updates, links, and reviews
Well, my experiment with iTunes 11 made me go back to iTunes 10.6, a more unpleasant proposition than it should have been-initially it erased 3 months of changes, and I’d added a bunch of music and am also obsessive about my play counts, so that was a couple of hours of fiddling. Ultimately I downloaded a couple of scripts that allow manual resetting of play counts, which wasn’t perfect but was a hell of a lot faster than skipping tracks one by one, which I should have done from the beginning; would have saved me a lot of time.
Unionmade, retailer of fashions that are not union made. See, it’s an homage to the time when things were well made by people with good jobs! Or a huge slap in the face to real union labor. You choose.
Aaron Bady (wow is this guy sharp; his Batman essay was genius, and now this), Questioning Clay Shirky:
Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.
Talking in terms of "access" (instead of access to what?) allows people like Shirky to overlook the elephant in the room, which is the way this country used to provide inexpensive and high-quality education to all sorts of people who couldn’t afford to go to Yale -- people like me and my parents.
Randall Munroe: “It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles into hurricanes.”
Charles H. Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America: This book by the documentarian who made Inside Job elaborates on that film’s theme: the reason we’re in such a mess is that we decided to stop punishing criminals as long as they stole enough money. There’s very little new here about the financial crisis itself, but Ferguson’s anger is refreshing-he is deeply outraged that nobody with significant responsibility is in jail, and many instead went on to make hundreds of millions more after crashing the economy and/or joined Obama’s administration. He connects the mortgage bubble to other kinds of criminality, including money laundering, that the big banks carried out essentially with impunity, fined trivial amounts after the fact when fined at all. Though you might be better off reading another book about causes, or watching the film, he also offers a detailed account of just how far the corruption of money extends into academia, tracking the various ways in which experts have been hired by one side so that their material interests at least exert a subtle-and often not-so-subtle-distorting pull. The financial sector is the worst offender, but he points out that telecommunications, among other industries, is also badly affected, and that by owning politicians and academics our telecoms have been able to get away with delivering worse, more expensive service than anywhere else in the developed world (and we’re on a downwards trend while others are on the way up).
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power: Z., in his capacity as historian, noted that the book is a bit choppy, as if a core dissertation on Rosa Parks’ activism in causes important to black women had to be padded out for publication. That said, the core story is powerful. Rosa Parks’ history in civil rights didn’t begin on that famous bus; she was a longtime activist who had for years investigated and agitated for protection against sexual violence against black women. (The book includes several horrible descriptions of gang rapes.) When Parks triggered the bus boycott, male leaders in the civil rights movement made a conscious decision to downplay that (and take over the boycott, even though the people who coordinated the actual functioning of the boycott were largely women). The book provides chilling reminders of just how badly people will treat other people if they can and if the dominant ideology encourages it-the litany of rapes never investigated, public killings ignored, and so on is hard to read, as are the compromises the survivors made in a violent and segregated South. The “victory” at the end is a black woman in jail who kills her rapist jailer and succeeds in her self-defense claim; while that result was unimaginable before, it seems a very limited victory.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
Unionmade, retailer of fashions that are not union made. See, it’s an homage to the time when things were well made by people with good jobs! Or a huge slap in the face to real union labor. You choose.
Aaron Bady (wow is this guy sharp; his Batman essay was genius, and now this), Questioning Clay Shirky:
Why have we stopped aspiring to provide the real thing for everyone? That’s the interesting question, I think, but if we begin from the distinction between "elite" and "non-elite" institutions, it becomes easy to take for granted that "non-elite students" receiving cheap education is something other than giving up. It is important to note that when online education boosters talk about "access," they explicitly do not mean access to "education of the best sort"; they mean that because an institution like Udacity provides teaching for free, you can’t complain about its mediocrity. It’s not an elite institution, and it’s not for elite students. It just needs to be cheap.
Talking in terms of "access" (instead of access to what?) allows people like Shirky to overlook the elephant in the room, which is the way this country used to provide inexpensive and high-quality education to all sorts of people who couldn’t afford to go to Yale -- people like me and my parents.
Randall Munroe: “It makes me happy that an arm of the US government has, in some official capacity, issued an opinion on the subject of firing nuclear missiles into hurricanes.”
Charles H. Ferguson, Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals, Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America: This book by the documentarian who made Inside Job elaborates on that film’s theme: the reason we’re in such a mess is that we decided to stop punishing criminals as long as they stole enough money. There’s very little new here about the financial crisis itself, but Ferguson’s anger is refreshing-he is deeply outraged that nobody with significant responsibility is in jail, and many instead went on to make hundreds of millions more after crashing the economy and/or joined Obama’s administration. He connects the mortgage bubble to other kinds of criminality, including money laundering, that the big banks carried out essentially with impunity, fined trivial amounts after the fact when fined at all. Though you might be better off reading another book about causes, or watching the film, he also offers a detailed account of just how far the corruption of money extends into academia, tracking the various ways in which experts have been hired by one side so that their material interests at least exert a subtle-and often not-so-subtle-distorting pull. The financial sector is the worst offender, but he points out that telecommunications, among other industries, is also badly affected, and that by owning politicians and academics our telecoms have been able to get away with delivering worse, more expensive service than anywhere else in the developed world (and we’re on a downwards trend while others are on the way up).
Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power: Z., in his capacity as historian, noted that the book is a bit choppy, as if a core dissertation on Rosa Parks’ activism in causes important to black women had to be padded out for publication. That said, the core story is powerful. Rosa Parks’ history in civil rights didn’t begin on that famous bus; she was a longtime activist who had for years investigated and agitated for protection against sexual violence against black women. (The book includes several horrible descriptions of gang rapes.) When Parks triggered the bus boycott, male leaders in the civil rights movement made a conscious decision to downplay that (and take over the boycott, even though the people who coordinated the actual functioning of the boycott were largely women). The book provides chilling reminders of just how badly people will treat other people if they can and if the dominant ideology encourages it-the litany of rapes never investigated, public killings ignored, and so on is hard to read, as are the compromises the survivors made in a violent and segregated South. The “victory” at the end is a black woman in jail who kills her rapist jailer and succeeds in her self-defense claim; while that result was unimaginable before, it seems a very limited victory.
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.