Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘the Netherlands

Spring! Break! Forever! Links!

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* The Department of Special Collections and University Archives will host an upcoming talk by Tolkien scholar Janet Brennan Croft March 26, at 4:30 p.m. in the Raynor Memorial Libraries Beaumier Suites. Croft is the author of “Barrel Rides and She-Elves: Audience and ‘Anticipation’ in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy,” and has written on film adaptions of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works. The talk will explore Tolkien’s “Hobbit Trilogy” in regards to audience expectations, the difficulties of filming a prequel after a sequel, and issues of anticipation in relation to character development.

The death of writing – if James Joyce were alive today he’d be working for Google.

In Amsterdam, a revolt against the neoliberal university.

* Make School a Democracy.

* The persistence of inequality.

How A Traveling Consultant Helps America Hide The Homeless.

Working-Class Women at the MLA Interview.

* Checking flights now: Kim Stanley Robinson Week at Ralahine.

Using Science Fiction to Re-Envision Justice.

Arab Sci-Fi: The future is here.

‘House of Cards’ is the worst show about American politics. Ever. On the perfunctoriness of House of Cards.

* Unarmed teenager shot by police in Madison. Students march.

* Meanwhile, Milwaukee’s sheriff wants attention.

* The Unfortunate Fate of Sweet Briar’s Professors. This headline really buries the lede:

Of course, faculty members aren’t the only employees who are taking a hit. Rainville suggested that nearly a third of the college’s hourly workers are descendants of the Fletcher plantation’s original slave community. Some of the staff members have worked at Sweet Briar their entire adult lives.

* Detenuring and its discontents.

Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education.

What Obama’s ‘Student Aid Bill of Rights’ Will — and Won’t — Do. Student Loans Viewed Differently Than Other Debt, Study Finds.

* Fear of a Muslim Planet. From TNI #38: “Futures.”

* Did somebody say FUTURE!

Islamophobic Bus Ads In San Francisco Are Being Defaced With Kamala Khan.

* Finally, a technological solution to the problem of taking attendance!

LARPing Hamlet at Castle Elsinore.

* These Photos Beautifully Capture the Complex Relationship Between Mothers and Daughters. These are really amazing. Many more links after the photo.

Soraya and Tala, Yarze Lebanon 2014.

* The 1 percent’s white privilege con: Elites hold “conversations” about race, while resegregating our schools.

Austerity won’t collapse under its own contradictions. We’ll need a movement for that.

* Big Sugar vs. your teeth.

It’s a mistake to ask whether this is wealthy people defending their financial interests or wealthy people expressing their ideology, or which motivation is reallyin the driver’s seat. The triumph of modern conservatism is that it has collapsed the distinction. The interests of the wealthy are the ideology. Fossil fuels are the ideology. They’re bubbling in the same ethno-nationalist stew as anti-immigrant sentiment, hawkish foreign policy, hostility toward the social safety net, and fetishism of guns, suburbs, and small towns. It’s all one identity now. The Kochs (and their peers) are convinced that their unfettered freedom is in the best interests of the country. There’s no tension.

* What happens when Queen Elizabeth dies?

* Native language study at UWM.

Judge Says University Failed to Shield Professor From Colleagues’ Retaliation. Yeah, sure sounds like it.

* It is now twelve months to the day that I set myself the task of, for one full year, reading books only by straight, white, middle-class, Anglopone, cis male authors. During that time I read 144 books. The things I learned in my year of selective reading made me pretty glad to have persevered.

* NYU union does good work.

Ph.D. students will receive 4 percent more in total compensation for their work as teaching assistants, bringing the average annual compensation up to approximately $36,600. The agreement also guarantees yearly minimum wage increases of 2.25 to 2.50 percent through 2020. For graduate employees at NYU’s Polytechnic School of Engineering, some of whom currently make only $10 an hour, hourly wages will increase to $15 next fall and reach $20 by 2020. Those employees will also receive a $1,500 bonus for work done over the past three semesters.

* Diving into the weeds: Is University of Oklahoma frat’s racist chant protected by 1st Amendment? 5 Ways Fraternities Are Wielding Major Influence Over University Administrations. A decade of bad press hasn’t hurt fraternity membership numbers. A Brief and Recent History of Bigotry at Fraternities.

