Wednesday Links!

* CFP: World Science Fiction Studies.

* We apply because it is absurd: The academic job market: A Kierkegaardian perspective. Also good from Adam: Some reservations about non-violent resistance. To what are “contrarians” contrary?

* 100 Years of Sun Ra.

* Can a Pope Help Sustain Humanity and Ecology?

* How The “Trigger Warning” Took Over The Internet.

* There’s an old joke about economists: A mathematician, a statistician and an economist apply for a job. The interviewer asks, “What’s two plus two?” The mathematician says, “Four.” The statistician thinks for a second and says, “On average, four.” And the economist gets up, closes the door, turns to the interviewer and says, “What do you want it to be?”

* BREAKING: The U.S. Constitution Is Impossible to Amend. This is why we need to start over.

* BREAKING: New Report Finds Climate Change Already Having Broad Impact. This is why we need to start over.

* The end of Florida.

* “Check your privilege!” is a speech-act that intends the maintenance of anti-racist, anti-misogynist, anti-capitalist groups against the persistent threat of auto-corruption. One only says “Check your privilege!” to comrades, to those with whom you co-incline. It’s a locution that keeps political lines of communication clear from all of the fucked-up shit we bring, and can’t not bring, to our collectivities. … A simple way of putting this: One checks the privileges of one’s friends. One destroys those of one’s enemies. One does the former in the service of the latter.

* Charter Schools Gone Wild: Study Finds Widespread Fraud, Mismanagement and Waste.

* Los Angeles now spending more on Wall Street fees than on maintaining roads.

* The Silencing Of Cecily McMillan.

* Advocates Respond to White House Report on College Sexual Assault.

* Universities and researchers all over the world have a problem with Microsoft. It’s not just that the company forces expensive and dated software on customers. Using products like Microsoft’s email service Outlook is potentially in breach of the ethical contracts researchers sign when they promise to safeguard the privacy of their subjects.

* The nursery and the sitting room are part of a Mehrgenerationenhaus, literally a “multigeneration house”, which is a kindergarten, a social centre for the elderly and somewhere young families can drop in for coffee and advice. In theory, the sitting room is reserved for the over-60s, but in the practice the door to the kids’ area rarely stays closed for long.

* “With Porn Studies, there is no such ambiguity about the sheer world-making power of pornography.”

* Re-headlining the news.

* I just can’t accept that a movie starring a 72-year-old Harrison Ford is going to be called “The Ancient Fear.”

* If the Center for Teaching and Learning were supported by a Center for Teaching and Learning, then all stakeholders could join the circle of excellence.

* Obama’s pretending he cares about climate again. Vox is straight-up advocating that America invade Iran I guess.

* W. Kamau Bell and Tressie McMillan Cottom discuss Leslie Jones, blackness, and Saturday Night Live.

* Great moments in poorly thought-out pedagogy.

* Amherst College Officially Bans All Fraternities And Sororities — though friends of Facebook familiar with the place tell me that it’s not as big a deal as it sounds.

* Gasp! Conservative Money Front Is Behind Princeton’s “White Privilege” Guy.

* Teen Pregnancies Are Plunging Because Young People Are Making Responsible Sexual Decisions.

* Science reporting is abysmal, sexual difference edition.

* Disruptive innovation, Soylent Green edition.

* Abolish prom.

* A college degree is worth $831,000.

* And the future is finally here: Grilled Cheese Delivered By Parachute, Coming Soon to NYC.

Monday Night Links

* Florida develops innovative solution to problem of students unprepared for college.

* We’re all to blame for MOOCs. (Hey! Speak for yourself. I just got here.) A second chance to do the right thing. Online college course experiment reveals hidden costs.

“I get this call from San Jose State: ‘Uh, we have a problem,'” recalled Mark Ryan, superintendent of the Oakland Military Institute, a public school set up on a military model.

It turned out some of the low-income teens didn’t have computers and high-speed Internet connections at home that the online course required. Many needed personal attention to make it through. The final results aren’t in yet, but the experiment exposed some challenges to the promise of a low-cost online education. And it showed there is still a divide between technology-driven educators and the low-income, first-generation college hopefuls they are trying to reach.

To make it work, the institute had to issue laptops to students, set aside class time for them to focus on the online course, and assign teachers to make sure they stayed on task.

* Inside the no-confidence vote at NYU. CUNY Faculty Votes No Confidence in Curriculum Overhaul.

* In disaster after disaster, the fear returns that people — under stress, freed by circumstance from the bonds of authority — will turn on one another. The clear consensus is that this has no basis in reality.

* Where do greenhouse gases come from? Links continue below the graph.

* Mother Jones reports nobody has a good place to fix student debt.

* A generation of voters with no use for the GOP. Can the GOP somehow manage to throw away another chance at the Senate?

* Facts as ideology: women’s fertility edition.

