Posts Tagged ‘personhood’
Thursday Links!
* Gasp! The MOOC ‘Revolution’ May Not Be as Disruptive as Some Had Imagined.
* Scenes from the class struggle in New York: CUNY and SUNY bigs get chauffeurs as tuition soars.
* The job skills employers crave!!!
* In other words, it may be that cheating rates are so high because too many university curriculums and courses are designed for cheating. Indeed, I’ve often felt that one of the principal skills—and it is a skill—imparted by the American educational system is the ability to bullshit your way through assessment with minimal effort.
* Dolphins can recognize whistles from old tank mates from over 20 years ago, study finds.
* Man charged with stealing “entire road.”
* The faces of Manhattan Project.
* Being Unemployed For Over Nine Months Is The Same As Losing Four Years Of Experience.
* Most 2013 job growth is in part-time work, survey suggests.
* NIH Reaches Pact With Family of Henrietta Lacks.
* Brutal review of DC’s missteps since the Nu52 debacle.
* “You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do Scooby-Doo.”
* Just about the only thing that could get me excited about Man of Steel 2: Bryan Cranston Tapped to Play Lex Luthor?
* Monsters are real: Louisiana parish claims incarcerated 14-year-old consented to be raped by a corrections officer.
* And I am just completely horrified every time I come across statistics on Greece’s economy. Jesus.
Wednesday!
* Duke’s Jebediah Purdy has the solution to the problem of animal-rights muckrakers I blogged about yesterday:
Fairness and safety are real issues. So is transparency, and that is why we should require confined-feeding operations and slaughterhouses to install webcams at key stages of their operations. List the URL’s to the video on the packaging. There would be no need for human intrusion into dangerous sites. No tricky angles or scary edits by activists. Just the visual facts. If the operators felt their work misrepresented, they could add cameras to give an even fuller picture.
On what grounds could the slaughterhouse industry possibly object to that? Via DotEarth’s post on the personhood of non-humans.
* All told, over the last five fiscal years, the Education Department has generated $101.8 billion in profit from student borrowers, thanks to low borrowing costs for the government and fixed interest rates for students, budget documents show.
* Student loan interest rates are scheduled to double on July 1, from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent. Congress extended the lower rate on federal student loans for a year in an effort to control the nation’s formidable student debt crisis, but will now have to decide whether or not to cancel the interest rate hike once again. Interests Diverge on Interest Rates.
* Every meaningful resistance to neoliberalism must be a feminism.
* Now, however, the City College of San Francisco might pay a heavy price for its faculty-oriented ethos: being shut down.
* The L.A. Times pans the New University of California.
* Millions of Americans have grown up with a defining family immigration story. But while our families may have endured hardship coming to America, the simple fact is that most of our immigration stories would not be possible at all under today’s immigration laws. Great idea for a site.
* The 2012 VIDA statistics have been out for some time now, so I won’t linger over the current and quantifiable inequity—yes, even in this magazine—in the frequency with which male and female writers are reviewed today, five years after the past was deemed “gone.” It’s a proven fact, backed by simple math even my first grader can understand: the number of reviews of books by men is greater than the number of reviews of books by women; the number of male reviewers is greater than the number of female reviewers. Men, in other words, are still the arbiters of taste, the cultural gatekeepers, and the recipients of what little attention still gets paid to books.
* Scenes from the class struggle in the future: Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium.
* Animated Renderings of America After 25 Feet of Sea Level Rise.
* They f*ck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do.
* Trends in Instructional Staff Employment Status, 1975-2011.
* And xkcd considers the mise-en-Adobe.
Monday, Monday
* In local news! @baylorstudio and @artmilwaukee win $50,000 Joyce Award to create original work of art in blighted neighborhoods.
* The next Kim Stanley Robinson novel! Shaman: A Novel of the Ice Age.
* Is science fiction the future of the novel?
* Student loans: The next housing bubble.
* ‘We Ask That You Do Not Call Us Professor.’
* McSweeney’s: “I’m an English professor in a movie.”
* The University of British Columbia is striking a blow at gender inequity in professors’ pay, promising all tenure-stream female faculty a 2 per cent pay hike by the end of the month – a rare approach expected to cost the school about $2-million this year. I asked on Twitter and nobody answered — is this legal in Canada? I don’t think it would be here.
* Expelled Student Activist Wins $50K Court Judgment Against University President. The president is being held personally liable for his decisions.