Where has all the money gone? The decline in faculty salaries at American colleges and universities over the past 40 years.

* Flexible online education can never fail, it can only be failed.

* Small Private College Shuts Down, Donates Campus to the University of Iowa.

* Mass Firings in History at Boise State.

* The eco-optimists.

The U.S. is being overrun by a wave of anti-science, anti-intellectual thinking. Has the most powerful nation on Earth lost its mind?

Florida Officials Ban The Term ‘Climate Change.’

Climate Change Is Altering Everything About The Way Water Is Provided In Salt Lake City.

* The Desertification of Mongolia. Still not done, more links below.

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* Introducing the Gawker Media SecureDrop.

* Buffy is old enough to go through that weird test they make Slayers go through when they turn 18.

White candidates with degrees from less-selective universities can expect to get a response every 9 résumés, while equally qualified black candidates need to submit 15.

* Is Scott Walker the most dangerous man in America?

* The troubled history of the foreskin.

* I’m honestly amazed the insurers were letting Harrison Ford fly small planes to begin with.

* In the U.S., a notary public does unglamorous legal drudge work. But in many Latin American countries, a notario is an ill-defined but powerful figure with broad legal authority, often someone with the connections needed to navigate bureaucracies that, while arcane, are also flexible. Unscrupulous notarios in the U.S. exploit these facts to con immigrants into believing that all it takes to finally get legal is the right person to file the paperwork.

* Emily Yoffe has another piece at Slate arguing against the current approach to sexual assault at colleges, this time framed around The Hunting Ground.

* English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet.

* Dystopia in our time: “Why Buzzfeed Is The Most Important News Organization in the World.”

* The end of cable: HBO is coming to Apple TV.

* I have altered the Expanded Universe. Pray I do not alter it further. But at least progress marches on.

* Gasp! Airbnb Is Making Things Worse for LA Renters.

* Meritocracy watch: Chelsea Clinton Absolutely Open to Running for Office.

How Reddit Became a Worse Black Hole of Violent Racism than Stormfront.

* “A simple design fluke and marketing are afoot here. When Gard accidentally increased her breast size by 150 percent, the creative team insisted it was maintained. The parent company’s marketing team found this to be a boon to breaking through the noise that would buoy their success.”

Porntopia: A trip to the Adult Video News Awards.

* Interview with a Torturer.

In 1923, Daylight Saving Time Was Actually Illegal In Some States. It’s time to make daylight saving time year-round. PFT speaks.

The salary you need to buy a home in 27 U.S. cities.

These maps show where the world’s youngest and oldest people live.

Ottawa doctors behind breakthrough multiple sclerosis study. This sounds amazing. I hope it’s true.

* Coming this October: Back in Time: The Back to the Future documentary.

* You know, like Ghostbusters, but Ph-balanced for a man.

* Scenes from the class struggle at NBC News.

Day-in, day-out, Calvin keeps running into evidence that the world isn’t built to his (and our) specifications. All humor is, in one way or another, about our resistance to that evidence. The Moral Philosophy of Calvin and Hobbes.

Men make their own brackets, but they do not make them as they please. Marx Madness. Via MarxFi.

* And they say our culture is no longer capable of producing great things.

MM-Bracket

Written by gerrycanavan

March 11, 2015 at 2:12 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Thursday Night Links!

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* [Deletes blog, deletes Twitter, unplugs phone, burns everything]

* A little bit on the nose, don’t you think? Scott Walker Strikes ‘Truth,’ ‘Human Condition’ from Wisconsin Idea. The Walker administration has now backed off the plan. The Power of the Wisconsin Idea.

Top 11 things to know about the proposed budget.

* Meet the Regents, Wisconsin, or Welcome to Our New University System Overlords.

* Ursula Heise on what happens when dystopia becomes routine.

* The FCC clears the deck on net neutrality, possibly for good.

* Questions for Harper Lee’s editor. Be suspicious.

From Ph.D. to the professorship, the market moves downward. Of the graduates who get tenure-track jobs, most end up at universities ranked lower than the ones they attended. Virtually no one moves up. Even moving from a fourth-tier Ph.D. program to a tenure-track professorship at a third-tier one is nearly unheard of.