* …this wealthiest of all wealthy nations has been steadily falling behind many other nations of the world. Consider just a few wake-up-call facts from a long and dreary list: The United States now ranks lowest or close to lowest among advanced “affluent” nations in connection with inequality (21st out of 21), poverty (21st out of 21), life expectancy (21st out of 21), infant mortality (21st out of 21), mental health (18th out of 20), obesity (18th out of 18), public spending on social programs as a percentage of GDP (19th out of 21), maternity leave (21st out of 21), paid annual leave (20th out of 20), the “material well-being of children” (19th out of 21), and overall environmental performance (21st out of 21).

* Comics Beat’s 16-part history of Marvelman ends with one question: who owns Marvelman?

* Sony wants to sell DVDs of Dan Harmon watching Community Season Four.

Perhaps the most intriguing news: “Sony said they’re very interested in recording me watching it as a commentary track” for the Season 4 DVD set, he said. His co-host for the evening, Rob Schrab, asked if the DVD commentary could also include a visual in the corner of the screen of Harmon’s facial expressions as he watches the season he was aced out of.

* Assange v. Google.

* Ben & Jerry’s Will Stop Using Genetically-Modified Ingredients, Company Says. Soylent Green’s apparently going to be a real thing now.

* The Today Show has confirmed that the “disabled guide” Disneyland thing is actually happening.

* And a headline that seems like it must have been generated by a fake headline generator, and yet: Update: Was Pablo Neruda Murdered By a CIA Double Agent Working for Pinochet?

Some Sunday Links

* Class warfare in the USA: Anti-unionism and the legislative agenda of the 1%.

* Sid Meier’s Colonization: Is It Offensive Enough? This link and the last via zunguzungu’s Sunday Reading.

* Limbaugh loses advertisers. Santorum loses 99% of everyone. And Romney learns that sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.

* Scenes from the class struggle in Rhet Comp.

* In a wooden warehouse in Richmond, California, the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster.

* Another apocalypse slideshow from io9.

* Looks like the Walking Dead TV show will colonize the comics.

* The New York Times tries to figure out how many people Manhattan can actually hold.

* DoJ steps in against voter suppression in Florida.

* And the flying car is just a few short months away. This time for real.

Thursday 2

* Why Dollhouse failed: an interview with Joss Whedon.

“The problems that the show encountered weren’t standalone versus mythology [episodes],” Whedon said. “Basically, the show didn’t really get off the ground because the network pretty much wanted to back away from the concept five minutes after they bought it. And then ultimately, the show itself is also kind of odd and difficult to market. I actually think they did a good job, but it’s just not a slam-dunk concept.”

(via here and here)

* Continuity: a game that combines all the fun of low-res platforming with those sliding box puzzles we had when we were kids.

* Good news from places I have lived: Cleveland has passed a transgender protection law, while NJ may vote on marriage equality next week. “Democratic officials previously said they would not put the legislation to a vote unless they had the support needed to pass it.” So it’s as good as done.

* And close enough: Hundreds of New Yorkers rally in Times Square for marriage equality.

* Bad news from places I have lived: MTV’s The Shore premieres tonight.

* Next year, residents of Denver will get to vote on whether or not the city should set up a seven-member commission for the study of UFOs and extraterrestrial sightings.

* The headline reads, “Hungry polar bears resorting to cannibalism.” (Thanks Leah. But Canada is still on notice.)

* Of course, as we all know, polar bears are just early adopters.

* Actually existing media bias: The Dallas Morning News has saved journalism by ordering its section editors to report directly to its advertising staff. Via MeFi.

* A University of Montreal study on the effects of watching pornography ran into trouble when it couldn’t find any men who didn’t watch porn. Also spotted at Pharyngula. But won’t somebody think of the children?

* Amanda Marcotte: You’ll notice that entire categories of women are being redefined as so disgusting that any man who touches them should be ashamed. First it was over 40 (cougar), then over 30 (puma), and now over 25 (cheetah), and soon it will be anyone over the age of legal consent. And those below it? Illegal. Exactly zero women will be acceptable for fucking.

* Nate Silver continues his quixotic efforts to handicap the 2012 GOP field.

* And hairy chests are back. I have come prepared.

The End of Detroit and A Short History of America

Lots of pictures of Ozymandian Detroit around this weekend, from Time to Flickr. Lots of images to choose from, but the one I went with is a R. Crumb poster linked in the MeFi thread.

Sadly the picture’s not big enough for the lettering to be read, so here’s a closeup of the fourth to last panel.

Originally that’s where the comic ended, but Crumb later went in and drew three possible answers: ecological collapse, technofuturism, and ecotopia. Right now we’re still hovering over “What’s next?”

My former students may appreciate the similarities between this static image and the Soylent Green opening titles…

Soylent Green

The Art of the Title Sequence celebrates Soylent Green‘s, which I’ve used in the classroom a few times to introduce the concept of ideology and the ways in which science fiction can comment on it. Via SF Signal.