Weekend Links!

* CFP: ASAP, Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present.

* Real-life trolley problem: programming a self-driving car to decide what to aim at in the event of a crash.

* As one of the first full-time faculty members at Southern New Hampshire’s online college, Ms. Caldwell taught 20 online courses last year: four at a time for five terms, each eight weeks long. The textbooks and syllabi were provided by the university; Ms. Caldwell’s job was to teach. She was told to grade and give feedback on all student work in 72 hours or less.

* The digital humanities bubble has popped. Climb on board the science fiction studies bubble before it’s too late!

* March Madness: The University of Oregon and the local district attorney’s office appear to have colluded to prevent a rape accusation from interfering with basketball. What a mess. “I thought, maybe this is just what happens in college,” she told police, “… just college fun.”

* How to Combat Sexual Assault: Three universities are addressing sexual assault the right way.

* The Worst of All Possible Universes and the Best of All Possible Earths: Three Body and Chinese Science Fiction.

* Go ahead, make your jokes: Harvard Faculty Members Approve College’s First Honor Code.

* “The Day I Started Lying to Ruth”: A cancer doctor on losing his wife to cancer.

* The CPB also usefully charts the changing funding fortunes of higher education and corrections.  As they remind us (4), there has been an effective reversal in the priorities placed on higher education and corrections since the early 1980s.  In 1980-81 2.9% of the General Fund was spent on corrections; in 2014-2015 the Governor proposes 9%.  In 1980-81, 9.6% of the General Fund was spent on higher education; in 2014-2015 the Governor proposes 5.1%. Actually the reversal is worse than the CPB indicates since Brown’s General Fund budget does not include the spending being sent to counties for realignment.  This has allowed him to appear as if he is cutting back on correctional spending when he is not.

* Money, Politics, and Pollution in North Carolina.

* Portland Committee Reviews Arrest of Nine-Year-Old Girl. Give them time! They really need to think through if arresting kids is really a good idea!

* Snapchat goes on twenty-year probation with the FTC.

* Atrocious: The Globe and Mail wants its management to the have the right to assign editorial employees to write and edit advertorial copy as part of their regular duties, according to this union bulletin. 

* ‘Can You Make Sure There’s Nothing Un-Islamic In Our Oriental Shlock-Fest?’ – G. Willow Wilson In The Bleeding Cool Interview.

* The point is that after years of studies about charter schools, there is not really any definitive proof of any “charter magic” they bring to the field.

* Meanwhile, standardized testing in Chicago asks immigrant students to choose the best argument for their own exclusion from society.

* Yes we can! Interest Rates on New Federal Student Loans Will Rise for 2014-15.

* Professors’ non-existent privacy rights.

* Economists: Still the Worst.

* Scenes from the adjunct struggle in San Francisco.

* Pope Demands ‘Legitimate Redistribution’ Of Wealth. Sold!

* North Dakota Is the Deadliest State to Work In.

* RIP, Community. For now!

* I’m a little surprised we don’t already have a few trillionaires lying around. Get to work, capital! You’re slacking.

* Iowa Secretary of State makes voter fraud his signature issue, pours a ton of money into finding it, comes up with 117 illegally cast votes and gets six convictions. Typical voter turnout in Iowa is around one million people.

* Scientists create truly alien lifeforms.

* The Recommendation Letter Ralph Waldo Emerson Wrote For A Job-Hunting Walt Whitman.

* The tragic case of Monica Lewinsky.

* Four Ways You Can Seek Back Pay for an Unpaid Internship.

* Stress Gives You Daughters, Sons Make You Liberal. Well, that about solves all the big questions forever.

* The Secret Origins of Benghazi Fever.

* And bell hooks vs. Beyoncé: whoever wins, we… Well, look, Beyoncé’s going to win. Let me start over.

