Browndom

facebook.com/browndorfm

Shared posts

23 Dec 18:02

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

by Shep McAllister, Commerce Team

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

The Canon EOS SL1 won a lot of fans for packing the venerable T4i into a smaller package, and now you can get it for an appropriately shrunk-down price. Amazon has the body only today for a mere $369, by far the lowest price ever. And if you want two kit lenses and a few other accessories, Target will sell you a bundle for essentially $500 after you factor in a $150 gift card. Both deals are great, and neither will last very long.

Canon EOS Rebel SL1 (Body Only) | $369

Canon EOS Rebel SL1 (Two Kit Lenses + Accessories) | $650 + $150 Target Gift Card

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

Admit it, there have been plenty of times you would pay $25 for an extra charge on your smartphone. Luckily, Best Buy today is selling LifeCHARGE battery cases for the Galaxy S4, Galaxy SIII, iPhone 5/5s, and iPhone 4/4s today for $25 a pop.

LifeCHARGE Battery Cases | $25

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

The Logitech K400 wireless keyboard/trackpad combo has everything you need to control your home theater PC from a distance. It's a no-brainer at $20.

Logitech K400 Keyboard/Trackpad | $20

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

If you're sick of constantly resetting your cheap router, it's a great time to upgrade to the venerable ASUS N66W router. $115 is near the lowest price ever listed for this Wirecutter recommendation.

ASUS RT-N66W Router | $115

Tiny DSLR at a Tiny Price, Battery Cases, Apps Galore [Deals]

Give yourself the gift of a clean mouth with $10 off the Sonicare toothbrush of your choice. Discount taken at checkout.

$10 Off A Sonicare Toothbrush

Apps

iOS

Android

Phones, Tablets, and Accessories

External Storage

Computers, Networking and Accessories

Displays

Computer Parts and Cases

Tools and DIY

Home Theater and Audio

TVs and Projectors

Media Players

Accessories, Speakers, and Headphones

Kitchen and Household

Photography

Entertainment

Movies & TV

Games

Toys

Grab Bag

This post is brought to you by the Commerce Team, a dedicated group of deal hunters and product enthusiasts. We operate independently of Editorial to bring you the best bargains every day, share our favorite products with you, and ask you about yours. When you buy something we recommend, we may also get a small share of the sale. We welcome your questions and want your feedback.

Follow us for the best deals on the internet, curated for @lifehacker readers.

— Lifehacker Deals (@LifehackerDeals) December 10, 2013

Get in touch with me on Twitter or by emailing shep@gawker.

— Shep McAllister (@shepmcallister) December 10, 2013

15 Sep 17:26

A Boy Named Humiliation: Some Wacky, Cruel, and Bizarre Puritan Names

by Joseph Norwood

Puritanism has its roots in the late sixteenth century, after Henry VIII broke ties with the Catholic Church. The Puritans believed that reforms had not gone far enough and advocated for a church entirely divorced from Catholic ceremonies. For over a century, Puritans argued amongst themselves, schismed, predicted the end of the world, and still found time to fight the English Civil War and start colonies in the Northeastern United States.

Perhaps their greatest gift to history, however, is their wonderfully strange taste in names. A wide variety of Hebrew names came into common usage beginning in 1560, when the first readily accessible English Bible was published. But by the late 16th century many Puritan communities in Southern Britain saw common names as too worldly, and opted instead to name children after virtues or with religious slogans as a way of setting the community apart from non-Puritan neighbors. Often, Puritan parents chose names that served to remind the child about sin and pain.

Many Puritan names started to die out after 1662, when the newly restored monarch, Charles II, introduced new laws that cracked down on nonconformist religions and consolidated the power of the Anglican Church. Despite this, some of the names have remained in common use in Anglophone countries.

I’ve collected some of the best, worst, and strangest names the English Puritans came up with. Most of these are courtesy of the 1888 book by Charles Bardsley, Curiosities of Puritan Nomenclature (seen here on the Public Domain Review’s website), which includes Parish records with details about some of the people who had these names. To show that some of these names are still in use, I've referred to 2012 statistics on names in the UK from the Guardian's interactive chart of baby names.

20 Puritan Names That Are Utterly Strange

  1. Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar. Son of Dancell-Dallphebo-Mark-Anthony-Gallery-Cesar, born 1676.
  2. Praise-God. Full name, Praise-God Barebone. The Barebones were a rich source of crazy names. This one was a leather-worker, member of a particularly odd Puritan group and an MP. He gave his name to the Barebones Parliament, which ruled Britain in 1653.
  3. If-Christ-had-not-died-for-thee-thou-hadst-been-damned. Praise-God's son, he made a name for himself as an economist. But, for some inexplicable reason, he decided to go by the name Nicolas Barbon.
  4. Fear-God. Also a Barebone.
  5. Job-raked-out-of-the-ashes
  6. Has-descendents
  7. Wrestling
  8. Fight-the-good-fight-of-faith
  9. Fly-fornication
  10. Jesus-Christ-came-into-the-world- to-save. Brother of "Damned Barebone". I can only imagine this name shortened to "Save."
  11. Thanks
  12. What-God-will
  13. Joy-in-sorrow. A name attached to many stories of difficult births.
  14. Remember
  15. Fear-not. His/her surname was "Helly", born 1589.
  16. Experience
  17. Anger
  18. Abuse-not
  19. Die-Well. A brother of Farewell Sykes, who died in 1865. We can assume they had rather pessimistic parents.
  20. Continent. Continent Walker was born in 1594 in Sussex.

12 of the Cruelest Puritan Names (meant to remind children of the pain of the world)

  1. Humiliation. Humiliation Hynde had two sons in the 1620s; he called them both Humiliation Hynde.
  2. Fly-debate
  3. No-merit. NoMerit Vynall was born in Warbleton in Sussex, a fount of beautiful names.
  4. Helpless
  5. Reformation
  6. Abstinence
  7. More-triale
  8. Handmaid
  9. Obedience
  10. Forsaken
  11. Sorry-for-sin. Sorry-for-sin Coupard was another resident of Warbleton.
  12. Lament

12 Strangely Pleasant Puritan Names

  1. Silence
  2. Creedence
  3. Dust
  4. Diffidence
  5. Desire. In the UK, seven babies were named this in 2012.
  6. Make-peace. This name was in use at least until 1863; see William Makepeace Thackeray, the novelist.
  7. Ashes
  8. Tace. It's another word for silence, and is of course a female name.
  9. Placidia
  10. Kill-sin. Kill-sin Pimple did Jury service in the 1650s.
  11. Freegift
  12. Vanity

10 of the Sweetest Puritan Names

  1. Jolly
  2. Liberty. 129 were born in the UK in 2012.
  3. Tenacious
  4. Happy
  5. Felicity. 302 babies got this name in 2012.
  6. Hope. 416 babies took this name in 2012.
  7. Prudence. 13 babies got this name in 2012.
  8. Amity. 5 babies got this name in 2012.
  9. Verity. 131 babies were born with this name in 2012.
  10. Trinity. 69 Trinities were born in 2012. The name saw a burst in popularity in 1999—due to a particular film, I suppose.

Despite their eccentricities, the Puritans did leave us some beautifully resonant names. Names like Verity, Felicity, and Hope more than make up for the Humiliations, Die-wells, and Kill-sins.

Kill-sin Pimple probably wouldn't have agreed. But, to be fair, his first name was only half of his problem.

31 Aug 01:36

A MUST WATCH: The Dream Defenders will not be silenced!...



A MUST WATCH: The Dream Defenders will not be silenced! @PhilUnchained goes in!

(For the Deaf D/HH folks, I’ve asked the Dream Defenders for a text version of the speech; I’m awaiting a response from them, bear with me.)

H/T Clare Cramer

21 Jul 22:29

The Wealth of Nations: The U.S. is No. 1 in Inequality

by Martin Hart-Landsberg, PhD
Wealth data is not easy to get.  Still for three years now, Credit Suisse Research Institute has published an annual Global Wealth Databook which attempts to estimate global wealth holdings.  The most recent issue includes data covering 2012.  According to Credit Suisse, “The aim of the Credit Suisse Global Wealth project is to provide the [...]
17 Jul 23:22

A Suffragette Describes What It Felt Like to Be Force-Fed

by Rebecca Onion

The Vault is Slate's history blog. Like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @slatevault, and find us on Tumblr. Find out more about what this space is all about here.

