Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Northwestern

All the Thursday Links

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* 2048: Academia Edition.

Shocking police overreach haunts Southern city: Racial profiling, quotas and secret “conviction bonuses.” Yes, of course it’s Durham.

* Nazis! Me no like those guys. Neo-Nazis Are Using Cookie Monster to Recruit German Children.

* The charter school scam in action.

* Congratulations, University of Connecticut.

* The prestige premium.

* BREAKING: Governing boards don’t care about adjuncts.

* Let Them Eat Code.

All of which is just to say that it’s a handy thing, should you ever get elected to anything, to think a little about who’ll replace you when your term is done.  Because you should leave.  It’s good for your brain, and it’s good for the university. It’s also good for the soul to know that you’re not irreplaceable.

Voices from the Student Fossil Fuel Divestment Movement.

* Rethinking carceral feminism.

* Now the head women’s basketball coach is out at Marquette. Second-highest-paid employee on campus.

* New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators.

* Northwestern University fights back against NCAA football unionization.

* Drone art: Drone Operators Now Have a “Bug Splat” Staring Them in The Face.

* Former Taco Bell interns claim they invented Doritos tacos in 1995.

161* The art of Kurt Vonnegut.

The Legend of Vera Nabokov. The old days, guys, am I right?

* Meanwhile, everything old is new again: Adam Terry, McAllister’s chief of staff, said Peacock was taken off of the payroll during the past 24 hours.

* “Duke Collective” now Internet-famous for wage-sharing idea that if you knew the institutional context you’d realize isn’t really oh forget it.

I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them. So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.

* St. Michael’s in Vermont plans to survive by shrinking.

* Student Social Network Use Declines as Social Apps Move to Take Their Place.

The geology of Westeros.

* More Khaleesis were born in 2012 than Betsys or Nadines.

* Superficially plausible readings of fuzzy demographic signifiers: The Muppets and Generation X.

* The Vermont solution: single-payer. I don’t have a ton of hope in the American system, but I think this plan could actually work.

* Battlestar Galactica Is Getting Rebooted As A ZZZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzzzzzz

Jon Stewart cursed me out: I dared question a “Daily Show” warm-up comic’s racist jokes.

* The birth of Thanaticism. As neologisms to describe our era go, I prefer necrocapitalism.

Milwaukee Art Museum unveils design for building addition.

* Who mourns for jai alai?

* What has been seen can never be unseen.

* Tolkien, Martin, and politics.

Carbon Dioxide Levels Just Hit Their Highest Point In 800,000 Years.

* And I still think this is more a heat map of imperial ideology (don’t kill people in Europe!) than of “knowledge” per se. I think you’d see the opposite effect about a country in the Global South.

Written by gerrycanavan

April 10, 2014 at 9:27 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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All the Links, Half the Calories

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* Fake Blood and Blanks: Schools Stage Active Shooter Drills. This is utterly horrific. The country has lost its mind.

Mass shootings in America, 1999 through 2013.

Arkansas man guns down 15-year-old girl for egging son’s car as a prank.

Nowhere in all this information is there any mention of the fact that more than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery. These presidents bought, sold, and bred enslaved people for profit. Of the 12 presidents who were enslavers, more than half kept people in bondage at the White House.

Jefferson had a number of slaves who gained their freedom by various methods. He freed two slaves in his lifetime and five in his will. Three others ran away and were not pursued. (Still others successfully ran away despite pursuit.) All ten freed with Jefferson’s consent were members of the Hemings family; the seven he officially freed were all skilled tradesmen. About 200 slaves were sold at estate sales after Jefferson’s death.

* In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?