Thursday Night Links

* Predictably outrageous: University endowments and teachers’ pension funds are among big investors in Sallie Mae, the private lender that has been generating enormous profits thanks to soaring student debt and the climbing cost of education, a Huffington Post review of financial documents has revealed.

* Dialectics of Joe Biden.

* David Golumbia writes up UWM’s The Dark Side of the Digital conference.

* Pakistan Court Decision Finds US Drone Strikes Are ‘War Crimes,’ Which Are ‘Absolutely Illegal.’

* 19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words.

* At least 912 people are now known to have died in last month’s collapse of a building near the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, officials say.

* Issue 4.1 of Excursions is devoted to “Science/Fiction” (including a much-needed denunciation of the Jedi).

* Millennials aren’t lazy; they’re f*cked.

* The Ghetto Is Public Policy.

* Surprising literally dozens, Snapchat photos can be retried after all.

* ABC has apparently picked up Agent of SHIELD.

* And just when you thought the culture had scraped the bottom of the barrel: 24 is coming back.

A Whole Lot of Sunday Night Links

* SNL wins a game: Djesus Uncrossed.

* Batman should never have revealed his secret identity.

* Dan Harmon explains his Joseph-Campbell-influenced theory of the “story circle,” in a few posts: 1 2 3 4 5 6

* For the first time in its 120 year history the board of the Sierra Club has authorized the use of civil disobedience, to protest the proposed construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline.

* The politics of the Papal Conclave are fascinating.

* Pope Benedict XVI’s leaked documents show fractured Vatican full of rivalries. Pope blesses thousands at Vatican as details of ailments emerge.

* Speechless:

As early as this April, Yale plans to welcome a training center for interrogators to its campus.

The center’s primary goal would be to coach U.S. Special Forces on interviewing tactics designed to detect lies. Charles Morgan III, a professor of psychiatry who will head the project, calls these tactics “people skills.” These techniques would be honed using New Haven’s immigrant community as subjects.

* Cooper Union will probably not be free anymore.

* Roopika Risam on breaking the silence of the job search.

* Freddie deBoer: I’ve been making the case (again and again and again) that the constantly-expressed notion that we’ll have full employment if people are just smart and go into STEM fields is empirically indefensible. Adam Kotsko: What is education actually for?

* Margaret Atwood teases Maddaddam:

“Maddaddam begins where The Year of the Flood finishes and goes on from there,” she says. “It explores what happens when the conventional humans and the new creations find themselves in the same space. You can see that there might be some cultural misunderstandings.”

* Comics explained: the backstory of Rachel Summers. It couldn’t be simpler!

* Aaron Bady on Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s In the House of the Interpreter.

* The New York Times profiles flood management technology in the Netherlands.

* Could our universe be located within the interior of a wormhole which itself is part of a black hole that lies within a much larger universe? And that universe is on the back of an even larger turtle…

* Forest Whitaker Accused of Shoplifting, Frisked at Upper West Side Deli.

* Obama says kill the penny. He would say that. He hates capitalism.

* Senator Warren, not bad.

* Equal Opportunity, Our National Myth.

* Kidding on the square: another National Review blogger calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

* Gasp! Deregulation May Not Have Lowered Air Fares After All.

* The phenomenology of solitary confinement.

* Surveying self-confessed rapists.

* How to be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.

* Data-crunching the Internet Adult Film Database.

* Data-crunching the Lord of the Rings.

* The Internet has finally developed impermanence technology.

* And Iceland might ban Internet porn.

Halla Gunnarsdóttir, an adviser to the interior minister, explains the country’s anti-smut rationale to The Guardian:

“We are a progressive, liberal society when it comes to nudity, to sexual relations, so our approach is not anti-sex but anti-violence. This is about children and gender equality, not about limiting free speech…”

This is Iceland, after all. Prime Minister Jóhanna Sigurdardóttir is the first openly lesbian government head in the world. It’s already illegal to print and distribute porn within the country, and since 2010, strip clubs have been prohibited as well…