In a 1913 article, a portion of which is reprinted below, Sylvia Pankhurst, the British suffragette, describes the experience of being force-fed in prison. Like the rapper, actor, and activist Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def), who subjected himself to force-feeding last week in order to draw attention to the experiences of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Pankhurst used a first-person description of the procedure to show its brutality.

Pankhurst, whose mother Emmeline and sister Christabel were also prominent suffragettes, went to jail multiple times in 1913 alone, trying to draw attention to her cause. In 2005, the British government released documents that showed how careful those in charge of her case were to prevent her from dying in prison, as they were aware of her power as a political symbol.

One of these documents shows that a physician was sent to the prison to assess the procedure and returned with a recommendation that its use be discontinued in Pankhurst’s case. He blamed her own behavior for her pain: 

I wish it be understood that it is not the actual feeding which is endangering her but the mental excitement which she works herself into before during and after each feed, together with the strenuous resistance she always offers.

The British press covered the issue of force-feeding extensively. To satisfy the public's curiosity, papers such as the Illustrated London News commissioned artists to create imagined representations of what the procedure might look like (as in the image that accompanies this post).

The version of Pankhurst’s story that appears below was printed in McClure’s magazine, an American literary and current-events periodical of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Manchester Guardian printed an earlier, briefer version of Pankhurst’s account on March 26, 1913.

This article was brought to my attention by the editors of the new project The Browser Review, a site that resurrects and reprints news stories from 100 years ago.

FORCIBLY FED: THE STORY OF MY FOUR WEEKS IN HOLLOWAY GAOL

by E. Sylvia Pankhurst

As published in McClure's magazine, August 1913, pp 87-93. This is an excerpt. The entire piece may be found here.

… About half past nine that first morning, the doctor came to me and saw the breakfast tea and bread and butter lying untouched. He pointed to it and said: "Will you not reconsider?" I answered, "No". Then he felt my pulse and sounded my heart, and went away. 

At twelve o'clock a wardress brought me a chop, some potatoes and cabbage, and some milk pudding. At five came supper—bread, butter, an egg, and a pint of milk. I left them all untasted, and sat reading the Bible hour after hour. I had nothing else to do. 

So two days passed. I felt constantly a little hungry, but never for one moment did I wish to eat a morsel. I was very cold—partly, I suppose, from want of food, partly because the temperature of the cell was very low, the hot water pipe—the only means of heating—having little warmth in it. I sat with my feet on the hot-water pipe, wearing a woollen dress, a thick knitted woollen sweater, a long cloth coat, and with thick woollen gloves on my hands; but still I was cold. 

On the morning of the third day I was taken out into the corridor to be weighed, and some time afterwards the two doctors came into my cell to sound my heart again. They said: "Will you eat your food?" And—when I said, "No",—"Then we have only one alternative—to feed by force."

They went. I was trembling with agitation, feverish with fear and horror, determined to fight with all my strength and to prevent by some means this outrage of forcible feeding. I did not know what to do. Ideas flashed through my mind, but none seemed of any use. 

I gathered together in a little clothes basket my walking-shoes, the prison brush and comb and other things, and put them beside me, where I stood under the window, with my back to the wall. 

I thought that I would throw these things at the doctors if they dared to enter my cell to torture me. But, when the door opened, six women officers appeared, and I had not the heart to throw things at them, though I struck one of them slightly as they all seized me at once. 

I struggled as hard as I could, but they were six and each one of them much bigger and stronger than I. They soon had me on the bed and firmly held down by the shoulders, the arms, the knees, and the ankles.

Then the doctors came stealing in behind. Some one seized me by the head and thrust a sheet under my chin. I felt a man's hands trying to force my mouth open. I set my teeth and tightened my lips over them with all my strength. My breath was coming so quickly that I felt as if I should suffocate. I felt his fingers trying to press my lips apart,—getting inside,—and I felt them and a steel gag running around my gums and feeling for gaps in my teeth. 

I felt I should go mad; I felt like a poor wild thing caught in a steel trap. I was tugging at my head to get it free. There were two of them holding it. There were two of them wrenching at my mouth. My breath was coming faster and with a sort of low scream that was getting louder. I heard them talking: "Here is a gap." 

"No; here is a better one—this long gap here." 

Then I felt a steel instrument pressing against my gums, cutting into the flesh, forcing its way in. Then it gradually prised my jaws apart as they turned a screw. It felt like having my teeth drawn; but I resisted—I resisted. I held my poor bleeding gums down on the steel with all my strength. Soon they were trying to force the india-rubber tube down my throat. 

I was struggling wildly, trying to tighten the muscles and to keep my throat closed up. They got the tube down, I suppose, though I was unconscious of anything but a mad revolt of struggling, for at last I heard them say, "That's all"; and I vomited as the tube came up. 

They left me on the bed exhausted, gasping for breath and sobbing convulsively. The same thing happened in the evening; but I was too tired to fight so long. 

Day after day, morning and evening, came the same struggle. My mouth got more and more hurt; my gums, where they prised them open, were always bleeding, and other parts of my mouth got pinched and bruised. 

Often I had a wild longing to scream, and after they had gone I used to cry terribly with uncontrollable noisy sobs; and sometimes I heard myself, as if it were some one else, saying things over and over again in a strange, high voice. 

Sometimes—but not often; I was generally too much agitated by then — I felt the tube go right down into the stomach. It was a sickening sensation. Once, when the tube had seemed to hurt my chest as it was being withdrawn, there was a sense of oppression there all the evening after, and as I was going to bed I fainted twice. My shoulders and back ached very much during the night after the first day's forcible feeding, and often afterwards.

But infinitely worse than any pain was the sense of degradation, the sense that the very fight that one made against the repeated outrage was shattering one's nerves and breaking down one's self-control. 

Added to this was the growing unhappy realization that those other human beings, by whom one was tortured, were playing their parts under compulsion and fear of dismissal, that they came to this task with loathing of it and with pity for their victim, and that many of them understood and sympathised with the fight the victim made. 

17 Jul 23:17

Well, we’re about to reach an interesting point in our culture. Searches for ‘library’ versus ‘lol’.

by andrew hanelly

Library LOL Chart

Don’t read too much into it though. Data can be misleading. Oh what’s that, you weren’t reading anyway?

17 Jul 23:16

dweeq: Hidding again. Not really good at hiding are you,...



dweeq:

Hidding again. Not really good at hiding are you, Rupert?

16 Jul 00:57

"Kirk to Enterprise, send down the extra strong Tribble...



"Kirk to Enterprise, send down the extra strong Tribble repellent!" by R D L on Flickr.

05 Jul 17:24

Malcolm X at a meeting in Paris, November 23, 1964

White interviewer: If it was our white ancestors who bought you and enslaved you, we are their children. We are the new generation. Why don't you call us your brothers?
Malcolm X: A man has to act like a brother before you can call him a brother. You made a very good point, really, that needs some clarification. If you are the son of the man who had a wealthy estate and you inherit your father's estate, you have to pay off the debts that your father incurred before he died. The only reason that the present generation of white Americans are in the position of economic strength that they are is because their fathers worked our fathers for over 400 years with no pay. For over 400 years we worked for nothing. We were sold from plantation to plantation like you sell a horse, or a cow, or a chicken, or a bushel of wheat. It was your fathers who did it to our fathers, and all of that money that piled up from the sale of my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother is what gives the present generation of American whites [the ability] to walk around the earth with their chest out; you know, like they have some kind of economic ingenuity. Your father isn't here to pay his debts. My father isn't here to collect. But I'm here to collect and you're here to pay.
16 Jun 19:13

Soon, a bunch of expired French food will suddenly be OK to eat

by Rachel Feltman
You'd better hope that's fruit on the bottom.

France today announced its plan to cut food waste, and one of it targets is sell-by dates found on packages, which tend to be overly cautious and poorly communicated.

The move by Food and Agriculture Minister Guillaume Garot is part of in an effort to comply with a European Union initiative to halve food waste by 2025. France currently throws away an average of 20 kilograms of food each year per capita.

