on education
A Few Links for a Travelin’ Sunday
* After writing all of this I realize that I am not leaving my profession, in truth, it has left me. It no longer exists. I feel as though I have played some game halfway through its fourth quarter, a timeout has been called, my teammates’ hands have all been tied, the goal posts moved, all previously scored points and honors expunged and all of the rules altered. A teacher resigns.
* Academics have finally “started” to talk about capitalism? Inconceivable!
* Take the example of online education, for which excitement is rapidly building in California. Morozov notes in the book that it might very well produce more graduates per dollar spent, but it also might miss the very point of education.
* An outrage of the week right in my own backyard: Botched ATF sting in Milwaukee ensnares brain-damaged man.
“I have never heard of anything so ludicrous in my life,” said Greg Thiele, who spent 30 years working for the Milwaukee Police Department including on undercover stings with federal agents, including those with the ATF. “Something is very wrong here.”
* The latest from the law school scam.
* How people die in Shakespearean tragedy.
* And when continuity collides: The new Doctor Who companion’s ten-second appearance in Captain America.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 7, 2013 at 8:04 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, ATF, capitalism, Captain America, continuity, death, Doctor Who, entrapment, flexible online degrees, guns, How the University Works, inconceivable, Jenna Louise-Coleman, law school, Milwaukee, MOOCs, online education, outrageous, outrages, pedagogy, police corruption, police state, privatize everything, scams, Shakespeare, standardized testing, teaching, tragedy, war on education, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?
More Monday Night Links
* “Too few questions were asked, too many assumptions were allowed to go unchallenged, too many voices of doubt were muffled or rejected in a toxic atmosphere of patriotism, ignorance and political fear.” No, he’s not talking about the Obama administration’s current policy of ubiquitous drone-backed assassination! He’s talking about Iraq.
* Slaughter critically reviews the history of the AAUP, and finds that since its inception in 1915, it has failed either to claim in theory, or to defend in practice, a concept of academic freedom sufficiently robust to ensure even the basic civil liberties of faculty in the “danger zone” of politically sensitive scholarship in the social sciences, let alone their ability to develop research in these fields without fear of politically motivated reprisals. Even one AAUP president, William Van Alstyne, has stated that the AAUP’s standards of professional accountability for public statements restrict faculty utterances in ways that would be unacceptable in the context of the constitutional law of civil liberties. Slaughter also argues that the AAUP has placed excessive emphasis on tenure, bargaining away other aspects of academic freedom to obtain job security, and that the tenure-review process itself is the principal mechanism by which conservative biases in the faculty are perpetuated, particularly in times of financial exigency when the refusal to grant tenure to young radical faculty can be rationalized as non-political.
“I think about it,” Westbrook said Friday. “I think everybody has their own personal battles, own personal demons. So I think Junior was not only dealing with concussions but he was also dealing with other things. But I often wonder the long-term effects of everything — playing with the bad knee, playing with the ankle, and of course the concussion situation. I think about it all the time, every time I wake up and can’t remember the name of someone I once knew. I always think about it.”
* Nate Silver has solved the NCAA tournament. You’re welcome. More here.
Marquette, meanwhile, is almost certainly the weakest No. 3 seed this year, and has about a 35 percent chance of being upset by No. 14-seeded Davidson in its opening game. Instead, a Round of 16 game against No. 4 Syracuse in Washington could be Indiana’s toughest test.
You bastard.
* Coming of Age, Slowly, in a Tough Economy.
* Idea for a movie in which aliens invade the Earth and fix the economy.
* World successfully hypnotized into thinking that Cyprus really is unique.
* Sometimes the most radical ideas are those which at first sound most banal. For example, when Detroit Emergency Manager (EM) Kevyn Orr and Michigan governor Rick Snyder describe the citizens of Detroit as “customers,” it barely registers as a platitude. At first glance, it’s just another example of how marketing-speak has encroached on the language of politics; similar to how a candidate for higher office might say that government ought to be run like a business, or compare the president to a CEO.