* On the Killing of Jordan Davis by Michael Dunn: I insist that the irrelevance of black life has been drilled into this country since its infancy, and shall not be extricated through the latest innovations in Negro Finishing School. I insist that racism is our heritage, that Thomas Jefferson’s genius is no more important than his plundering of the body of Sally Hemmings, that George Washington’s abdication is no more significant than his wild pursuit of Oney Judge, that the G.I Bill’s accolades are somehow inseparable from its racist heritage. I will not respect the lie. I insist that racism must be properly understood as an Intelligence, as a sentience, as a default setting which, likely to the end of our days, we shall unerringly return. I had never heard Oney Judge’s story before. What a life. More, more.

Justifiable Homicides Up 200 Percent in Florida Post-Stand Your Ground. Just make sure you don’t get more than one DUI a year or you could miss out in the horrible war of all against all.

* Terrible news, everyone: Change In Jet Stream Is the Likely Cause of Brutal Winter. Arctic getting darker, making Earth warmer. Rise in malaria forecast for tropical highlands.

* 401-not-okays.

On Friday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Missoula County Attorney’s Office in Montana, alleging that it has found “substantial evidence” that prosecutors there systematically discriminate against female sexual-assault victims.

A Northwestern University student alleges in a federal lawsuit that the school mishandled her complaint that a professor sexually attacked her after getting her drunk in 2012.

But as journalist Kevin Cook details in his new book, “Kitty Genovese: The Murder, the Bystanders, the Crime that Changed America” (W.W. Nor­ton), some of the real thoughtlessness came from a police commissioner who lazily passed a falsehood to a journalist, and a media that fell so deeply in love with a story that it couldn’t be bothered to determine whether it was true.

8 Book Historians, Curators, Specialists, And Librarians Who Are Killing It Online. #4 with a bullet: Duke’s Own Mitch Fraas.

California police use taser on deaf man trying to communicate with them via sign language.

Facets of Hope for Adjunct Faculty.

Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now.

Loyola Marymount U. Is Accused of Interfering With Adjuncts’ Union Election. Strike at UIC.

Vitruvian Man Had a Hernia.

PBS: Bought and Paid For.

* National recruitment sources have become necessary because most Black youth from our city who attend college outside of Milwaukee decide never to return. And you can’t blame them given the fact that several studies have shown Milwaukee to be among the worst cities in the country for African Americans.

* And it gets worse for the Cream City.

* The NFL wanted him… until he was named a Rhodes Scholar.

After Historic UAW Defeat at Tennessee Volkswagen Plant, Theories Abound. A Titanic Defeat.

Snake-handling star of ‘Snake Salvation’ reality show dies from snake bite.

* The Duke Chronicle profiles a first-year student who also works in the porn industry.

Behind Frank Underwood’s Medieval Senate Maneuver In ‘House Of Cards.’ * Political Drama Without Politics: The Nihlism of House of Cards.

Where do you go after you leave the cast of The Real World?

* Hoverboards or I walk.

20 Practical Uses for Coca-Cola That Prove That It Should Not Be In The Human Body. So good though.

* Event in NYC: All the Women in Capital.

* BDS as psychological warfare.

Apple working on heart attack prediction device.

* Previewing the coming disaster at Qatar World Cup 2022.

​The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.

New Zealand Prime Minister publicly denies being a lizard person.

* A Pushing Daisies Stage Musical?

* And The Cast of The Grand Budapest Hotel Says Wes Anderson Is a Genius Hardass. Hurry up and get here, March!

These Tuesday Links Surround Hate and Force It to Surrender

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BfE0H2HCAAE4VEa* Pete Seeger before the House Un-American Activities Committee, 1955. This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. Some recent articles and profiles. RIP.

* CFP: New Directions in Sherlock.

* Amazing moment: Northwestern University athletes have filed for union representation with the NRLB. Now, I don’t think they’ll get it — so the really interesting question is what happens when they don’t.

Rabon, a veterinarian, said he believes House Bill 930 is too weak. He said its standards for humane treatment could too easily be interpreted by a judge to apply to livestock as well as pets. “It can’t spill over to the animal husbandry in this state, which is an $80 billion industry – larger than the other top five industries in the state,” he said. “There is a LOT of money involved.”