A key problem with sell-by dates is that consumers often don’t understand what they mean. A 2012 paper in Food Engineering & Ingredients explains what’s flawed about the EU’s policies for stamping food with ‘use by’ dates for safety purposes and ‘best before’ dates for quality:

There is survey evidence that many consumers do not understand the difference between ‘use by’ and ‘best before’ dates. This has sometimes been exacerbated by the use of other date labels, such as ‘display until’ and ‘sell by’, which have no status in law and are mainly used by retailers for stock control purposes.

This confusion, the paper says, could lead to consumers eating foods that have become unsafe. But it’s more likely to lead consumers to throw out food that’s still edible.

A good example of a commonly mislabeled food is yogurt: Because it has a low pH and usually uses pasteurized milk as a base, yogurt is extremely unlikely to cause foodborne disease for some time past its expiration date, even when it’s past peak quality in terms of texture and taste. (A bulging package and visible mold are signs of yogurt spoilage—but absent them it’s generally safe to eat and usually still tasty up to 10 days after its sell-by date.)

But a 2010 retail survey by the anti-food-waste non-profit Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) showed that 75% of yogurt in the EU carried a ‘use by’ date, which many consumers took to mean that the product would be unsafe to eat after only a week or two on the shelves. 

A Swedish study published in 2011 in The Journal of Cleaner Production found that, during a week-long period of measuring food waste, participants attributed 11.5% of their collective 100 kilograms of waste to tossing out products that were past their ‘best before’ date. A good portion of the products were probably quite edible, according to the study, given that 1) the safety of different foods after their expiration dates varies greatly and 2) there was a separate category for food thrown away after visible spoilage.

The French government is likely to tweak labeling regulations so that safety periods more accurately reflect a product’s real shelf-life. For example, ‘best before’ will be replaced with ‘preferably to be consumed before.’ After that, hopefully consumers can figure it out themselves.

In the coming months, Garot also hopes to press companies into offering smaller serving sizes in stores at a lower cost (to discourage customers from buying in bulk when they don’t need to). He also wants to make it easier for stores and restaurants to give away food they can no longer sell via government-run collection programs.


16 Jun 18:59

Here are some of the most expensive pieces of paper in the world

by Lily Kuo
stamps philately

Postage stamps have some of the hallmarks of any great investment craze. They’re tangible assets for those concerned about global economic stability. They’re rare. And the Chinese government has been promoting its citizens’ interest in them.

By all available indicators, the value of stamps is surging accordingly. Investment-grade stamps return between 10% and 12% annually according to Nick Salter, a stamp investment specialist who runs the website Philatelic Investor. Britain’s Stanley Gibbons, the world’s oldest rare stamp dealer, is starting an investment fund for rare British stamps, which the firm says will return 10% a year. On average, the GB250 Rare Stamp Index has risen 13.9% a year (in compound annual growth) over the past decade. Since the financial crisis, the return has been even better—and, as you can see from the chart below, has outperformed other major investments since 1995.

​

The index tracks the assessed value of premium stamps held by Stanley Gibbons. (The stated performance is worth taking with a grain of salt, since it represents the value as assessed by the company, which has a commercial interest in promoting stamps as a lucrative investment.)

Postage collecting has been around since the first postage was printed in the mid-1800s. Some believe the growth in stamp investing is driven in part by Westerners born after World War II who studied philately in school and are now collecting stamps in their retirement. Today, there are an estimated 50 million stamp collectors worldwide.

Hedge funds and wealth managers are also looking to stamps as an alternative asset that doesn’t follow stock market trends. That’s partly because collectors tend to hold onto them, and their buying and selling isn’t triggered by changes in the economy. In China, investors with limited access to equity markets are pouring money into tangible assets like stamps, art and tea. (Also, in 2000, the Chinese government started promoting stamp collecting to encourage interest in Chinese history.)

Some of the most valuable stamps traded today are from India, China and Europe. One particularly valuable stamp: The Swedish Treskilling Yellow, a tiny three-shilling stamp accidentally printed in yellow, which sold for £1.6 million ($2.1 million) in 2010.

selection-of-stamps-2

To meet rising demand from emerging markets, Stanley Gibbons has opened offices in Brazil, Singapore and Hong Kong this year. The firm says Asian investors account for about 5% of stamp sales in terms of volume but 18% in value (paywall).

The market isn’t without risks. A speculative stamp bubble burst in the 1970s, when prices fell as much as 50%. It took stamps two decades to recover. Rare stamps aren’t guaranteed to increase in value, especially if they fail to attract more young philatelists. The market for Chinese stamps looks particularly dodgy. The value of Chinese stamps issued after 1949 increased by 10- to 30-fold in 2009 and then plummeted in 2011 before stabilizing last summer, according to Louis Mangin, director of stamp auctioneer Zurich Asia.


13 Jun 00:34

Kitty Union Demands Food Dish Be Left Out All Day Cat Union...



Kitty Union Demands Food Dish Be Left Out All Day

Cat Union Local 402 is threatening to strike unless their demand that the food dish be left our during the day is met.

“Enough of the scheduled feedings,” said cat union spokesperson, Colin Hubbard. “These cats work hard, they play hard, they nap hard, and they deserve to eat whenever they get hungry, not just when ‘The Man’ deems it okay.”

Hubbard said the kitties are fully prepared the strike and that the Hamsters Union may join them. The hamsters won a similar fight earlier this year, and their food is now dispensed throughout the day via a canister affixed to the side of their cage.

SEE ALSO: Canine Construction Workers’ Union Chides Layoffs

Via paulina_araujo.

11 Jun 16:41

The Life Expectancy of People with Down Syndrome

by Lisa Wade, PhD

This post originally appeared in 2010.

Most of us familiar with Down‘s Syndrome know that it brings characteristic facial features and delayed or impaired cognitive development. People with Down, however, are also more vulnerable than the general population to diabetes, leukemia, and infectious and autoimmune disease, and about 40% are born with heart defects.

For most of history, then, the life expectancy of people with Down was very low.  But, with advances in knowledge and access to health care, life expectancy has risen dramatically… especially for white people:

The Centers for Disease Control explain that severity of Down does not vary by race, so most likely the cause of the gap in life expectancy is differences in the quantity and quality of health care.

Possibilities include differences in factors that may be associated with improved health in the general population such as socioeconomic status, education, community support, medical or surgical treatment of serious complications, or access to, use of, or quality of preventative health care.

This is just one striking example of the wide racial gap in health outcomes and access to care.  We see data with similar patterns most everywhere we look.  As examples, pre-term births, cancer diagnosis and treatment, and likelihood of living near a toxic release facility.

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, via Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

11 Jun 15:00

Sleeping German banker accidentally transfers €222,222,222.22

by Jake Maxwell Watts
SleepingonDesk

At least he didn’t fall asleep on the “9″ key.

A German labor court ruled on Monday that a bank supervisor was unfairly dismissed for failing to notice that one of her employees had made a multi-million euro mistake on a transaction. The employee had fallen asleep with his finger on his keyboard while pressing the number two, so instead of transferring €62.40 from a retiree’s bank account, he withdrew €222,222,222.22 ($2.95 million) instead.

Fortunately for the anonymous retiree, the transaction was spotted by another colleague and reversed. A court in Hesse, Germany, ruled that the supervisor should have been reprimanded, not fired, as her mistake was genuine and she had also checked 811 other documents that day.


06 Jun 14:38

Analyzing Authority @ the ACRL Conference

by Maura Smale

On the last morning of my last day at the ACRL Conference I tweeted out a quick observation:

Would be interesting to text mine #acrl2013 tweets for the word “authority” — seems to be coming up in lots of contexts/sessions.

— Maura Smale (@mauraweb) April 13, 2013

I got a couple of retweets and even started up a Twitter conversation with @nancyeadams, who shared a preprint of an article she’s written that discusses authority (among other topics), which I’m looking forward to reading this summer. But then it was time to head home.

I’ve never done any textmining before, so I tried to dip my toe in the pool by using Storify to pull together tweets that included the word “authority” and the hashtag #acrl2013. But I was tired after the conference and somewhat impatient. I couldn’t get Storify to simultaneously display tweets with the other hashtag (#acrl13) I saw being used occasionally, so I gave up pretty quickly; it also seemed like Storify wasn’t pulling in every single tweet from Twitter. I tried using Zach Coble’s fascinating ACRL Conference social media archive, but I couldn’t manipulate the tweet text all at once. I was also worried that as the conference receded into the past, tweets would become more difficult to find. So I went for the bash-it-with-a-rock strategy: I did a search in Twitter for each of the two hashtags, then I cut and pasted all of the tweets into a text file.