3 Things Academic Leaders Believe About Online Education.

To portray Samus’ sudden refusal to carry out her genocide mission, the game has the player nurture and nourish life instead of ending it. The fundamental nature of Metroid’s game-design ethos is subtly changed to reflect the altered tone. Paths are no longer opened with destructive weapons; instead, progress can only be made when the player provides life-giving nourishment to a newborn whose entire family they’ve just killed. The significance is that the player cannot stand idly by while the metroid child eats; they must lead the child to the food and take part in feeding them. Understanding Metroid II.

* Frozen vs. the patriarchy.

* Trains and safety.

The FRA gave the site of Tuesday’s crash a probability of 3.1 percent — or, all things being equal, about one crash every 32 years. (Ironically, the last crash at the intersection was just over 30 years ago.)

But in Elmwood Park, New Jersey, there’s a New Jersey Transit crossingwith a predicted-collision probability of 49.6 percent — a coin flip, more or less. In total, 31 crossings in the New York area have probabilities above 10 percent, plus another 31 in Chicago.

* Ursula K. Le Guin on the future of the left. Ursula K. Le Guin on men.

* Presenting the original pitch for Game of Thrones, with unspeakably gross Arya-Jon incest plot.

* The original pitch for The Muppet Show. More links after the clip!

Why Transparent Has Lost The Trust Of The Trans Community.

* It’s time to stop letting sports team owners blackmail taxpayers for new stadiums.

* “Let’s talk about sex in English class.” Okay but let me get tenure first.

* “What Roman slave owners knew about managing staff.” Um.

As Parents Get More Choice, S.F. Schools Resegregate. But only artisanal segregation is good enough for my kids. Meanwhile, in Mississippi: A School District That Was Never Desegregated.

NYPD Has a Plan to Magically Turn Anyone It Wants Into a Felon.

* Strange Maps takes up The Man in the High Castle.

The Truth About What Went Wrong With The Third Season Of Star Trek. Roddenberry himself takes most of the blame in this telling.

The Amazing Village in The Netherlands Just for People with Dementia.

* Singlism and married privilege.

* Two takes on language and activism at Ravishly and Student Activism.

* Jonathan Chait and the Overton Window.

Yung found that, during the government audits, the number of sexual assaults reported by those schools increased by about 44 percent. But after the audits were over, the number of reports dropped back down to their previous levels. The study also found that the vast majority of participating schools frequently reported zero cases of annual off-campus sexual assaults, even though the Clery Act requires officials to make a “good faith” effort to work with local police to get that data.

* The arc of history is long, but Harvard professors are now barred from having sex with undergraduates.

* Twitter CEO admits Twitter is terrible.

* What Happens When a Prominent Male Feminist Is Accused of Rape?

* Former Teacher At Elite L.A. Girls School Arrested For Sex Crimes.

* Twilight of the fraternities.

* You had me at “sci-fi alterations of 19th century portraits.”

Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person.

* Oculus Rex.

* “My dad, the pornographer.”

* And the kids aren’t all right.

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Bask in the Warm Glow of Martin Luther King’s Dream with These Exciting Sunday Links

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* CFP: Modernism’s Child (Centre for Modernist Studies, University of Sussex, April 20, 2015).

* CFP: Obsidian Call for Submissions: Speculating on the Future: Black Imagination & the Arts.

* Martin Luther King’s other dream: disarmament.

* Our most cherished MLK Day ritual: remembering there is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr.

* 13 Words of the Year from Other Countries. Another set of possible candidates.

5. DAGOBERTDUCKTAKS, NETHERLANDS

In the Netherlands, the Van Dale dictionary group chose dagobertducktaks, “Scrooge McDuck tax,” a tax on the super rich. The “youth language” category choice wasaanmodderfakker (someone with no ambition in life, from a blend of aanmodderen, “muddle,” and motherf***er). The “lifestyle” category choice was vergeetverzoek, “forget request,” a request to a search engine that sensitive information be removed.

* For-Profit College Investor Now Owns Controlling Share of Leading Education Trade Publication. IHE’s ownership statement says that editors retain full editorial independence.

* Aaron Bady told me “Trust Us Justice: 24, Popular Culture and the Law” was a great talk forever ago, but I didn’t have time to get to it until this week. But it was indeed great, and something that will be useful in my classroom to boot.

