This is a good expose of the real story behind Abigail Fisher, the lead plaintiff in the case attempting to destroy the remnants of affirmative action in higher education admissions. In short, Fisher was a respectable but hardly exceptional student who simply did not have the grades or SAT scores to get into the University of Texas. Most of the students who got into UT with lower grades for special reasons were also white. Basically, the white supremacists behind the destruction of affirmative action saw Fisher as a perfect person to fight any system that considers race at all for admissions, but the case itself is exceptionally weak.
Not that its weakness will stop at least 4 Supreme Court justices from ruling in her favor.
A Reader’s War: “I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere.”
Captured on Film: “It’s true that Syrian films tend to be critical of the regime, but the nature of the protest is often indirect, like the projection system of the Damascus Cinema Club.”
“Every night for a month, he and fifteen colleagues met to pack texts into small metal boxes, the size of a treasure chest, that they bought at the local market. When Timbuktu ran out of boxes, Haidara ordered more from Mopti, two days away by boat on the Niger River.”
Lolcats of the Middle Ages: “The relationship between mice and cats, and the prospect of an organized mouse insurrection against the oppressor, was actively explored as a metaphor for human society.”
“The experiments successfully demonstrated that, through a person’s visual cortex, decoded fMRI could be used to impart brain activity patterns that match a previously known target state. Interestingly, behavioral data obtained before and after the neurofeedback training showed improved performance of the relevant visual tasks especially when the subjects were unaware of the nature of what they were learning.”
Artist Phillip Stearns makes blankets and tapestries out of glitch art. Some of the source images are taken from intentionally short-circuited digital cameras.
All items are woven in the US and cost $200 and up (plus shipping).
By the time of the election in November 1968, LBJ had evidence Nixon had sabotaged the Vietnam war peace talks -- or, as he put it, that Nixon was guilty of treason and had "blood on his hands".
The war went on for seven more bloody years, most of them under Nixon's watch. Shameful.
“Whoever reviews Ito’s works notices not only a variety of functional programs, but also a spectrum of architectural languages.” — From the 2013 Pritzker Jury’s Citation
Toyo Ito has just been announced the winner of the 2013 Pritzker Prize. To commemorate this master architect, we’ve reached out to Iwan Baan, architecture’s premier photographer, and assembled a retrospective of some of Ito’s greatest works (all photographed, of course, by Baan) – including the Za Koenji Public Theatre, Toyo Ito’s Museum of Architecture, Silver Hut – TIMA, Ken Iwata Mother and Child Museum, Yaoko Kawagoe Museum, Suites Avenue Hotel, Huge Wineglass Project, Mikimoto 2, Tama Art University Library & White O. See them all, after the break…
Ideology means many things, but one of them is the difference between who gets the maximum benefit of the doubt, and who gets the presumption of guilt. I know what I see, when I see this clip:
I see a law professor shoving a student—shouting “Get away from my space, you prick”—making more threatening movements, attempting to provoke a fight verbally, and grabbing a student’s cell phone out of her hand. I see the student who was pushed and threatened staying calm and passive, even trying to defuse the situation. I see the student whose phone was taken from her hands defending herself verbally and no more. And then the clip ends.
It is clear to me what I see in the video. It is clear to me who, in the video, is turning a political conflict into a physical one, and who it is that is aggressively trespassing into whose space. Mine is an ideological account of what happened, of course. Which is not to say that it’s wrong—yours is ideological too—but simply that any reading of this event, this brief window in time, cannot help but be shaped and contextualized by what you or I expect to see. And it also can’t help but be shaped by the context which we assume into existence, framing the event.
After all: what happened before this video began? What happened after it ended? That context could change how we view what we’ve just seen. In fact, it has to: we’ve already filled in the gaps in our knowledge with assumptions about what we don’t know. One of two things is true: either the law professor was provoked in some way that would justify or mitigate his conduct, or he wasn’t. And before we come to a decision about what we’ve seen, we’ve decided which of those two things are probably true. And how we come to that decision will most likely have everything to do with what our opinions are about Israel/Palestine, border checkpoints, and the meanings of the words Apartheid and Imperialism.