And there the text file sat until Memorial Day weekend, when the semester had ended and I finally had a chance to get back to it. I should stress that this is (still) a fairly basic analysis — I’ve gone through the text of tweets from the beginning of the conference to the end to find all instances of the word “authority” to see whether anything particularly interesting stood out. I’m certain that there are better tools to use for this task, but I’m (still) impatient so I’m plowing ahead with my rocks. (If you’ve used any tools that seem like they’d be useful in this context, please let me know in the comments!)

So, what did I find? I pulled 8,393 tweets (including retweets) with the hashtags #acrl2013 and #acrl13 dating from April 3 through April 16 at around 10:30pm. There were 60 occurrences of the word “authority” in the tweets I pulled.

Following #qacrlauthority for “Questioning Authority” #infolit session at #acrl2013 with @edrabinski @barnlib and @piebrarian

— Roxanne Shirazi (@RoxanneShirazi) April 11, 2013

Some of the patterns are easy enough to see and explain. First thing Thursday morning was the panel session “Questioning Authority: Standard Three and the Critical Classroom” with Jenna Freedman, Emily Drabinski, and Lia Friedman. This session had its own hashtag — #qacrlauthority — which made the tweets even easier to spot (and which I really appreciated since the wicked weather made me miss the session). There were 41 occurrences of the word “authority” in the tweets and retweets from this session. Laura O’Brien created a Storify of the panel which looks to have captured the session well. As librarians we should examine the authority embedded in controlled vocabularies, sources, and other library systems we use, and consider the ways we can empower students as authorities.

#qacrlauthority allow students to become the authority as a powerful pedagogical tool. #acrl2013

— Barbara Rockenbach (@Wilderbach) April 11, 2013

Chronologically, the next mention of authority was a tweet from Alison Head’s invited paper on Project Information Literacy, a multi-year, multi-institution study of college students’ information seeking and use. They have a nifty infographic created from their data on how college students seek information.

#acrl2013 Alison Head: Your speciality comes with an “information responsibility” to be an authority. That authority lets you enact change.

— Jessica Critten (@JessicaCritten) April 11, 2013

I missed that presentation (and haven’t read the paper yet) so I can’t offer any extra context around this tweet. But it’s an interesting comparison to the tweets from the Questioning Authority session, especially this one:

#acrl2013 #qacrlauthority Lia Friedman deconstructing the notion of authority, even her own authority on this topic.

— Barbara Rockenbach (@Wilderbach) April 11, 2013

And in comparison to Henry Rollins’ mention of authority in his keynote (there were 5 tweets that referred to the thematic links he drew between Thomas Jefferson and punk rock):

Henry Rollins: “I learned from Joe Strummer what I should’ve learned from Thomas Jefferson – question all authority” #acrl2013

— Zach Coble (@coblezc) April 11, 2013

And in comparison to the three tweets from the Feminist Pedagogy panel session on Sunday morning, especially:

#acrl13femped –themes in fem pedagogy: privileging student voice, transforming student/teacher authority and empowerment. #acrl2013

— lia friedman (@piebrarian) April 13, 2013

Taken together, all of these tweets seem to point to a tension between librarians (and libraries) and our patrons, especially students. We have authority in the information realm, authority conferred by education, by experience, by knowledge. Is there a down side to having that authority? Can looking for ways to enable students and patrons to seize some of that authority enhance their learning? And are there reasons not to share or transfer that authority?

A couple of tweets from the libraries and publishing discussion at THATCamp ACRL hinted at the relationship between authority and prestige, a relationship which seems to be growing increasingly fraught as scholarly communications continue to shift and change.

We are the final authority in determining if articles are useful to us. Not the publisher. Not the prestigious journal name. #ACRL2013

— Chealsye Bowley (@chealsye) April 12, 2013

Undergraduate research & authority re: publishing: Prestige? Branding? What if peer reviewed? Is faculty work devalued? #thatcamp #acrl2013

— Maura Smale (@mauraweb) April 12, 2013

Finally, three tweets discussed the nature of authority in our own library workplaces. Two were from the session “Think Like A Startup: Creating a Culture of Innovation, Inspiration, and Entrepreneurialism,” including one from my fellow ACRLogger Laura Braunstein:

if you aren’t @brianmathews & don’t have authority to launch/mentor internal startups – how to motivate colleagues from the side? #acrl2013

— Laura Braunstein (@laurabrarian) April 13, 2013

Another seems to have been from the session “Curb Your Enthusiasm? Essential Guidance for Newbie Academic Librarians,” and pairs well with Laura’s tweet above:

Are we arguing because we disagree, or we’re friends, or to exert authority, or because boss is boss? #acrl2013 #acrlnoob

— David Runyon (@dclr42) April 13, 2013

I’ve found it interesting to see the various points of the conference where the topic of authority was discussed and considered. I confess that I’m not a big fan of the word authority. When I teach students about evaluating information I always use the term expertise, and in writing this post it’s been easy to see why: in looking through these tweets I’m struck by the underlying theme of power. Thinking on this more drove me to seek out some definitions. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary lists this as the first definition of authority:

an individual cited or appealed to as an expert

and this as the second:

power to influence or command thought, opinion, or behavior

which for me comes uncomfortably close to authoritarian:

1. of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority
2. of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people

This as opposed to the more egalitarian nature of the term expertise, from expert:

having, involving, or displaying special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience

As librarians we aim to increase access to information, to share it, and ultimately to promote expertise among our patrons and students. The words we use when we describe our roles and relationships — both within and outside of the library — matter. When we use the term authority, is it possible to get away from power? And do we want to? After all, power can be used for good as well as for ill. Do we lose anything by shifting our use to expertise instead of authority?

06 Jun 14:26

Information literacy: Standards, skills, and virtues

by Lane Wilkinson

Do you remember when the dot-com bubble burst? How about that time Elián González lost at hide and seek? Or when the Supreme Court gave George Bush the presidency? Remember the premiere of Survivor and how much you hated the dude with the beard? Do you remember when iMacs looked like fishtanks? Did you know that Destiny’s Child was once a quartet? If you do remember any 0f this stuff then good for you! Now you can name a half dozen things that have happened since the ACRL Information Literacy Standards were last changed.

That’s right.

The ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards–the ones that start with “The information literate student…blah blah blah” and then get broken into 22 performance indicators and 87 distinct outcomes–were formally approved on January 18, 2000. Over 13 years ago. For a profession that prides itself on its web-savvy, it seems a bit odd that the document which Steven Bell just described as “one of, if not the most essential document, related to the emergence of information literacy as a recognized learning outcome at many institutions of higher education” harkens back to a time when the most popular method of accessing the Internet involved AOL 5.0 and a dial-up connection.

aol50

Thankfully, the ACRL is taking steps to remedy this situation by creating a task force dedicated to writing new information literacy competency standards for higher education. Here’s the charge:

Update the Information literacy competency standards for higher education so that they reflect the current thinking on such things as the creation and dissemination of knowledge, the changing global higher education and learning environment, the shift from information literacy to information fluency, and the expanding definition of information literacy…

I won’t go into all of the messy details about why these standards need to be retired but it suffices to say that at 13 years old they probably need to be revisited. If you want more specific gripes and recommendations regarding the current IL standards, check out the recommendations from last year’s review task force.

Oh yeah…did I mention that I’m on the task force? Yeah…I have no idea why, but I was asked to help write new information literacy standards for the ACRL. The task force has only just started working, so there isn’t much to report yet, but over the next year I plan on sharing what I can here on the blog. And what better way to start than to explain my general take on information literacy and the future of the ACRL standards?

Information literacy as skill

Consider the current standards, which are modeled on the ALA’s 1989 four-part definition of IL as a set of abilities requiring individuals to “recognize when information is needed and have the ability to locate, evaluate, and use effectively the needed information.” The ACRL standards are monomorphic with the ALA definition: to meet Standard One is to “recognize when information is needed”, to meet Standard Two is to “have the ability to locate…the needed information”, and so on, with the fifth standard standing on its own as an ethical and legal consideration. Within the five overarching standards, we see a further division explicitly based along the lines of Bloom’s Taxonomy and the concept of higher- and lower-order cognitive skills. So, the idea is that the information literate student can fulfill the five standards by demonstrating the ability to carry out certain tasks: II.2.b: “Identifies keywords…”, II.4.c: “Repeats the search using a revised strategy…”, III.1.a: “Reads the text and selects the main ideas”, and so on 87 times. In a nutshell, the current ACRL Standards for IL are based entirely on the notion of information literacy skills.