But the description of citizens as customers—an analogy repeatedly invoked by Snyder to justify suspending the powers of Detroit’s local government and putting the city under Emergency Management—is different. It refers not only to citizens, but to the fundamental character of the government’s relationship with its citizens.
* Steubenville, actually existing media bias, and the view from nowhere. The Egregious, Awful and Downright Wrong Reactions to the Steubenville Rape Trial Verdict. Steubenville and the misplaced sympathy for Jane Doe’s rapists. Steubenville Shows the Bond Between Jock Culture and Rape Culture. On Rape, Cages, and the Steubenville Verdict. Why Does Steubenville’s Football Coach Still Have His Job? What the hell is wrong with CNN?
* Lawsuits Over Job-Placement Rates Threaten 20 More Law Schools.
* Gates McFadden’s Beverly Crusher Action Figure Tumblr. I can’t even begin. Via MetaFilter.
* You don’t know all the secrets of Buffy the Vampire Slayer yet.
The United States government totally collapsed during season 4. At least, that’s what a prop newspaper created for use during “Hush” claims — apparently the United States House and Senate both dissolved as governing bodies, replaced by a shadowy group known only as “The Surviving Members of Queen.” Even though Brian May, Roger Taylor and John Deacon and “digitally enhanced voice samples of Freddie Mercury” might not actually have U.S. citizenship. Meanwhile, then-President Clinton faced another scandal after he tested positive for presidency-enhancing drug Crovan.
* Alyssa Rosenberg is doing a Veronica Mars viewing club.
* 12 Very Special ‘Very Special Episodes.’
* And the RNC autopsies what went wrong.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 18, 2013 at 10:34 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic freedom, actually existing media bias, Barack Obama, Buffy, Bush, charts, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, CNN, college basketball, college sports, concussions, consumer culture, Cyprus, Detroit, drones, football, general election 2012, Great Recession, high school football, How the University Works, Iraq, Joss Whedon, law school, Marquette, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, NCAA, neoliberalism, NFL, politics, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Star Trek, Steubenville, television, tenure, the economy, the kids aren't all right, TNG, Tumblr, underemployment, unemployment, Veronica Mars, very special episodes, war on terror, worst financial crisis since the last one
Wednesday Links: MOOCpocalypse, Debtpocalypse, Truthserumpocalypse, and More
* Privatization. Naked. Higher Education Shock Doctrine.
* The actual politics of professors.
* Exactly as the Founders intended: Judge William Sylvester ruled that in the event of Holmes pleading insanity his prosecutors would be permitted to interrogate him while he is under the influence of a medical drug designed to loosen him up and get him to talk. The idea would be that such a “narcoanalytic interview” would be used to confirm whether or not he had been legally insane when he embarked on his shooting spree on 20 July last year. There’s some things an adversarial legal system just isn’t good at; this is obviously one of them. Determination of insanity should be inquisitorial: let a panel of experts evaluate him and make a decision about how to proceed on that basis.
* An open letter to The Atlantic regarding the payment of workers.
* The latest law school debt figures are pretty ugly.
* The U.S. drones program is shrouded in confusion. The media generally has portrayed the project as one that targets high-level terrorists with surgical precision, when in fact a very small percent of its targets are senior level, and hundreds of civilians have been killed. Giving people that information tends to change their attitude toward the program.