* Comics studies is not a busman’s holiday. Great rant. This goes for science fiction studies too! It’s hard and miserable work and you should leave it all to us!

Photomediations Machine: Exploring the Anthropocene.

* Lili Loofbourow in the New York Times: “TV’s New Girls’ Club.”

Above all, promiscuous protagonism is interested in truths that are collectively produced. Its greatness stems not from a single show runner’s bleak and brilliant outlook but from a collaborative vision of art that admits a spectrum of shades. The central question driving this movement forward is no longer “How did these mad men come to be?” but rather “How did these women get so good at staying sane?”

* If anything I think Matt Reed’s concerns about the inevitable cuts to #FreeCommunityCollege don’t go far enough.

* Behold, Phase 2! That was quick.

* Free Community College Is Nothing to Celebrate, or What Piketty Means for Education.

* And from the leading light of the anti-schooling left: The hidden costs of free community college.

One of the ways we talk about the value of education is in terms of a student’s future “competitiveness.” It sounds like it should correlate directly with wages, but they’re competing against other workers like them. And from a worker’s perspective, a rising educational tide keeps wages under control for all boats. More schooling doesn’t necessarily mean better jobs, it means more competition for the same set of jobs. The so-called “skills gap” is a myth; if employers needed educated labor so badly, they would pay like it. Instead, the costs of training more productive workers have been passed to the kids who want to be them, while the profits go to employers and shareholders. The state assuming some of those costs for some of those students doesn’t solve anyone’s problems. Rather, it’s another boon for the ownership class.

Philly’s adjuncts seek to rewrite their futures.

* New talk of splitting off Madison from the rest of the UW system.

Mikalsen said the most persistent rumbling of late is that the universities would operate as a public authority, with the state playing a much reduced role in overseeing hiring practices, construction bids and other internal matters that university officials have long said could be done more efficiently and cheaply with more autonomy. The trade-off would come in reduced state aid, Mikalsen said.

* Louisiana is going to gut its state university system so Bobby Jindal’s no-hope presidential campaign has something to talk about. Unreal.

* And it sounds like UNC is next.

1970s Film: Vintage Marquette University. More links below the video!

It’s a bit of a weird way to be selling the world’s biggest sporting event—and we’re gonna build a super-cool stadium and then tear it down again because everyone knows stadiums suck—but points for honesty, at least.

* The second interesting thing about the Packers, or football, I’ve ever heard. Here of course was the first. Go Pack, times two!

Nobody Expects the Facebook Inquisition. Also from Burke: An Ethic of Care.

Perhaps that means “check your privilege” is a phrase to retire because it invites that kind of ease, a lack of awareness about what that statement hopes for and requires. If it’s not an expression of an ethic of care, trying to radar-ping the world around it to find out who else shares or might share in that ethic, and not a threat with power behind it, then what it usually leads to is the moral evacuation of a conversation and the production of a sort of performative austerity, of everyone in a community pretending to virtue they do not authentically embrace and avoiding the positive or generative use of the forms of social power they might actually have genuinely privileged access to.

* Eric Holder ends the scandal of civil asset forfeiture, at least for now.

Florida police use images of black men for target practice.

“Our policies were not violated. There is no discipline that’s forthcoming from the individuals regarding this,” Dennis said.

While the ire of environmental activists remains fixed on the Keystone XL pipeline, a potentially greater threat looms in the proposed expansion of Line 61, a pipeline running the length of Wisconsin carrying tar sands crude. The pipeline is owned by Enbridge, a $40 billion Canadian company, which has been responsible for several hundred spills in the past decade, including one in 2010 near Marshall, Mich., reportedly the largest and most expensive inland oil spill in American history.

The stark disparities of paid leave: The rich get to heal. The poor get fired.

Few New Parents Get Paid Time Off.

* “Carry bolt cutters everywhere”: life advice from Werner Herzog.

Last night “The Daily Show’s” Jessica Williams delved into a baffling Alabama law: HB 494. The law takes state funds — funds that are scarce in the Alabama justice system — to appoint lawyers for fetuses.

How Gothic Architecture Took Over the American College Campus.

