Posts Tagged ‘metrics’
A Million Billion Links, Forever and Ever
* I don’t think I’ve even seen anything that sums up academic labor as well as this image.
* I’ve been deposed, but SFRA soldiers on: SFRA Review #327 is out, this time with a special devoted to papers from the Worlding SF conference last December.
* I’d also suggest you very urgently check out Polygraph 27: “Neoliberalism and Social Reproduction.”
* Along with some of my colleagues I’ll be presenting at the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities conference this weekend; schedule here!
* Call for applications for the R.D. Mullen fellowship.
* Please support the AAUP-WSU Strike Fund.
* Do Catholic Universities Still Have a Value Proposition? Gee, I hope so.
* Describing a UW System in transition with campuses facing falling enrollment and declining tuition dollars, its president, Ray Cross, said in a wide-ranging panel discussion Wednesday that the UW is not abandoning the humanities.
* Nice work if you can get it: Dale Whittaker, who resigned amid controversy last week as president of the University of Central Florida, could collect $600,000 as part of a proposed severance package.
* The End of the Remedial Course.
* Our in-house student satisfaction survey has found that every department scored 97%. However, within this, we have identified three groups: – Green: 97.7-97.99% – Amber: 97.4-97.69% – Red: 97.0-97.39%. As you can imagine, this is cause for concern.
* N.K. Jemisin’s preface to the new edition of Parable of the Sower. As of date, the Octavia E. Butler papers are the most circulated and accessed collection at the Huntington. What a potent reminder of the significance of her words, more than a decade after her passing. And a TED Talk from Ayana Jamieson and Moya Bailey: Why should you read sci-fi superstar Octavia E. Butler?
* There’s No Severing Michael Jackson’s Art From His Obsession With Children.
* A 1983 EPA report titled “Can We Delay a Greenhouse Warming?”
* Climate change in Bolivia: a thread.
* America’s Northernmost City Is Having a Weird, Hot Winter. Homes lose $15.8 billion in value as seas rise, Maine to Mississippi. Extreme Weather Can Feel ‘Normal’ After Just a Few Years, Study Finds. Iceberg twice the size of New York City is set to break away from Antarctica. In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
* Renewable hydrogen ‘already cost competitive’, say researchers. Lake Erie just won the same legal rights as people. The tick that gives people meat allergies is spreading. He’s on to us.
* White Settlers Buried the Truth About the Midwest’s Mysterious Mound Cities.
* Tenure and promotion letters — a thread.
* Writers love to hate creative writing programs, graduates of them most of all. In 2009, literature scholar Mark McGurl published The Program Era, in which he declared the rise of creative writing “the most important event in postwar American literary history.” For an academic book full of graphs and terms like “technomodernism,” it reached a wide audience, prompting reviews and editorials from publications like The New York Times Book Review and The New Yorker. While McGurl steered clear of either celebrating or condemning the creative writing program — seeking “historical interpretation,” not valuation, he emphasized — his reviewers did not. Charles McGrath, the former editor of the NYTBR, called creative writing a Ponzi scheme. Chad Harbach, a founding editor of n+1, suggested that the MFA program had transformed books from things to be bought and read into mere “credentials” for professors of creative writing. Literature scholar Eric Bennett wrote that the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his alma mater, discouraged all writing that wasn’t either minimalist, conversational, and tenderhearted, or magical realist. Junot Díaz, a Cornell alum, argued that the creative writing workshop secured the whiteness of American literature. And the attacks keep coming, not that they have slowed applications. Some 20,000 aspiring writers apply to MFA programs every year, and the numbers continue to rise.
The range of writers who come out of graduate programs in creative writing make it difficult to argue that the MFA has somehow flattened literature, that T. C. Boyle, Sandra Cisneros, and Denis Johnson all write with something called “Iowa style.” The world of creative writing isn’t homogeneous, and for a lot of writers it offers time rather than instruction, two years to complete a book-in-progress rather than two years to mimic their advisor’s prose or verse. But creative writing also didn’t come out of nowhere. It emerged from a long-since-forgotten philosophical movement that instituted creative writing as a discipline for learning about yourself rather than the wider world.
* When you definitely didn’t do any crimes in 2006.
* Never tweet: Elon Musk Faces U.S. Contempt Claim for Violating SEC Accord. Seems like the jig may almost be up.
* New horizons in cheating to win.
* Really saying the quiet part loud here.
* News from a failed state: At issue is the number of hours the armed teachers and staffers would have to train, the 27 in the district’s policy or the more than 700 required of peace officers. Pater said his reading of the statutes doesn’t require school staff to be treated as security personnel requiring 700-plus hours of peace officer training.
* Living with Type 1 Diabetes When You Can’t Afford Insulin.
