Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘librarians

Infinite Monday Links! Just Keep Scrolling!

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* Podcast report! Everyone is listening to every episode of Hello, from the Magic Tavern one after another pretty much nonstop. My favorite one so far.

* My book Octavia E. Butler has a preview page at University of Illinois Press. Get your pre-orders in now!

* From the archives! That thing I wrote about the first season of Kimmy Schmidt. I’ve been pretty unimpressed with the second season, alas, and some of the things I wrote back then seem to point to why.

* You know, after reading this I think I hate the humanities too.

* CFP: 4th edition of “Games and Literary Theory” in Krakow, Poland (Nov 18-20).

Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity.

* Star Trek 2017 Rumor Watch!

* Local news.

* And you thought you felt bad about your pedagogy already: Are Colleges Too Obsessed With Smartness?

“When the entire system of higher education gives favored status to the smartest students, even average students are denied equal opportunities,” he writes. “If colleges were instead to be judged on what they added to each student’s talents and capacities, then applicants at every level of academic preparation might be equally valued.”

* Administrators at the University of Beirut seem to have blocked an appointment for Steven Salaita.

* University maladministration can never fail, it can only be failed.

272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?

* How to Build a Major in a Young Field: The University of Toledo’s new disability-studies program attracts undergradute interest.

* Cornell Continues to Receive Scrutiny Over Job Ad.

Philosophers who work outside of academia – Part 3: Transferrable skills and concrete advice.

UC Davis spent thousands to scrub pepper-spray references from Internet. The University of Public Relations.

President Obama to Forgive Nearly 400,000 Disabled Americans’ Federal Student Loans.

Vatican conference urges end to doctrine of ‘just wars.’

* The Minecraft Generation.

Behind the Scenes at the Met.

The Librarian Who Saved Timbuktu’s Cultural Treasures From al Qaeda.

* Wild Chernobyl.

* Huge, if true: Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems. Why Are Voters Angry? It’s the 1099 Economy, Stupid.

A $15 minimum wage is too high and that’s great.

Mississippi Jails Are Losing Inmates, And Local Officials Are ‘Devastated’ By The Loss Of Revenue.

* Special pleading alert! No, DC Should Not Become The 51st State. Here’s A Quick History Lesson To Remind You Why.

* A(other) New Map for America.

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This Former College President Spent 2 Years in Prison. Here’s What He Learned. The answer will shock you!

How Not to Audit the Pentagon.

You could almost forget this, as the term fizzles into a bunch of sagging 4-4 ties and improbable unanimous decisions, but if Antonin Scalia had lived until July the docket was full of poisoned pills and silent time bombs that would have exploded in President Obama’s face this summer. Until and unless we reckon with what might have been at the high court this term, it’s impossible to understand why there will be no hearings for Judge Garland. GOP senators aren’t just angry about losing Justice Scalia’s seat. They are angry because the court as the weapon of choice to screw the president has been taken from them, and they want it back.

* A Huge Portion of Greenland Started Melting This Week. This Is Why the Great Barrier Reef Is Dying. If only someone had known!

New UN report finds almost no industry profitable if environmental costs were included.

Now Keurig says it has found a solution. It is taking longer than it took for NASA to put a man on the moon, but in the coming months, the company will begin to sell K-Cups made of material that is easily recycled.

* Every Disney Song from Best to Worst. Glad we settled that!

* There never was a Bernie Sanders movement. Personally I blame Ben and Jerry.

* Why Democrats Must Embrace A Universal Child Allowance. Working moms have more successful daughters and more caring sons, Harvard Business School study says.

* The time Donald Trump’s empire took on a stubborn widow — and lost.

* I was a men’s rights activist.

* An oral history of Childrens Hospital.

* Behold, King Curry. A flashback.

* Remembering the Dungeons and Dragons Moral Panic.

* As I feared, the tide seems to have turned on Title IX. I continue to think the whole law is at risk if its supporters cannot find a way to frame and articulate the need for reform.

Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan. The chimp was eventually caught after being shot with a tranquilizer gun and falling from the power lines, Kyodo news reported. REUTERS/Kyodo

It’s Time To Acknowledge How Important the Death Star is to Star Wars. I don’t know that I quite agree with this, but Rogue One does (seem to) point to a vision of the franchise that isn’t so heavily dependent on the Jedi.

Ben Affleck’s Solo Batman Movie Has a Huge Opportunity and One Big Problem. And while we’re at it, just one more beating up Batman v. Superman.

Male chimpanzee Chacha screams after escaping from nearby Yagiyama Zoological Park as a man tries to capture him on the power lines at a residential area in Sendai, northern Japan.

A Zookeeper Known as “The Tiger Whisperer” Was Killed by a Tiger.

Journalist wants Obama’s ‘Game of Thrones’ screeners, so files a FOIA request for them.

* Being Kumail Nanjiani.

* Being Cherie Berry.

* Being Monica Lewinsky.

* Ancient Peruvian Mystery Solved from Space.

Alien ‘Wow!’ signal could be explained after almost 40 years.

Could the Broadway smash ‘Hamilton’ help keep a woman’s face off the front of the $10 bill? Coming soon: Andrew Jackson: The Musical! PS: In 2030.

Why Fans of Hamilton Should Be Delighted It’s Finally Stirring Criticism.

New ABC show ‘Cleverman’ is about an Aboriginal superhero. Australian ABC, not US ABC, alas.

* Someone should have double-checked that math: Man Sentenced to 4 Years After Victim Says She Was Held Captive, Sexually Assaulted for a Decade.

At Tampa Bay farm-to-table restaurants, you’re being fed fiction.