Solar Is Adding Jobs 10 Times Faster Than the Overall Economy.

* “Zero Stroke Was A Mental Illness That Affected An Entire Country.”

* Love, marriage, and mental illness.

The $4 billion worth of subsidies represents a record high outlay at the very time Christie says budget shortfalls are preventing him from making actuarially required pension payments. What could explain it this incomprehensible paradox? It’s been thirty-five years and the media is simply incapable of admitting that when Republicans claim to care about deficits they are lying.

* Some bad news, y’all, overparenting doesn’t work either.

Parents investigated for neglect after letting kids walk home alone.

I’ll never punish my daughter for saying no.

* Group projects and the secretary effect.

* Making the school day longer will definitely fix it. I suppose every generation feels this way but I really feel like the 1980s and 1990s were the last good time to be a kid.

* Teach the controversy: Rate of environmental degradation puts life on Earth at risk, say scientists. Meanwhile, everything in the ocean is dying.

* But it’s not all bad news: Ron Howard recording new narration for recut of Arrested Development season four.

* Ghost stores of Wal-Mart.

The biggest downside to a Walmart opening up in your community is that after all the protests, the negotiations, and, almost inevitably, the acceptance, the retail giant might just break its lease, pack up shop, and move a mile down the road. The process starts all over again, and Walmart’s giant, hard-won original behemoth of a structure sits abandoned, looming over its increasingly frustrated neighbours.

Duke University announced it would broadcast the Muslim call to prayer from its iconic chapel, then backed down after threats of violence.

Kepler has given many gifts to humanity, but we should be careful throwing around words like “habitable” when talking about worlds 1,000 light years away, about which we only know sizes and orbits. It’s not my intention to put a damper on things, or to take the wonder and imagination out of astronomy. Science requires both imagination and creativity, but also analytical thought and respect for observational evidence. And after only 20 years of exoplanet discoveries, the observational evidence is rich, beautiful, and stands on its own. We don’t know the odds that life will arise on other worlds, but we’ve got a few tens of billions of rolls of the cosmological dice.

“What Are the Children Who Grow Up to Become Police Officers Learning in School?”: Lessons from Philadelphia’s Mandatory African American History Classes.

* Kotsko shrugged: The perpetual adolescence of the right. Along the similar lines, but thinking of ethics instead of intellectualism, I always think of David Graeber’s “Army of Altruists” from Harper’s, almost a decade-old now, on the way elites have cordoned off all meaningful work for themselves and their children alone.

Majority of U.S. public school students are in poverty. But wait! Let’s quibble about the numbers!

* Hidden laborers of the information age.

* The Cathedral of Consumption: We’re Not Living in an Algorithmic Culture So Much as a Computational Theocracy.

* Just this once, everybody lives: Netflix Renews Deal for ‘Doctor Who,’ ‘Luther,’ More BBC Series.

* Around the mid 2000s it became popular in Sweden for teenage boys to wear rubber bands around their legs on top of their jeans. The more rubber bands you had and variety in colors the more alpha you became to the other teenage boys.

* Like Uber, but for veillance. Of course the university is at the cutting edge:

We’ve got an early warning system [called Stoplight] in place on our campus that allows instructors to see what a student’s risk level is for completing a class. You don’t come in and start demonstrating what kind of a student you are. The instructor already knows that. The profile shows a red light, a green light, or a yellow light based on things like have you attempted to take the class before, what’s your overall level of performance, and do you fit any of the demographic categories related to risk. These profiles tend to follow students around, even after folks change how they approach school. The profile says they took three attempts to pass a basic math course and that suggests they’re going to be pretty shaky in advanced calculus.

* #FeministSexualPositions. (NSFW, obviously.)

* I guess I just don’t see why you’d bring your baby to work.

Top 10 Biggest Design Flaws In The U.S.S. Enterprise. I can’t believe “elevated warp nascelles perched on extended towers are super vulnerable to attack” didn’t even make the top ten.

Space, ze final frontière.

* Dave Goelz explains how to Gonzo.

* Apocalypse zen: photos of stairs in abandoned buildings.

* And I guess that settles it. Little Boy Who Claimed to Die and Visit Heaven Admits He Made It Up.

Written by gerrycanavan

January 18, 2015 at 3:23 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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