* Every parent with a disability could benefit from a friend like Carrie Ann. The fact that she is no longer in our world just enrages me more now. The fact that the systems that should be in place to maintain the care and wellbeing of people with disabilities and their families, killed her. The fact that her insurance company thought that the medication she needed to recover from a lung infection was too expensive and instead approved a drug that would lead to her loss of speech and her eventual death. Carrie Ann Lucas died to save $2000, even though it ended up costing the insurance company over $1 million to try and salvage their error.
* Oh no, not my stocks! “Health Insurers Sink as ‘Medicare for All’ Idea Gains Traction.”
* As Doctors, It Is Our Responsibility to Stop Racism in Medicine.
* Why White School Districts Have So Much More Money.
* Texan Determines It’s Cheaper to Spend Retirement in a Holiday Inn Than a Nursing Home.
* “Mom, When They Look at Me, They See Dollar Signs.” How rehab recruiters are luring recovering opioid addicts into a deadly cycle.
* Maybe not the strongest argument, but… You Don’t Have to Like Bernie Sanders to Like Bernie Sanders.
* The U.S. war in Afghanistan has been going on for so long that the newest recruits weren’t alive when it started. Drafting Only Men for the Military Is Unconstitutional, Judge Rules. Clothes, violence, war, and masculinity. Would you like to know more?
* Solving homelessness by giving people homes.
* Concrete: the most destructive material on Earth.
* When Morrison and Millar Almost Had Professor X Destroy the Universe.
* Under the terms of the deal, science fiction novels would be periodically interrupted by scenes in which the characters would drop everything and start eating Maggi soups, smacking their lips and exclaiming over just how delicious they were. It actually sounds at least as well as achieved as the interruptive ads in comics.
* We gradually become less attentive as we age—and not just because we stop giving a damn. The phenomenon is due to a shrinking “useful field of view,” the feature of visual attention that helps us recognize at a glance what’s important to focus on. Studies show that kids have a similarly limited field of view, hindering their ability to register the complete visual world around them.
* Toxic parenting myths make life harder for people with autism. That must change.
* China blocks 17.5 million plane tickets for people without enough ‘social credit.’
* California keeps a secret list of criminal cops, but says you can’t have it.
* Thousands of migrant youth allegedly suffered sexual abuse in U.S. custody.
* Late abortion: a love story.
* What is the Global Anglophone, anyway?
* Superheroes and traumatic repetition compulsion.
* A Brief History of the Grawlix.
* I might have done this one before, but: video games as pulp novel covers.
* Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants the Country to Think Big.
* And I’ve weirdly become a complete sucker for this category of photography: Winners of the 2019 Underwater Photographer of the Year Contest.
Off to MLA Links!
* CFP: Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy.
* “Man who changed name to Beezow Doo-doo Zopittybop-bop-bop faces 5 years in prison on drug charges.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson Receives 2016 Robert A. Heinlein Award.
* Your daily dose of pop culture art.
* GOP lawmakers call for firing of Mizzou professor who called for ‘muscle.’ Wheaton College seeks to fire Christian professor over view of Islam. Florida Atlantic Fires Sandy Hook Denier. Professor Removed From Course Over Vulgarity Waiver.
* Oregon and the Injustice of Mandatory Minimums. Libertarian Fairy-Tales: The Bundy Militia’s Revisionist History in Oregon.
* How Michigan literally poisoned an entire city to save a few bucks.
* “This is the United States of America and we have private property here. This is not a communist country. We own land, and land use is an attribute of property ownership,” he says. “Food doesn’t stay on the farm it was grown on. We share our food, we share our energy, we share our oil and gas. I can sell land to anybody. Why would I treat water any differently?”
* Shelters near capacity in Milwaukee County.
* Wisconsin schools earn a B-, over the nation’s gentleman’s C.
* As it happens, these new Star Wars comics are good comics precisely because they are restricted by the Star Wars franchise. Rather than engage in the default marketing narratives of mainstream superhero comics — killing off a character, or staging a world-changing event, or redesigning costumes, all ways of fooling readers who know better into thinking that things will actually change in significant ways — these comics tell serial stories aimed at no specific resolution. They promise nothing but play. Sure, okay, but where is your God now? More LARB Star Wars: Making Things Right: “Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.”
* The Secret Origin of The Force Awakens’ Adorably Angriest Stormtrooper. (It’s canon.) What the Seven Star Wars Films Reveal about George Lucas. All the Backstory You Desperately Want to Know About The Force Awakens.
* Jacob Brogan reviews The Census-Taker.
* Elsewhere on the Brogan beat: What’s the Deal With Geoengineering? Your Geoengineering Cheat Sheet.
* “The system isn’t broken. It’s fixed.”
* Really, though, how did this happen? We are all complicit.
* Social Justice Warrior (level 2).