* And more Big Data from Big Porn: Porn search site PornMD has, for the sake of publicity and social science, collected its most-used search terms for the last six months and accounted them by location—not just in the U.S. but across the world. This is a safe-for-most-workplaces Gawker link, though there are some bawdy words in the searches.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 13, 2013 at 9:44 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abstinence porn, adversarial legal systems, austerity, Barack Obama, Berkeley, class struggle, communists are everywhere, consciousness, data, disaster capitalism, drones, freelancing, Greeks, guns, How the University Works, inquisitorial legal systems, insanity defense, James Holmes, law school, literature, MOOCs, neoliberalism, Occupy Cal, politics, polls, privatize everything, shock doctrine, shrouded in confusion, student debt, The Atlantic, the Iliad, the Odyssey, truth serum, UCLA, writing
Monday Links
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* I have recently asked my colleagues at UCSD questions such as: How many adjunct/contingent/non-tenure track faculty are there in your department? Can you name them? Have you met any adjuncts for coffee or lunch on campus? Are they invited to the homes of ladder rank faculty? Do they have office space? Do they have any voting rights in your department? Should they? Do you know how they are evaluated? Should they be rewarded for publishing? Should ladder-rank faculty with poor teaching evaluations be assigned to courses ahead of adjunct colleague with excellent teaching evaluations? Should campus charters be changed to extend representation to adjuncts in the Senate?
The results of the informal survey have been so depressing that I would like to survey faculty at UCSD to draw attention to the cooperation that ladder-rank faculty give to the corporatizaton of their home institutions. We should be forging firm bonds with the fastest-growing category in our midst instead of setting ourselves apart from and above them. We are all aware that our fate is tied to the fate of adjuncts and that our separate futures would be far more pleasant if we stand firm with them now. But I think we know that we will not. Better to burnish our progressive self-image by baying at the moon (on this and other list servs) even as we help campus administrators slip the dagger between our collective ribs.
* “Families bring their children in bright and early because they want them to learn,” she said, “not because they want them to be test dummies.” Related: How Michelle Rhee Misled Education Reform.
* Two recent reports by a prominent researcher purport to challenge Academically Adrift’s underlying conclusions about students’ critical thinking gains in college, and especially the extent to which others have seized on those findings to suggest that too little learning takes place in college. The studies by the Council for Aid to Education show that students taking the Collegiate Learning Assessment made an average gain of 0.73 of a standard deviation in their critical thinking scores, significantly more than that found by the authors of Academically Adrift.
* The flying monkeys of Burlington, Vermont.
* Getting everyone high is a great, if potentially lazy, plot device to exploit narrative inconsistency. There are no metaphors needed here: These characters—and by extension, this episode—is literally on speed. Did we, as viewers, complain that Weiner’s show felt like it was dragging on, or growing recursive? Did we whine that nothing really ever happened, or that Don was being glorified beyond his due? “The Crash” not only brought its awareness of such complaints to the fore, but it brought them at a speed usually reserved for those little explosions (slapstick, campy, or abject) that only interrupted the visually austere or pristine environment that defined “Mad Men.”
* Rare, amazing original prospectus for Disneyland.
* LARoB on the lawyer bubble.
* TV show rankings, science style.
* Some cosmetics companies that were cruelty-free for many years have changed their policies on animal testing so that they may market to China where animal testing is required.
* Ignoring the memory of the over 1,100 factory workers that passed away at the Rana Plaza Factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh last month, at least 14 major North American retailers have declined to sign the Accord on Fire and Building Safety, an agreement that would have entailed a five year commitment from all participating retailers to conduct independent safety inspections of factories and pay up to $500,000 per year towards safety improvements.
* Proposal gives Scott Walker administration more power to sell state property.
* What’s Next For Kaitlyn Hunt, The Teen Charged With A Felony For Same-Sex Relationship With Classmate.
* VA GOP’s Attorney General Nominee Wanted Women To Report Miscarriages To Police Or Face Jail Time.
* And winter is coming: HBO May Reveal Game of Thrones Ending Before the Books Can.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 20, 2013 at 12:40 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjuncts, animal testing, Bangladesh, Burlington, China, class struggle, cosmetics, Disney, Disneyland, equality, flying monkeys, Game of Thrones, gay rights, George R. R. Martin, HBO, How the University Works, labor, law school, lawyers, learning, Mad Men, metacommentary, Michelle Rhee, miscarriage, morally odious monsters, neoliberalism, pedagogy, pregnancy, science, Scott Walker, standardized testing, Target, teaching, television, tenure, unions, Vermont, Wal-Mart, war on education, Wisconsin