For example, the person who posted the video framed it this way:
“During our solidarity mock check-point/border check point, University of Oregon professor, James Olmsted, physically pushes two students after making very racists remarks to all of us. This was after we had asked him to calm down because he was making us feel intimidated.”
In this video, we see the same confrontation from a different angle, and we see some of what happened after the first video cuts out:
The poster of that video says more or less the same thing as the poster of the first video:
“Seconds before this video was recorded he shoves a student and continues to stir up tension until UOPD arrive on the scene.”
A commenter on the first video asserts:
“there are two sides to everything…people dont just act like this for no reason…I guarantee you the professor was reacting to something that isnt shown in this video”
An a commenter on the second also asserts that they are the aggressors:
“hahaha that girl thinks she’s being harassed. In reality, it’s a group of weirdos surrounding a law professor recording him, and pushing their ideals on him.”
After all: if this confrontation began with the students aggressively encroaching on his space—as he seems to be claiming—thereby impeding his ability to move freely, then our sympathy will naturally gravitate towards his side of the story. If he was simply going about his business, and they provoked him, then at least he isn’t the only asshole in the situation. But if the reverse is the case—if they were simply putting on a campus demonstration, peacefully—then he is obviously the one trying to provoke a confrontation. This is especially the case if, beforehand, he was making racist remarks.
Which is it? Which do you see?
Now, watch this six minute version, which is taken from the phone that he snatches from the students hand and puts in his pocket:
With MOOCs, the future is clearly what happened to the French Department at Southeastern Louisiana University. Fire all the tenure track professors, replace them with adjuncts, and continue offering the minor (or major as the case may be). Dare the professors to do something about it.
Of course SELU did this without MOOCs, but technology just facilitates the elimination of faculty.
The impending death of Google Reader has sparked much wailing and gnashing of teeth, petition-signing, alternative-seeking, and rending of garments. But what about the people who made RSS? Dave Winer, one of the fathers of the both RSS and the blog, couldn't give less of a shit. More »
High Country News has a remarkable obituary of one Robert Berlo, an army chaplain and map collector whose 13,000 travel maps were recently acquired by Stanford University’s Branner Earth Sciences Library. The collection includes “every official state road map from 1929 to the present, plus U.S. Forest Service, topographic, regional and city maps,” according to the article.
The real treasures of Berlo’s collection, however, were the maps of places he’d invented himself. Berlo used “the real geography of a place as the foundation for an invented city,” and imagined the evolution of the community from its first settlement to its latest metropolitan guise, creating a new map for each decade of its existence. Island Lakes, shown here, occupies a lake valley of Admiralty Island in the Alexander Archipelago of southeastern Alaska, about 50 miles south of Juneau. What I love about Island Lakes is the very lack of whimsicality in Berlo’s fidelity to the everyday grid that characterizes most modern cities. All he’s done is create another place that might have appeared on any of the 13,000 maps he collected in his lifetime. A man loyal to his passion, certainly.
I haven’t been able to find any other examples of Berlo’s imaginary maps, but I’d certainly be interested to hear of them.
Throughout this trial, the two defendants and a parade of friends who wound up mostly testifying against the defendants expressed little understanding of rape – let alone common decency or respect for women. Despite the conviction, the defendants likely don’t view themselves as rapists, at least not the classic sense of a man hiding in the shadows.
“It wasn’t violent,” explained teammate Evan Westlake when asked why he didn’t stop the two defendants as they abused a non-moving girl that Westlake knew to be highly intoxicated. “I always pictured it as forcing yourself on someone.”
…and, on a related point, Epps: “By diverting attention to a hypothetical drone strike on Jane Fonda, Paul has created the 2013 version of the 2009 “death panels.” No matter how many liberal columnists he wowed, he has done a disservice to the national interest by making it harder to address the real issues we face.” Pushback against Obama’s terror policies from Congress is desperately needed. But in addition to his horrible positions on many other civil liberties issues Paul is also worse than Obama just on national security state issues, which is why he was asking the wrong questions.