* Presenting the sperm switch.
* Gene Editing Cures Animal Of Genetic Disease For The First Time.
* Today in unholy abominations.
* Today in the 2016 election: Former U.S. attorney: Clinton could face criminal indictment. Why this social feminist is not voting for Hillary. A warlock in Mexico has predicted that Donald Trump will not be the 45th president of America.
* What not to wear to your MLA interview.
* Grading abolition watch: Better-Looking Female Students Get Better Grades.
* Student evaluation abolition watch: Student Evaluations of Teaching (Mostly) Do Not Measure Teaching Effectiveness.
* When Your Curriculum Has Been Tumblrized.
* The CEO of your company has probably already earned your 2016 salary this year.
* …according to the state of California, ten-year-olds should also know enough to “voluntarily, knowingly, and intelligently” waive their right to remain silent before they are interrogated by police, so the statements that they make are admissible, should there be further criminal proceedings, in a court of law.
* Get this traffic camera a Pulitzer.
* Twitter announces plan to ruin the whole point of Twitter.
* WSJ covers one of my favorite sites on the net.
* That Dragon, Cancer: A Father, a Dying Son, and the Quest to Make the Most Profound Videogame Ever.
* The Death Penalty’s Last Stand.
* A people’s history of Blossom.
* I’m about to have seen things you people won’t have believed.
* The sad core of the gun debate.
* Deadwood Reunion Movie ‘Is Going to Happen,’ Promises HBO President. THAT’S LEGALLY BINDING.
* And of course you had me at Gruesome and Surreal Surgical Illustrations from the 15th–19th Centuries.
Weekend Links! Catch Them All!
* SFFTV CFP: “Stephen King’s Science Fiction.”
* To shill a mockingbird: How a manuscript’s discovery became Harper Lee’s ‘new’ novel. And now everyone’s super mad.
* From the archives! Radical Socialist Movement Ends After Three Semesters.
* University Rolls Out Adblock Plus, Saves 40 Percent Network Bandwidth.
* The Board of Directors of the American Psychological Association has recommended that the organization ban psychologists from taking part in interrogations conducted by the military or intelligence services, a prohibition long sought by critics of the APA’s involvement with a Central Intelligence Agency program, widely viewed as practicing torture, under the administration of President George W. Bush.
* The book argues that media theory (like science fiction) is often theology by other means, and my insistence on deep technicity, like all basic visions of the human estate, inevitably has religious resonances.
* Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.
* Sci-Fi Has Been Prepping Us for an Alien Invasion for Years.
* So here’s the challenge for women’s professional tennis: is it a sport, or is it a modeling agency?
* Robots Might Save the Humanities. Probably not though.
* That ‘Volunteer Professor’ Ad.
* Fear of a Scott Walker presidency.
* “Academic Unfreedom in America: Rethinking the University as a Democratic Public Sphere.”
* The paradox of the underperforming professor.
* These 20 schools are responsible for a fifth of all graduate school debt.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of the future.
* If you want a vision of March 14, 2005.
* Here’s the crayons you shouldn’t let your kids draw with if you don’t want them to eat asbestos.
“Children’s playtime should be filled with fun, not asbestos,” the two senators said. “We need greater access to information about where asbestos is present in products children and families use every day.”
And this used to be a free country.
* Why I No Longer Eat Watermelon, or How a Racist Email Caused Me to Leave Graduate School. I was nauseous reading this, on behalf of all parties.
* Bad Math and a Coming Public Pension Crisis.
* Well, that’s not allowed: Undocumented Moms: Texas Is Denying Birth Certificates To Our U.S.-Born Kids.
* The FBI targeted MAD magazine.
* “US pilot flushed bullets down a toilet on flight to Germany.”
* The Hopeful, Heartbreaking Ads Placed by Formerly Enslaved People in Search of Lost Family.
* Its website was created by Career Excuse, a service which, for a fee, provides job-seeking customers with verifiable references from nonexistent companies. While the companies have phone numbers, websites and mailboxes manned by Career Excuse, they don’t conduct any actual business, besides verifying the great work done by employees they’ve never really had.
* Washington Post Writer Who Accused Amy Schumer Of Racism Never Saw Her Standup or TV Show.
* Firefly spawns its own Galaxy Quest.
* Probably the darkest thing I’ve ever posted: “More men have walked on the moon than been Ronald McDonald.”
* A Lego-Friendly Prosthetic Arm Lets Kids Build Their Own Attachments.
* Point: “The green case for fracking.”
* Counterpoint: California Has No Idea What’s In Its Fracking Chemicals, Study Finds.
* Double Counterpoint: We’re Already In The ‘Worst Case Scenario’ For Sea Level Rise.
* The rule of law is the glue that holds society together: President Obama says he can’t revoke Bill Cosby’s Medal of Freedom.