Hawking’s Interstellar Starship Would Revolutionize the Search for Alien Life. What Will Make Interstellar Travel a Reality?

* And they said culture was dead!

* As a wise man once said, you don’t exist.

Controversial Illustrations By Polish Artist Reveal The Darker Side Of Modern Society.

Foreskin doesn’t make a man more “sensitive,” study finds.

Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing. The Black Radical Tragic : Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. LARoB v. Shakespeare.

Can SeaWorld Redeem Itself?

* Are Humans Definitely Smarter Than Apes?

* Have creepy professors ruined the independent study forever?

* Behold, the US alt-right.

* If you want a vision of the future.

* And I didn’t know him as well as others, but we’ll all miss Srinivas Aravamudan. Some details on the Aravamudan fund.

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Written by gerrycanavan

April 18, 2016 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Where Is Your Labor Day Now Links

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* Great local event alert: George Lipsitz (Black Studies, UCSB) will be speaking at UWM’S Golda Meir on Wednesday (September 9) at 4:30pm on “The Ferguson Conjuncture: Why the Humanities Matter Now.”

* One of Jaimee’s poems was on Lake Effect on Friday; her full interview on the program is coming soon.

* After meeting my class and talking a bit with them about their familiarity with Tolkien I’ve updated my syllabus with a few supplementary readings.

There’s a storm in the poetry world, this one set off by the bio in Best American Poetry 2015 of Michael Derrick Hudson, who has been publishing under the name Yi-Fen Chou. A pre-post-mortem from editor Sherman Alexie.

@AcademicsSay: The Story Behind a Social-Media Experiment.

Wikipedia Editors Uncover Extortion Scam And Extensive Cybercrime Syndicate.

Iowa’s New President Is Choice Faculty Opposed. Unpopular pick. On the Suborning of Free Speech and Shared Governance at the University of Iowa.

UH shifts millions from academics to sports.

* Harvard as tax-free hedge fund.

* Speaking for the humanities.

Instead of hoping that higher education should be the solution to all of our economic problems, we should follow Cassidy’s advice and return to the notion that college is a public good and an end in itself: “Being more realistic about the role that college degrees play would help families and politicians make better choices. It could also help us appreciate the actual merits of a traditional broad-based education, often called a liberal-arts education, rather than trying to reduce everything to an economic cost-benefit analysis.” If we focus on making higher education more accessible and affordable as we enhance its quality, we can at least make sure that it does not enhance inequality and decrease social mobility.  The first step is to stop believing that college degrees produce good jobs. 

Meant to keep academics compliant, obedient, and domesticated, audit culture comes to Canadian universities at an otherwise exciting moment for research. Indigenous epistemologies and publicly engaged, participatory, and open forms of research are asserting their places in the academic landscape today. In response to rich debates about what constitutes knowledge, universities are being called to feature relationally and community oriented research outcomes. But with audit culture’s narrow benchmarks and retrograde understandings of what counts as real research, there is little breathing room in the academy for public engagement, community-based research, and Indigenous forms of knowing, since these methodologies can’t be easily captured in the audit forms. Indeed, academics are driven away from socially engaged scholarly activities in part because they are more difficult to measure, assess, and judge.

Daniels seems mildly indignant at the extent to which he has been monitored by Disney, now the home of the Star Wars franchise. As well he might. He didn’t just step off the first space-cruiser from Mos Eisley: he is 69 years old and has been playing C-3PO since before many of his current paymasters were born. “The secrecy has been beyond ludicrous,” he sighs. “For heaven’s sake, it’s a movie. When I got the script, it was typed in black on paper of the deepest red so you couldn’t photocopy it. I got a hangover just reading it.” He was censured by the studio recently for mentioning on Twitter a fellow actor from The Force Awakens.

* Obamaism distilled: In Alaska, Obama warns against climate change but OKs drilling.

Scientists Calculated How Much Lembas Bread Would be Needed to Walk to Mordor.

The Privatization of Childhood: Childhood has become a period of high-stakes preparation for life in a stratified economy.

The oceans are full of bodies. The things they carry. Migrants welcome.

* TNI, on the counterfeit.

* Assessing the Legacy of That Thing That Happened After Poststructuralism.

* Jacobin on Radical America and on the Ashley Madison bots.

* The earning power of philosophy majors.

* ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.

Paid Leave for Fathers Is Good for Everybody.

The experience will be disheartening, but remember: it is you who chose to play Adjunct Sudoku.

* The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that charter schools are unconstitutional. Someone tell Wisconsin!

Deaf Culture and Sign Language: A Reading List.

After all the media fawning over the nonprofit Teach for America, there are some veterans of the program who are now telling a different story. “Teach for America Counter-Narratives: Alumni Speak Up and Speak Out” contains 20 essays with anecdotes that seem too crazy to make up.

10,000 zines and counting: a library’s quest to save the history of fandom.

* The end of overparenting. The end of workplace friendships.

* Wake up and smell the weird.

* “Stonehenge II: Archaeologists uncover true scale of ‘superhenge’ – discovered just a few miles from famous prehistoric monument.”

* The total surveillance society, but with a human face.

* Toronto’s parking ticket jubilee.

* Alzheimer’s at 38.

* PC Comedy and Paul Revere vs. Putting Out Fire with Gasoline.

* Free your mind; start high school later in the morning.

* Course List for Rupert Giles, Master of Library Sciences Candidate, Michaelmas Term 1982.

* And of course you had me at The Alternative Universe Of Soviet Arcade Games.

Written by gerrycanavan

September 8, 2015 at 8:18 am