“Laura talks about it being for someone who wants to, “…keep track of what’s going on at the roots of my beat” or to “…really geek out” on some subject or other. It solves a very deep Search problem by facilitating a connection between the consumers of the information who want to get it in as dense and pure a form as possible, uncut on the street with the baby laxative the various aggregators use to define what will be popular. It is information curation in its purest form. If we once manage to find the true experts in the subjects we thrive on, the very wellsprings from which the best ideas flow, how could we not want to establish a permanent pipeline into those cognitive reservoirs? How else to do so than by use of a tool like Google Reader. This is the Super High Octane driven by true Human Intelligence alternative to Page Rank. It’s Quora done more deeply than a single question at a time. It’s more deeply Social than anything seen since for those who genuinely want to be a part of a select community of Thinkers. It is Ernest Hemingway and all of the others in Paris. It’s plugging directly into particular cyber-cognitive neighborhoods the way only Gibson and Stephenson could imagine before it came along. And Google wants to burn it down.”
The subtext of the furor over Google Reader’s shutdown is that Google no longer considers publishers its primary customers. Google folk (particularly Marissa Mayer) used to talk quite eloquently about how best way to ensure someone would return to the site was to send them away quickly. Google Plus doesn’t even have an open API (yet), there is nothing you will get from Google Plus without driving into the horrendous cul-de-sac that is plus.google.com. Just last week, I was reminiscing about the fury when Google launched a toolbar update that allowed Google to offer user’s features on top of the pages they were browsing. This was also the guiding philosophy of Google’s unfairly-maligned OpenSocial product. These products represent a philosophy turned 180 degrees relative to Google Plus; to use google’s software you never even had to navigate to Google.com.
Google’s shuttering of Reader, as well as their doubling down on the dual debacles of Google Plus and Glass, represent the complete rejection of the “send them away so they will return philosophy” which was the primary reason that nerds (like me) fell in love with Google in the first place. Google is replacing a strategy that was easily understood and straightforward with one that is nearly Orwellian in scope. They’re already quite far down this road, but the shuttering of Google Reader makes it clear for all to see. Google is a different company than it used to be, but the dramatic turn feels like a turn to ‘evil,’ and that’s quite sad for me.
“Simple point: just because Google couldn’t make a business out of a free RSS reader, it does not mean that business models that have a free component do not work, since, obviously, much of the rest of Google’s business is based on offering stuff for free, and monetizing elsewhere. And, similarly, just because you have a paid app, it does not mean that enough people will pay to make a viable business out of it. In both cases, the situations are basically the same: whatever you do, you need to be able to bring in enough revenue, and that usually needs to involve offering a good product with plenty of benefits. The business model discussion that goes on top of that is interesting, but not defining in the way some people seem to want it to be.”
Why didn't anyone tell me that I'd written an essay for the New Yorker?
“Looking through the folder, I can only conclude that, apparently, I used to know a lot about Web design. All that knowledge is gone now. I wonder: Will the same thing happen to the contents of the “Academia” (2003–2010) and “Dissertation” (2005–2012) folders?”
We got a babysitter and went out for dinner (hooray!). While we were at the restaurant, the weather gods dumped 2" of snow in Vermont (#twopeople). We had dinner with friends, one of whom used to date a woman who is now dating (or married; who cares?) this guy. (attn:@GN)
Bre Pettis (born c. 1972/1973[1]) is an American entrepreneur, video blogger and multi-artist.[2] He is also known for DIY video podcasts for MAKE,[3] and for the History Hacker pilot on the History Channel.[4] He is one of the founders of the Brooklyn-based hacker space NYC Resistor.
Pettis is a co-founder and the CEO[5] of MakerBot Industries a company that produces robots that make things out of plastic like materials and can replicate themselves.[3] Besides being a TV host and Video Podcast producer, he's created new media for Etsy.com, hosted Make: Magazine's Weekend Projects podcast, and has been a schoolteacher, artist, and puppeteer.
Posted by Alan Green, Software Engineer We have just announced on the Official Google Blog that we will soon retire Google Reader (the actual date is July 1, 2013). We know Reader has a devoted following who will be very sad to see it go. We’re sad too. There are two simple reasons for this: usage of Google Reader has declined, and as a company we’re pouring all of our energy into fewer products. We think that kind of focus will make for a better user experience. To ensure a smooth transition, we’re providing a three-month sunset period so you have sufficient time to find an alternative feed-reading solution. If you want to retain your Reader data, including subscriptions, you can do so through Google Takeout. Thank you again for using Reader as your RSS platform.
Labels: reader, sunset
This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader…
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