Now, a skill is simply a “learned capacity or ability” to perform some action, and there’s nothing wrong with that. We need skills. With respect to the topic at hand, all of the skills listed in the current ACRL standards are valuable abilities to have. And this focus on skills or learned abilities is unquestionably the paradigmatic approach to information literacy in librarianship. Which sort of makes sense. Skills are relatively straightforward to teach. Skill-based instruction admits of a wide variety of pedagogical tactics and methodologies. Skills are easily measured and assessed. They are easy to categorize and they create nice hierarchies if needed, and we all know how much librarians love to categorize.

Image via taildom.com

Image via taildom.com

The problem with skills

Yet, for as clear-cut and intuitive a skills-based approach to information literacy may be, consider what it really means to have a capacity to act. For example, I have some HTML skills, yet I’m writing this post in the “Visual” editor, rather than the HTML editor. I also have the ability to drive a car, yet I often walk to work. I can play the harmonica fairly well, but I don’t carry one with me. And even though I have the ability to brew my own beer, I’m still going to buy a sixer at the gas station every time. The problem with skills is that even when we have them, we do not always or reliably use them. Importantly, when we choose not to  apply a skill, that doesn’t mean we don’t have it. A capacity to act is just that: a capacity. It is not a disposition to act.  And so it goes for information literacy skills. We can teach students how to master information literacy skills, but that is a separate issue from getting them to actually employ those skills. And that’s where I see fertile ground for a new conception for the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards. I’ll call this new conception a virtue approach to information literacy.

Intellectual virtues

I should probably mention at this point that I’m really interested in libraries and epistemology. In particular, I’m interested in advocating for several very specific epistemological stances for librarianship. For example, I’m an externalist and, specifically, a reliabilist. This dovetails with my commitment to analytic social epistemology and the importance of testimonial knowledge. Wrapped up in all of this is another commitment to what is commonly known as virtue epistemology* (specifically of the sort advocated by Ernetst Sosa (1980, 2009)). And it’s this virtue epistemology that I want to briefly describe.

The basic idea behind virtue epistemology is that intellectual virtues play a key role in how we acquire knowledge. The reliabilist type of virtue epistemology I follow holds (roughly) that a true belief becomes knowledge through the exercise of our intellectual virtues and that what makes a particular intellectual trait a virtue is its reliability. At the heart of virtue epistemology is this concept of an intellectual virtue. As John Greco describes, intellectual virtues are simply “characteristics that promote intellectual flourishing” (cf. arete). Linda Zagzebski offers a few examples: sensitivity to detail, intellectual humility, open-mindedness, adaptability, being able to recognize reliable authority, intellectual fairness, and so on (1996, p. 114 [link]). These intellectual virtues can be contrasted with intellectual skills: the ability to read and write, deductive reasoning, the ability to think up insightful analogies, and so on. Basically, what we know and learn is a function of our intellectual virtues over and above our intellectual skills.  Of course, that’s not to say that skills and virtues are wholly separate. As Zagzebski explains,”many virtues have correlative skills that allow the virtuous person to be effective in action, and thus, we would normally expect a person with a virtue to develop the associated skills” (p. 116). Sometimes we need specific skills to act in accordance with our virtues, but the important thing is that the virtues are prior. Zagzebski explains,

virtues and skills have numerous connections, but virtues are psychically prior to skills…because the motivational component of a virtue defines it more than external effectiveness does, whereas it is the reverse in the case of skills. Virtues have a broader range of application than do skills, at least typically, whereas skills tend to be more subject specific, context specific, and role specific. The more direct connection of skills with external behavior makes them more easily taught than virtues. (p. 115)

By way of example, think about the Boy and Girl Scouts. One of the first things that comes to mind when we think of Scouting is the merit badge. Learn a square knot: get a badge. Pitch a tent: get a badge. Climb a mountain: get a badge. Watch TV: get a badge. And merit badges are an important part of Scouting. But if you ask any Scout what makes a Scout, you’ll get something other than a list of badges: a Scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, etc. (for the boys) or honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, etc. (for the girls). Being a scout is a matter of cultivating certain character traits; the skills-based merit badges are secondary. What makes the Scout helping the little old lady cross the road such an enduring image isn’t the traffic-safety merit badge on the kid’s sash, it’s the helpful character the kid displays. Again, skills are important, but virtue and character is the aim.

boyscoutpride by genial23 on flickr

Wait a minute…where’s your Traffic Safety merit Badge?

Information literacy as virtue

Hopefully, you can see where this is going: the ACRL information literacy standards are addressed to intellectual skills, not intellectual virtues. And this is what I want to see changed as the Information Literacy Task Force continues its work. I want to see intellectual virtues employed as the framework for how we teach information literacy. There are two ways we could do this. First, we could consider information literacy to be its own intellectual virtue on par with the virtues of open-mindedness, intellectual humility, sensitivity to detail, social justice, etc. Call this approach non-reductionist. Second, we could take a reductionist approach and reframe information literacy as some specific combination of intellectual virtues. For example, we could say that a person is information literate if they approach, engage, and apply information in accordance with the intellectual virtues of open-mindedness, intellectual humility, sensitivity to detail, social justice, etc. For a variety of reasons, I prefer the reductionist approach to information literacy

In either case, a virtue epistemology approach to information literacy is definitely what I would like to see because I want to focus less on discrete skills and more on fostering dispositions. And I’m not just talking about going beyond the “click here” skills.; any library instructor worth her salt already knows that teaching pure database mechanics is the wrong way to foster information literacy. No, I’m thinking of all skills, from the lower to the higher orders. The simple reason is that we can teach research skills until we’re blue in the face, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that students are going to give a shit about them. Go ahead and survey the college seniors who came through library instruction as freshmen. They may remember the cognitive skills, but ask if they actually use them. I bet you’ll find that the students we are willing to call “information literate” aren’t deserving of that label because of what skills they can demonstrate, but instead are deserving because they consistently put those skills to work those skills. These are the students for whom information literacy is an intellectual virtue, rather than a requirement for a term paper.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that we should ditch skill-based learning. We absolutely need to teach certain skills. But, those skills should be in the service of fostering information literacy as an intellectual virtue. The skills we teach should be thought of as means, not ends. To give a few examples, I want to see…

  • students who value different information sources, rather than who can merely “identify the value and differences of potential resources in a variety of formats” (I.2.c)
  • students who identify with investigative methods, rather than merely being able to “identify appropriate investigative methods” (II.1.a)
  • students who are motivated by social justice, rather than students who just “demonstrates an understanding of intellectual property, copyright, and fair use” (V.1.d)
  • students who are inclined to synthesize and internalize what they read, rather than students who just “restate textual concepts in his/her own words” (III.1.b)

And so on. Actually, if you go through the current ACRL standards, you’ll see that a lot of them are already sort of addressed to intellectual virtues. I want to make that focus explicit and consistent.

Reframing the ACRL Information Literacy Competency Standards

So, there’s a rough sketch of what I’d like to see. I readily admit that a virtue-based approach to IL is an uphill battle. How do we assess intellectual virtues? What does this mean for the vast body of professional literature that already exists? What about all of those videos and tutorials I’m making? And, sure, it’s harder to assess intellectual virtues. But it isn’t impossible. And, sure, it’s a radical departure from 13 years of research and it calls into question a lot of current practices. But, like I’ve said, we still need to teach IL skills; those aren’t going away. Students still need the ability to locate, assess, evaluate, and so on. My position is that these discrete skills are impotent without the motivation to apply them and they should be reframed in service of fostering information dispositions. What’s more, if you go back and read around, you’ll see that a TON of the existing literature on information literacy is implicitly appealing to something like dispositions, motives, or virtues. Even though we’re still using the language of skill, many library instructors have long been focused on modifying student behavior over and above presenting them with new skills. Yet, if the ACRL Standards are any indicator, to date we’ve been (officially) focusing our information literacy efforts on encouraging the development of certain skills; motivating students to value those skills has been of secondary importance. My suggestion is that we reverse this approach. Instead of focusing on cognitive skills, we should focus our information literacy efforts on cultivating the dispositions to value critical inquiry, to use information ethically, to be intellectually humble and honest and fair; the particular skills involved should, like merit badges, be of secondary importance.