* Freddie deBoer has a nice demonstration of how statistics don’t always tell you as much as you think.

Instead of guaranteeing that poor undergraduates can get through college debt-free, the University of Virginia decided it’s going to make low-income students borrow up to $28,000.

* More on the brokenness of the Common Core.

* The new face of food stamps.  Of the top five jobs projected to grow from 2012 to 2022, only one—registered nurse—provides an annual, full-time salary over $22,000.

The Fantasy Politics of the Libertarian Alliance.

* BREAKING: The past isn’t done with you yet.

With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death-penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

* Kubrick’s alternate titles for Dr. Strangelove.

Jonathan Banks is officially part of Better Call Saul.

Lawsuit Blames Uber App for Death of 6-Year-Old Girl.

* West Virginia as colonized zone.

* Five years into his presidency, Obama has finally issued an executive order raising the minimum wage for federal contracts. Can solving climate change be far behind?

* “Academic freedom” is a funny phrase: New York bill to punish ASA over Israel boycott picks up 48 supporters.

Man Charged With Shooting And Killing Own Neighbors Because He Wrongly Thought They Were Trespassing.

Florida Man’s Very Own Backyard Gun Range Is Perfectly Legal.

* Marquette just got $10 million to build a new JesRes.

* An 83-year-old nun faces up to 30 years in prison for breaking into a nuclear weapons facility.

* Here’s why Ezra Klein left the Washington Post. This is my skeptical face, but good luck.

* Horrific: After Being Denied A Snow Day, University Of Illinois Students Respond With Racism And Sexism.

* The crisis is over! Colleges are rich again!

Queens Library president gets $390G salary, luxe office makeover while shedding 130 jobs.

* BREAKING: Austerity politics don’t work. No one could have predicted!

* A bit on the nose, don’t you think? Birds Attack Peace Doves Freed From Pope’s Window.

* Let kids be kids: Chaos may reign at Swanson Primary School with children climbing trees, riding skateboards and playing bullrush during playtime, but surprisingly the students don’t cause bedlam, the principal says. The school is actually seeing a drop in bullying, serious injuries and vandalism, while concentration levels in class are increasing.

* The invention of jaywalking.

* Understand academic labor the Brady Bunch way.

* Rebecca Schuman hangs up on her “calling.”

* And some linkbait I can never resist: 22 Unbelievable Places that are Hard to Believe Really Exist.

unbelievable-places-27-3

Monday, Monday

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* It’s job and grant application season, so let the Educational Jargon Generator do the heavy lifting.

* LinkedIn founder determines that only LinkedIn can save us now. True story.

* Huge adjunct survey seeks to determine who adjuncts are. Useful, but honestly this sort of thing is really only useful at the level of the discipline. There’s simply so much variation between business school adjuncts and English department adjuncts that there’s hardly any reason to discuss them together at all.

* Do you know where your PhDs are? A Look at Life After the Ph.D.

I Quit Teach for America.

* What the Northwestern adjunct study doesn’t show.

* Meritocracy, in its majestic equality… The College Degree Boom Is Leaving Poor Kids Behind.

America is becoming a nation of zero-opportunity employers, in which certain occupations are locked into a terrible pay rate for no valid reason, and certain groups – minorities, the poor, and increasingly, the middle class – are locked out of professions because they cannot buy their way in.

* Here comes the de Blasio oppo. A Sandinista-supporting Leftist? ¡Que lástima!

* The Cory Booker oppo seems a lot more powerful. If Republicans had a better candidate in New Jersey I could see him actually blowing the race.

* Vatican dialectics: Pope condemns economic inequality while the Vatican continues to censure nuns’ anti-poverty work.

* Huge floods in Colorado aren’t even making a dent in the West’s forever-drought.

* The ultimate #slatepitch.

* And it looks like my Rolling Jubilee skepticism may have been well-founded. Bummer.