An environmental activist expelled from Georgia’s Validosta State University (VSU) has won a $50,000 award in a lawsuit against the university president who kicked him out of school in 2007. In a dramatic rebuke to President Ronald Zaccari, the federal jury that heard the case found Zaccari personally liable for violating Hayden Barnes’ due process rights.
* Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, sat down at the conference table just moments before the faculty meeting began. It was three o’clock on February 12, 2010, and thirteen professors and staff members in the biology department had crowded into a windowless conference room on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology. The department chair, a plant biologist named Gopi Podila, distributed a printed agenda. Bishop was sitting next to him, in a spot by the door. Inside her handbag was a gun.
* Scenes from the struggle for academic freedom in New York. Much more here.
* School closings are a popular method of cost-cutting for big-city districts, but critics say the savings are exaggerated. Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is pushing for up to 100 school closings this year. New York City just announced 26 planned closures.
But studies refute claims of savings. School buildings are difficult to sell. They cost money to maintain, and when vacant can become blights on their communities. Washington, D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee closed 23 schools in 2008, claiming she would save $23 million—and instead cost the district $40 million.
* The Super Bowl Is Single Largest Human Trafficking Incident In U.S. Football’s death spiral. The Rarest Play in the NFL.
* Capitalism: rise of the machines.
* Being touched against your will has become a twisted rite of passage for American females. It’s a reminder that you’re never safe anywhere. That your body is not really yours—but instead public property, there to be rubbed against by an old man or pinched and videotaped by a young one.
* It was a startling assertion that seemed an about-face from church doctrine: A Catholic hospital arguing in a Colorado court that twin fetuses that died in its care were not, under state law, human beings.
* Communism! S&P To Face Charges From States, U.S. Over Wrongdoing Before Financial Crisis.
* John McCain: the mask slips.
* Our individual perception of global warming is matching up with reality.
* Occupy Buddhism. Relatedly: growing up a Lama in exile.
* The Institute for Centrifugal Research.
We believe that even the trickiest challenges confronting mankind can be diverted via human centrifugalization. Spinning people around at a sufficiently high G-Force will solve every problem.
* Canada ends the penny. This means the U.S. will start talking seriously about ending the penny in about fifty years or so.
* And the Big Picture blog visits the sky.
‘In 2008 the Spanish Parliament Came to a Similar Conclusion for Great Apes That Would Grant Limited Personhood Rights to Nonhuman Animals for the First Time So That … They “Should Enjoy the Right to Life, Freedom and Not to Be Tortured”‘
What would it mean to grant personhood to whales, dolphins, monkeys, and great apes? Scientific American reports. There’s also this bit:
This is not as radical an idea as it may sound. The law is fully capable of making and unmaking “persons” in the strictly legal sense. For example, one Supreme Court case in 1894 (Lockwood, Ex Parte 154 U.S. 116) decided that it was up to the states “to determine whether the word ‘person’ as therein used [in the statute] is confined to males, and whether women are admitted to practice law in that commonwealth.” As atrocious as this ruling sounds, such a precedent continued well into the twentieth century and, in 1931, a Massachusetts judge ruled that women could be denied eligibility to jury status because the word “person” was a term that could be interpreted by the court.
1931!
Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans
“Dolphins deserve same rights as humans, say scientists.” Via io9.
Based on the principle of the equal treatment of all persons;
Recognizing that scientific research gives us deeper insights into the complexities of cetacean minds, societies and cultures;
Noting that the progressive development of international law manifests an entitlement to life by cetaceans;
We affirm that all cetaceans as persons have the right to life, liberty and wellbeing.
We conclude that:
- Every individual cetacean has the right to life.
- No cetacean should be held in captivity or servitude; be subject to cruel treatment; or be removed from their natural environment.
- All cetaceans have the right to freedom of movement and residence within their natural environment.
- No cetacean is the property of any State, corporation, human group or individual.
- Cetaceans have the right to the protection of their natural environment.
- Cetaceans have the right not to be subject to the disruption of their cultures.
- The rights, freedoms and norms set forth in this Declaration should be protected under international and domestic law.
- Cetaceans are entitled to an international order in which these rights, freedoms and norms can be fully realized.
- No State, corporation, human group or individual should engage in any activity that undermines these rights, freedoms and norms.
- Nothing in this Declaration shall prevent a State from enacting stricter provisions for the protection of cetacean rights.
Gerry Canavan 