I’m really excited to be taking part in the ACRL task force on information literacy standards. I realize that my proposal won’t be adopted 100%, but I do hope that as we hammer out the details, some elements of intellectual virtue remain. Whatever ends up happening, I can guarantee this: when the task force presents its final document to the Board in May 2014, the new set of Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education will be a radical departure from what we’ve been used to. I can’t wait to see what happens.

_

Stuff I mentioned on virtue epistemology

Greco, J., 2011, “Virtue Epistemology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/

Riggs, W., 2009, “Two Problems of Easy Credit,” Synthese, 169: 201–216

Sosa, E., 1980, “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5: 3–25.

Sosa, E., 2009, Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume 1: Reflective Knowledge, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zagzebski, L. 1996. Virtues of the Mind, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

* If you’re an epistemology nerd, you may be wondering how I can embrace both the importance of testimonial knowledge as well as virtue epistemology, given Jennifer Lackey’s well-known credit-worthiness objection. Well, let’s just say that I would argue that information literacy, when construed as an intellectual virtue, is the means by which we remain credit-worthy. Wayne Riggs suggests something similar, though he doesn’t use the language of information literacy.  I’ll write a more detailed IL-based defense of credit another time.


30 May 19:37

Study finds students don't learn more from charismatic lecturers

by Chris Parr for Times Higher Education

Study finds that students learn little more from great lectures than bad ones.

Editorial Tags: 
24 May 17:20

Photo







22 May 14:55

Is It Watergate Flowchart

by Rob Tornoe
20 May 16:31

Republican Judge Forces Lesbian Texan Out of Her Home

by burntorangereport
News Image: 

This month in McKinney, just outside of Dallas, Republican judge John Roach kicked Page Price, a lesbian, out of her home. Why? Because she was helping raise her partner's two children. As of May 7th, Price has 30 days to evacuate her home.

This sick, anti-family judge is involved at all because Price's partner, Carolyn Compton, is going through a divorce. Roach inserted a "morality clause" into Compton's divorce papers which forbids Compton from having anyone she is not related to "by blood or marriage" in her home past 9:00 p.m. if the children are present. The aptly named Roach wrote that he didn't approve of Compton's "lifestyle". Her lifestyle of living with the person she loves and raising two kids.

origin Blog: 
origin Author: 
17 May 20:15

Computer scientists to FBI: don't require all our devices to have backdoors for spies

by Cory Doctorow
scottbot shared this story from Boing Boing.

In an urgent, important blog post, computer scientist and security expert Ed Felten lays out the case against rules requiring manufacturers to put wiretapping backdoors in their communications tools. Since the early 1990s, manufacturers of telephone switching equipment have had to follow a US law called CALEA that says that phone switches have to have a deliberate back-door that cops can use to secretly listen in on phone calls without having to physically attach anything to them. This has already been a huge security problem -- through much of the 1990s, AT&T's CALEA controls went through a Solaris machine that was thoroughly compromised by hackers, meaning that criminals could listen in on any call; during the 2005/6 Olympic bid, spies used the CALEA backdoors on the Greek phone company's switches to listen in on the highest levels of government.

But now, thanks to the widespread adoption of cryptographically secured messaging services, law enforcement is finding that its CALEA backdoors are of declining utility -- it doesn't matter if you can intercept someone else's phone calls or network traffic if the data you're captured is unbreakably scrambled. In response, the FBI has floated the idea of "CALEA II": a mandate to put wiretapping capabilities in computers, phones, and software.

As Felten points out, this is a terrible idea. If your phone is designed to secretly record you or stream video, location data, and messages to an adverse party, and to stop you from discovering that it's doing this, it puts you at huge risk when that facility is hijacked by criminals. It doesn't matter if you trust the government not to abuse this power (though, for the record, I don't -- especially since anything mandated by the US government would also be present in devices used in China, Belarus and Iran) -- deliberately weakening device security makes you vulnerable to everyone, including the worst criminals:

Our report argues that mandating a virtual wiretap port in endpoint systems is harmful. The port makes it easier for attackers to capture the very same data that law enforcement wants. Intruders want to capture everything that happens on a compromised computer. They will be happy to see a built-in tool for capturing and extracting large amounts of audio, video, and text traffic. Better yet (for the intruder), the capability will be stealthy by design, making it difficult for the user to tell that anything is amiss.

Beyond this, the mandate would make it harder for users to understand, monitor, and fix their own systems—which is bad for security. If a system’s design is too simple or its operation too transparent or too easy to monitor, then wiretaps will be evident. So a wiretappability mandate will push providers toward complex, obfuscated designs that are harder to secure and raise the total cost of building and operating the system.

Finally, our report argues that it will not be possible to block non-compliant implementations. Many of today’s communication tools are open source, and there is no way to hide a capability within an open source code base, nor to prevent people from simply removing or disabling an undesired feature. Even closed source systems are routinely modified by users—as with jailbreaking of phones—and users will find ways to disable features they don’t want. Criminals will want to disable these features. Ordinary users will also want to disable them, to mitigate their security risks.

Felten's remarks summarize a report [PDF] signed by 20 distinguished computer scientists criticizing the FBI's proposal. It's an important read -- maybe the most important thing you'll read all month. If you can't trust your devices, you face enormous danger.

CALEA II: Risks of wiretap modifications to endpoints

    


13 May 20:18

The ‘glass is a liquid’ myth has finally been destroyed

by George Dvorsky
scottbot shared this story from io9.

By studying a glob of 20 million-year-old amber, scientists have proven once and for all that glass does not flow.

Read more...

    


08 May 17:18

Free Airport Parking for Congress: A Reminder that the Rich Write the Rules

by Lisa Wade, PhD

Last week the U.S. Congress made headlines when it quickly adjusted the sequester cuts that affected air traffic control. How quickly?  Parts of it were hand-written (via The Daily Show):
1 The move was interpreted as one meant to a certain class of voters, but it was also as a purely self-interested move, since Congress members fly quite frequently.

Riffing on this, Bloomberg Businessweek put together a short video about a little-known congressional perk: free and convenient parking at Reagan National Airport.

This little perk, saving congress members time and $22-a-day parking fees, is a great example of the way that privilege translates into being “above society.” The more power, connections, and money you have, the more likely you are to be able to break both the legal and social contract with impunity. Sometimes this just means getting away with breaking the law (e.g., the fact that, compared to the crimes of the poor and working classes, we do relatively little to identify and prosecute so-called “white collar” criminals and tend to give them lighter or suspended sentences when we do). But these perks are also often above board; they’re built into the system. And who builds the system again?

In other words, some of the richest people in the world get free parking at the airport because they’re the ones making the rules. I like this as a concrete example, but be assured that there is a whole universe of such rules and, like this sudden revelation about free parking, most of them go entirely unnoticed by most of us most of the time.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

08 May 17:14

SlickWrite Proofreads Your Writing and Provides Statistical Feedback

by Eric Ravenscraft

Spellcheck can only go so far to ensure you're writing something worth reading. SlickWrite analyzes your writing for grammar, common mistakes, and even provides statistical analysis of your text.

The tool is web based so you don't need to install anything (though you can grab Chrome and Firefox extensions that simplify uploading text). It will do typical analysis like watching for excessive use of adverbs or passive voice, which is a step up from most other spellcheckers. Where SlickWrite stands out, though, is in providing statistical analysis of your text. Showing what percentage of your text is made up of filler words, or how many unique words you've used can give you a new perspective on your writing. It's no replacement for real proofreading, but can give you a few hints on where to start. Hit the link below to try it out.

SlickWrite | via Ghacks

08 May 16:34

Typographical Chess Lets Novices Easily Recognize Each Piece

by Andrew Liszewski
scottbot shared this story from Gizmodo.

If you grew up playing checkers, transitioning to chess and keeping track of which piece is which and what moves where can be tricky. So to smooth out the learning curve, OneSavesSolutions created this 3D printed Typographical Chess Set with the name of each piece integrated into its design.

Read more...

    


07 May 15:50

Did anyone actually read “The Great Gatsby”?

by Zachary M. Seward
Great Gatsby, Leonardo DiCaprio

One spring just before the financial crisis struck, students at Princeton University threw a Gatsby party. “It’s going to be big,” said an organizer, promising all the trappings of the novel’s soirees. “It’s going to be grandiose.”