* Also in the rule of law files: That Time Scott Walker Defined What A “Sandwich” Is In A Bill.
* I’m amazed that not even Robin Williams’s death could protect us from this.
* Why is Kickstarter letting a hologram “scam” raise $250k?
* If you haven’t watched Kung Fury yet, it’s time.
* Hear him out! Professor’s Manifesto: Vegans Must Illegally Overthrow Society to Save the World.
* Punishment Park is on YouTube.
* How privilege became a provocation.
* I’ll allow it, del Toro, but you’re on very thin ice.
* At first, there was soccer, but then we fixed it.
* The League of Regrettable Superheroes.
* A new survey puts the incidence of male rapists in a campus population at over 10%. That’s higher than I ever could have thought, to the point where I find the survey results difficult to accept.
* Think of it as needing more space in your house, so you decide you want to build a second story. But the house was never built right to begin with, with no proper architectural planning, and you don’t really know which are the weight-bearing walls. You make your best guess, go up a floor and… cross your fingers. And then you do it again. That is how a lot of our older software systems that control crucial parts of infrastructure are run. This works for a while, but every new layer adds more vulnerability. We are building skyscraper favelas in code — in earthquake zones.
* And they all lived happily ever after.
Sunday Afternoon
* This is, I think, literally the first time I have ever heard of university budget cuts impacting administration. Meanwhile.
* Meanwhile meanwhile, Congress talks adjuncts and adjunctification. I’m sure they’ll come up with a good solution soon.
* Tressie McMillan Cottom on race and adjunctification.
* Yo novel so staid and conventional, it’s taught at over 50 MFA programs.
* Submitted for your approval: An OCR of the MLA JIL list, 1965-2012.
* Bérubé’s last post on MLA 2014.
* Harvard, MIT Online Courses Dropped by 95% of Registrants.
* Inside a for-profit college nightmare.
* Inside the “longform backlash.”
* How Student Activists at Duke Transformed a $6 Billion Endowment.
* “Income inequality” has proved a very successful framing for Democrats discussing a massive social problem, so of course the Obama White House is rolling out a much worse one.
* Pope Francis Is Drafting An Encyclical On The Environment.
* Demographics is destiny: Latinos overwhelmingly want action on climate change.
* How nonviolent was the civil rights movement?
* It’s 1968, and Esquire is interviewing James Baldwin.
* Chris Christie says no to dashboard cameras.
* The coming Common Core meltdown.
* Highly Educated, Highly Indebted: The Lives of Today’s 27-Year-Olds, In Charts.
* America’s nuclear corps are a mess. Dr. Strangelove was a documentary.
* A journey to the end of the world (of Minecraft).
* Science has finally proved that sex reverses cognitive decline in rats.
* This World Map Shows The Enormity Of America’s Prison Problem.
* The New York Times has the tragic story of a man with a million dollars in his retirement account struggling to scrape by on just $31,500 a month. Truly, there but for the grace of God go we.
* Bucking trend, Wisconsin union membership grows.
* Fox to strand reality show contestants on an island for an entire year.
* Woody Guthrie’s daughter wants to preserve Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.
* The “okay, fine, let’s abolish all marriages” response to marriage equality is so strange to me. I know things like this happened during the civil rights movement — and one might argue that precisely the same thing has been happening in slow-motion to public education over the last few decades — but it still seems like such a strange, uniquely twenty-first-century temper tantrum.
* Behold, the 90s! The Most Impressive Costumes from Star Trek: TNG’s First 3 Seasons.
* Life as a Nonviolent Psychopath.
* We Didn’t Eat the Marshmallow. The Marshmallow Ate Us.
* And Stephen Hawking wants to destroy all your silly, silly dreams.
Dr. Seuss Explains Assessment, Metrics, Administrative Blight, and Pretty Much Every Aspect of the Contemporary Education System
From Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are?, way back in 1973:
Oh, the jobs people work at!
Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch
there’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher.
His job is to watch…
is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee.
A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.Well… he watched and he watched.
But, in spite of his watch,
that bee didn’t work any harder. Not mawtch.So then somebody said,
“Our old bee-watching man
just isn’t bee-watching as hard as he can.
He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher!
The thing that we need
is a Bee-Watcher-Watcher!”Well…
The Bee-Watcher-Watcher watched the Bee-Watcher.
He didn’t watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher
had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher!
And today all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch
are watching on Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch,
Watch-Watching the Watcher who’s watching that bee.
You’re not a Hawtch-Watcher. You’re lucky, you see!”
And friends, I’m here to tell you, it just gets worse from there. On the very next page:
And how fortunate you’re not Professor de Breeze,
who has spent the past thirty-two years, if you please
trying to teach Irish ducks how to read Jivanese.
Gerry Canavan 