Gatsby parties are common, but this one stands out for its extravagance—the expected outlay was $20,000—and the particular irony of its locale. F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote The Great Gatsby after dropping out of Princeton, once called the school “the pleasantest country club in America,” which is one of those great insults that sounds like a compliment to those being held out for criticism.

So it is with Gatsby parties, as well. It spoils neither the book nor the new film adaptation, which opens in US theaters on May 10, to say The Great Gatsby is a critique of the American dream. It peels back a gilded veneer of success to reveal the hollow, rotting underbelly of class and capital in the early 1920s. Jay Gatsby’s weekend-long parties are lavish indictments of the whole, hard-charging scene that propelled him to sudden, extraordinary, unscrupulous wealth—”a new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about,” as Fitzgerald writes toward the end.

Yet so many people seem enchanted enough by the decadence described in Fitzgerald’s book to ignore its fairly obvious message of condemnation. Gatsby parties can be found all over town. They are staples of spring on many Ivy League campuses and a frequent theme of galas in Manhattan. Just the other day, vacation rental startup Airbnb sent out invitations to a “Gatsby-inspired soiree” at a multi-million-dollar home on Long Island, seemingly oblivious to the novel’s undertones.

It’s like throwing a Lolita-themed children’s birthday party.

And with the impending arrival of the movie, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatsby, the literary dissonance is growing stronger. Prada thew a Gatsby party last week, which is understandable enough, given that the Italian fashion company outfitted some characters in the movie. Brooks Brothers, which in the 1920s introduced the argyle sock to America, also chipped in some costumes, and is now selling them to the public with ads like this one:

Daisy Buchanan quote

The full Daisy Buchanan quote is actually, “It makes me sad because I’ve never seen such—such beautiful shirts before.” She says it during one of the novel’s most famous scenes, as Gatsby, trying rather clumsily to impress Daisy with his wealth, flings his fine clothing across his bedroom. Daisy’s meaning is ambiguous, but the line is certainly not included as a sartorial endorsement.

Brooks Brothers is just trying to sell clothes. Less understandable are the American high school teachers who use the book to teach their students how to strive, filling in the blank, “My green light is _____.” In the novel, Gatsby’s infatuation with social class is represented by the green light on the dock of the Buchanan estate across the bay from his house. And if there’s one line that neatly, almost overbearingly, conveys the novel’s jaundiced view of the American dream, it’s this one: “Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us.”

At Boston Latin School, however, the green light is just good old American ambition. “My green light is Harvard,” a 14-year-old Chinese-American immigrant told a reporter visiting her English class. On the wall of the classroom, students had written their own “green lights” (pdf) on a large piece of green construction paper in the shape of a lightbulb: Pediatric neurosurgeon … Earn a black belt … Make it to junior year… Become incredibly rich.

In the novel, a guest at one of Gatsby’s parties admires the host’s library but observes that none of the books’ pages are cut. Back then, you had to cut the pages before, you know, reading them.

Fitzgerald didn’t live long enough to see The Great Gatsby come to be regarded as a great American novel, a fixture of high school English classes and college term papers. I don’t think he could have predicted that Jay Gatsby would become an icon of celebration, but it probably wouldn’t surprise him. Gatsby is us, after all, and we are inescapably American.


06 May 01:17

Categorizing people without marginalizing them

by John Mark Ockerbloom
scottbot shared this story from "DH" via Reader in Google Reader.

Libraries and bookstores have perennially faced the problem of how to organize books on their shelves.  There’s a tension between making certain books easy to find for readers with one set of interests, and making them more difficult to find for other readers.  For instance, some libraries and bookstores near me have a section for African American fiction. Readers particularly interested in African American authors can easily find their books in this section.  But if novels by African American authors are shelved there instead of in the general fiction section, readers browsing general fiction might not find many African American authors there. Similar issues have arisen with genre fiction sections in libraries.  A separate “Science Fiction” section can be a convenient service for for fans of that genre.  But some readers have objected that such sections push science fiction off into a corner, making it easy for “mainstream” readers to overlook the genre.

In theory, online libraries shouldn’t have as much problem organizing their books and subjects.  Freed from the physical constraints of bound paper and shelves, the same book can be placed in many virtual locations, not just one.  But in practice, many of the problems of categorization persist in the online world.  Last week, for instance, Amanda Filipacchi noted in the New York Times that Wikipedia’s category listing of American novelists was disproportionally male, in part because some editors had been taking women authors out of this category and moving them to the more specialized “American women novelists” category.  As far as I can tell, Wikipedia policy does not call for this sort of marginalization, but it doesn’t prevent it from happening either.  It’s not just a matter of editors with an agenda and time on their hands; it also happens because manually filing people under multiple categories takes more effort than filing them under one, and it’s easy to neglect or forget to put someone in a broader category after placing them in a narrower one.  So people are classified under women authors but not authors, under chemists but not scientists, under Catholics but not Christians.  Readers who look for articles in the more general category listings can easily miss people who are only filed in the more specific ones.   (And even if those category listings were not originally intended for browsing, many Wikipedia readers do use them that way.)

In systems that have explicit hierarchies of categories (such as Wikipedia categories, or Library of Congress Subject Headings), there’s a fairly straightforward way to solve this particular problem: When a person is placed in a specific category, the system should automatically also place them in any broader categories of people that encompass the original category.  If someone is categorized under “Women chemists”, for instance, they should also get automatically categorized under “Chemists”, “Women scientists”, and “Scientists”.  This inclusion can be implemented in various ways, but the important thing is that narrowly-classified people should be just as visible for readers browsing the broader categories as people that were explicitly classified under the broader categories.

I implemented this automatic category promotion yesterday on The Online Books Page, which for a while has classified people that are the subject of listed biographies.  Consider, for instance,  St. Catherine of Siena.  The catalog data for her biography in The Online Books Page categorizes her as a Christian woman saint, and readers have been able to find her under that subject for some time now.  Thanks to the new algorithm, readers will now also find her when they browse broader subjects like Christian saints, or  saints generally.

We could be doing this sort of thing in other library catalogs, and in Wikipedia, as well.  Why aren’t we?  I’ve seen a few objections to the idea:

It’s too hard to implement?  It doesn’t have to be.  It took me just part of a Sunday afternoon to implement the feature on The Online Books Page, and I suspect a good programmer who was familiar with (and could modify) the relevant source code would not have much trouble implementing the feature in a well-designed catalog or Wiki.  In my experience, I had to spend more time modifying my data than modifying my code.  The Library of Congress Subject Headings, the subject system used by The Online Books Page, is not complete or consistent in its subject hierarchies, and I had also miscoded some topical subjects as people.  But it’s possible to clean up and enhance this kind of data, and doing so often benefits both present and future applications of the data.

It defeats the purpose of hierarchical categories?   I’ve seen this objection made in some of the Wikipedia discussions around this issue, and it doesn’t make sense to me when I think it through.  Far from being useless, the category hierarchy is precisely what makes it possible to automatically promote people in narrow categories into broader categories.  It also helps save the time of categorizers; they only have to explicitly place people in precise categories, and if the hierarchy is well-constructed the system will automatically take care of the broader categories.   (If the system also keeps track of which category assignments are explicit and which are automatic, it can also update them appropriately when categorizations or hierarchies get edited.)  I’m also not flattening hierarchies across the board; I’m only recommending at this point that this sort of promotion be done for people, in categories of people.  (More generally, it might be useful for any kind of individual instance that is categorized under abstract classes of those instances.  But doing it for people is a good start.)

It makes the broader categories too crowded to be useful?  In a comprehensive catalog such as Wikipedia, there will be a lot of people in categories like “writers”, once you include all the people in sub-categories.  But there still will be a lot of people in that category even if you banish all the women to a “women writers” subcategory.  Creating another category for “men writers” doesn’t really solve the problem; all it does is force people to choose which gender they want to browse, instead of letting them browse writers of both genders if that’s what they want to do.  And after the split, the broader “writers” category will most likely still be left with a random assortment of writers without gender classification, who might or might not be the people a reader is most interested in.

Well-designed interfaces make it possible to usefully browse large collections of items.  Relevance ranking, for instance, can be used to put the most notable examples of a category at the top of  a long list of its members.  That’s in fact what we routinely expect to happen in good search engines.  And mechanisms like faceted navigation (used in many online catalogs) and subject maps (used on The Online Books Page) make it easy to shift focus to more precise or related categories based on a reader’s interests.  In systems that implement these features, categories with lots of members are good things to have, not bad things.

I haven’t yet implemented relevance ranking in my subject browsing.  Right now, The Online Books Page doesn’t actually classify many people to begin with, so most of my categories don’t have a lot of people in them.  But I could see a number of ways to implement such ranking in a catalog like The Online Books Page, or in Wikipedia, which I can discuss later if there’s interest.

In summary, then, well-designed catalogs and wikis should be able to categorize people comprehensively without marginalizing them.  Three features that make this possible are:

  • detailed, well-organized systems of categories and their relationships
  • systems that automatically show people in broader categories when they’re classified in narrower ones
  • and ranking and navigation mechanisms that make it easy to pick out the people with the most general interest, or the qualities of interest to a particular researcher, from a large overall set of people.

I’ll continue to work on implementing these features on The Online Books Page, and would be very interested in participating in discussions of how they can better work there, in other catalogs, and in systems like Wikipedia.

06 May 00:37

The Odd Collection of Books in the Guantanamo Prison Library

by Dan Colman

gitmo booksYou don’t hear much about Guantanamo these days, unless you keep an eye on the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie Savage. Last week, Savage reported on a hunger strike involving 93 prisoners that’s now in its third month. Ostensibly the protest is in response to prison guards handling the Koran in disrespectful ways. But the real cause comes down to this: “a growing sense among many prisoners, some of whom have been held without trial for more than 11 years, that they will never go home.”

As part of Savage’s reporting on Gitmo, he has also created a photo blog that gives us insight into the prison library and its odd collection of books. The library offers prisoners access to Captain America comics (that must go over well with enemy combatants); pulp romance books by Danielle Steele (another choice pick for Islamists); the complete Harry Potter series (I imagine the Prisoner of Azkaban volume hits home); some more serious works by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien and Charles Dickens; an assortment of religious books; and the occasional self help book like The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook.

According to news reports, the library currently has 3,500 volumes on pre-approved topics. Prisoners have to order books in advance. (They can’t just wonder through the stacks.) And the most popular books include Agatha Christie mysteries, the self-help manual Don’t Be Sad; the The Lord of the Rings; and, of course, Harry Potter. 

We know that other prisons have given their residents access to our collections of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks. But I doubt that will be happening at Gitmo any time soon.

You can follow Savage’s photoblog here.

via @themillions

The Odd Collection of Books in the Guantanamo Prison Library is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

06 May 00:18

No Women Need Apply: A Disheartening 1938 Rejection Letter from Disney Animation

by Colin Marshall

Disney Letter

Put yourself in the mind of an artistic young woman who goes to see Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when it first opens in 1937. Captivated by the film’s groundbreaking cel-based cinematic animation, understanding that it represents the future of the art form, you feel you should pursue a career with a studio yourself. Alas, in response to the letter of inquiry you send Disney’s way, you receive the terse rejection letter above. “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen,” it flatly states, “as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” Your only remaining hope? To aim lower on the totem pole and become an “Inker” or “Painter,” but “it would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in comparison with the number of girls who apply.”

Times have changed; women now create animation. But to catch a glimpse of the industry in decidedly pre-changed times, revisit the 1939 promotional documentary short How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. In it, you’ll see these very young men hard at work, as well as those “pretty girls” hired to do inking and color. Prewar Disney turned out some masterpieces, no doubt, but by today’s standards their attitudes toward gender may leave something to be desired. “This letter originally belonged to my grandmother,” writes the user who discovered the note above. “After she passed away we discovered it and were surprised at how well it was preserved for being nearly 70 years old.” Young women like her, aspiring to high places in animation, found themselves forced to find alternate routes in, although after receiving that rejection letter on that stationery — emblazoned with Snow White herself, adding insult to injury — I wouldn’t blame them for looking into other fields entirely.

via Sociological Images & Mefi

Related content:

How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made

Donald Duck Wants You to Pay Your Taxes (1943)

Walt Disney Presents the Super Cartoon Camera (1957)

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

No Women Need Apply: A Disheartening 1938 Rejection Letter from Disney Animation is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

05 May 23:54

Unlikely Conversations and Improbable Sources

by Wayne Bivens-Tatum

Recently I’ve been getting some requests for what I have called The Improbable Source.  An improbable source is some source students hope to find that is exactly on the topic of their research essay, especially when that topic is somewhat obscure. The example I used then that still stands out as the top of this category is “scholarly books and articles on email as a form of civic friendship.” You can double check the philosophical literature if you like, or you can take my word for it that nobody has ever published a scholarly book or article on this topic. When I first identified the existence of the improbable source, I suggested that the problem “is that they want sources that already do their work for them.” To some extent, that’s true. Almost always, the improbable source students desire is one that already supports the exact thesis they hope to argue. If they found the source, then they’d have to change their thesis. However, I now think the problem is larger than that. It’s not just about a hunt for improbable sources, but also about a hunt for unlikely conversations.

“Scholarly conversation” is a phrase that librarians and writing instructors often use. It’s an apt metaphor for what scholars do, and most scholarly work is in a conversation of some sort with previous scholarship, whether arguing with it, building upon it, or whatever. There’s nothing controversial about either that claim or the use of the phrase itself as far as I can tell. However, it’s very difficult to teach a first-year student who has never participated in such a conversation or engaged in any actual research to understand what’s going on.

I’ve worked with students who are looking for scholarly conversations on topics that are highly unlikely to be conversed upon by scholars. We can stick with the “email as civic friendship” topic. It’s not just the source that’s improbable. It’s the entire conversation that’s unlikely to exist. And if there weren’t a conversation, there wouldn’t be the improbable source, because the scholarly sources often respond to previous research. Students have been taught that scholarly conversations exist. They are perhaps engaged in class readings that demonstrate a scholarly conversation in action. Then they pick a topic and go out to find the conversation that likely doesn’t exist.

So that’s what is happening. But why is it happening? There could be many reasons, but I suspect the main reason is the backwards approach to research the students are taking. Instead of reading around broadly in an area of scholarship and looking for the conversations that emerge, students are choosing and even narrowing topics at random and then trying to find the scholarly conversation. Librarians have strategies for helping students find the conversations, but they only work if the original topic is pretty broad. Students might make the leap into a conversation about email as civic friendship because they’ve read an article on civic friendship and need to write about a form of communication as civic friendship, but that’s obviously a scholarly conversation that didn’t emerge from anything scholarship they’d actually been reading. Another approach is students having to relate some event or thing to two different scholarly disciplines. That can be a very fruitful assignment, but students sometimes have problems figuring out exactly what they should be researching in the disciplines, because it’s usually not the thing or event itself. Thus, their initial searches aren’t emerging from the scholarly conversations within a discipline. They’re hoping to find that conversation based on what they think is interesting about the thing or event, and sometimes it just doesn’t exist.

Anyway, I think those are reasons why, but even if not there’s still the question of what to do about it. The first response I usually offer is one of assurance, because often enough the student has tried to find the improbable source or the unlikely conversation and failed. That’s when I practice reference as therapy, and assure students they’re not finding it because it likely doesn’t exist.

Then, we analyze, which etymologically means to break something down into its elements. Email and civic friendship has two elements, both of which could be researched separately. However, that topic is really what writing instructors call a “lens essay,” which means the student should be examining email through the lens of a theory of civic friendship. Thus, really the topic is email and whether or not it fits the criteria for civic friendship. But other topics that combine two or three areas together are ripe for analysis and research on the separate areas, but even then it might be hard to figure out specifically what to look for sources on without having read a lot. and that’s the students’ job, not mine. Comparing disciplinary approaches to something can work as well, but again it’s usually something that requires more reading by the student than searching with the librarian.

That’s where my final advice comes. Sometimes even as I’m meeting with students I realize they don’t really need me at all. They don’t need to find more sources; they just need to start reading and figuring things out from there, and the only thing I’m good for is to tell them that. So maybe I was right before and the hunt for improbable sources and unlikely conversations is motivated by the hope that someone out there has done all their reading, analysis, and synthesis for them, because that, not library research, is the hardest part of writing a research essay.