“Ryūkō eigo zukushi,” (translation, “A fashionable melange of English words”) a Japanese woodcut by Kamekichi Tsunajima to illustrate images of animals, activities, and objects each with their Japanese and English names. Via the Public Domain Review.
Justine Marie SherryThat's it, I'm old, bands I love are now releasing "anniversary deluxe editions" of albums I listened to in high school...
It's official: The Postal Service are officially, actually getting back together. A website for the duo-- comprising Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard and Dntel's Jimmy Tamborello-- appeared earlier today, simply stating: "The Postal Service: 2013". And now Billboard has confirmed that Sub Pop will release a deluxe edition of the band's sole album, Give Up, next month, in order to commemorate the record's 10-year anniversary.
Billboard also states that three separate sources confirmed to them that the band is booked to play this year's Coachella, as previously rumored, and that "additional dates and festivals are also in the works." However, as Gibbard has repeated dozens of times, there are still no plans for another Postal Service LP.
Dntel and Gibbard both released solo records last year; Aimlessness and Former Lives respectively. Watch the video for the Postal Service's much-covered "Such Great Heights" below.
We’re celebrating the end of the year with our most popular posts from 2013, plus a few of our favorites tossed in. Enjoy!
A former editor at Cosmopolitan, Leah Hardy, recently wrote an exposé about the practice of photoshopping models to hide the health and aesthetic costs of extreme thinness. Below is an example featuring Cameron Diaz:
The story about Diaz, in The Telegraph, includes the following description of the image’s manipulation:
Another example was posted at The Daily What. Notice that her prominent ribcage has been photoshopped out of the photograph on the right, which ran in the October 2012 issue of Numéro.
Hardy, the editor at Cosmo, explains that she frequently re-touched models who were “frighteningly thin.” Others have reported similar practices:
Jane Druker, the editor of Healthy magazine — which is sold in health food stores — admitted retouching a cover girl who pitched up at a shoot looking “really thin and unwell”…
The editor of the top-selling health and fitness magazine in the U.S., Self, has admitted: “We retouch to make the models look bigger and healthier”…
And the editor of British Vogue, Alexandra Shulman, has quietly confessed to being appalled by some of the models on shoots for her own magazine, saying: “I have found myself saying to the photographers, ‘Can you not make them look too thin?’”
Robin Derrick, creative director of Vogue, has admitted: “I spent the first ten years of my career making girls look thinner — and the last ten making them look larger.”
Hardy described her position as a “dilemma” between offering healthy images and reproducing the mythology that extreme thinness is healthy:
At the time, when we pored over the raw images, creating the appearance of smooth flesh over protruding ribs, softening the look of collarbones that stuck out like coat hangers, adding curves to flat bottoms and cleavage to pigeon chests, we felt we were doing the right thing… We knew our readers would be repelled by these grotesquely skinny women, and we also felt they were bad role models and it would be irresponsible to show them as they really were.
But now, I wonder. Because for all our retouching, it was still clear to the reader that these women were very, very thin. But, hey, they still looked great!
They had 22-inch waists (those were never made bigger), but they also had breasts and great skin. They had teeny tiny ankles and thin thighs, but they still had luscious hair and full cheeks.
Thanks to retouching, our readers… never saw the horrible, hungry downside of skinny. That these underweight girls didn’t look glamorous in the flesh. Their skeletal bodies, dull, thinning hair, spots and dark circles under their eyes were magicked away by technology, leaving only the allure of coltish limbs and Bambi eyes.
Insightfully, Hardy describes this as a “vision of perfection that simply didn’t exist” and concludes, “[n]o wonder women yearn to be super-thin when they never see how ugly [super-]thin can be.”
UPDATE: A comment has brought up the point that it’s bad to police people’s bodies, no matter whether they’re thin or fat. And this is an important point (made well here) and, while I agree that some of the language is harsh, that’s not what’s going on here. The vast majority of the models who need reverse photoshopping aren’t women who just happen to have that body type. They are part of an social institution that demands extreme thinness and they’re working hard on their bodies to be able to deliver it. This isn’t, then, about shaming naturally thin women, it’s about (1) calling out an industry that requires women to be unhealthy and then hides the harmful consequences and (2) acknowledging that even people who are a part of that industry don’t necessarily have the power to change it.
Cross-posted at Business Insider.
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)
Justine Marie SherryTIE!
CSE chair Hank Levy today testified to the Washington State Legislature on high tech workforce needs. His remarks are a terrific summary of Seattle’s high tech scene and the role of UW CSE in supporting it.
Watch Hank’s testimony here.
Cross-posted at The Huffington Post.
@bfwriter tweeted us a link to a college design student’s photograph that has gone viral. Rosea Lake posted the image to her tumblr and it struck a chord.
What I like about the image is the way it very clearly illustrates two things. First, it reveals that doing femininity doesn’t mean obeying a single, simple rule. Instead, it’s about occupying and traveling within a certain space. In this case, usually between “proper” and “flirty.” Women have to constantly figure out where in that space they’re supposed to be. Too flirty at work mean’s you won’t be taken seriously; too proper at the bar and you’re invisible. Under the right circumstances (e.g., Halloween, a funeral), you can do “cheeky” or “old fashioned.”
The second thing I like about this image is the way it shows that there is a significant price to pay for getting it wrong. It’s not just a faux pas. Once you’re “‘asking for it,” you could be a target. And, once you’re reached “prudish,” you’ve become socially irrelevant. Both violence and social marginalization are serious consequences.
And, of course, all women are going to get it wrong sometimes because the boundaries are moving targets and in the eye of the beholder. What’s cheeky in one setting or to one person is flirty in or to another. So women constantly risk getting it wrong, or getting it wrong to someone. So the consequences are always floating out there, worrying us, and sending us to the mall.
Indeed, this is why women have so many clothes! We need an all-purpose black skirt that does old fashioned, another one to do proper, and a third to do flirty… at the very least… and all in casual, business, and formal. And we need heels to go with each (stilettos = provocative, high heels = flirty, low heels = proper, etc, plus we need flats for the picnics and beach weddings etc). And we need pants that are hemmed to the right length for each of these pairs of shoes. You can’t wear black shoes with navy pants, so you’ll need to double up on all these things if you want any variety in your wardrobe. I could go on, but you get the picture.
Women’s closets are often mocked as a form of self-indulgence, shop-a-holicism, or narcissism. But this isn’t fair. Instead, if a woman is class-privileged enough, they reflect an (often unarticulated) understanding of just how complicated the rules are. If they’re not class-privileged enough, they can’t follow the rules and are punished for being, for example, “trashy” or “unprofessional.” It’s a difficult job that we impose on women and we’re all too often damned-if-we-do and damned-if-we-don’t.
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)
Justine Marie SherryI always get a crack up at "nude" dresses, etc (especially when Michelle Obama is wearing something peach, not nude) but when it comes to bras, I think the whole point is that you're supposed to wear something that matches your skin... so I mean seriously it actually kinda matters in a practical sense, not just a "you dumb mildly racist clothing designers don't you realize you're using the wrong word to describe colors."
Just not the Disney ones
tomnevels/flickr It was Book Week at the elementary school where I taught in Delhi, India. The third grade's theme for dress-up day was Indian mythology. When my girls came to me disappointed that they had to dress as princesses from the ancient stories, I was surprised. Indian princesses dress in silk and traditional ornaments, and most little girls love that! But their concern was the character. 'Why do the boys get to be heroes like Arjuna and Rama? Why can't I be a heroic woman? What did the princesses Draupadi and Sita do anyway?'
I dove into my memories for an appropriate character and then gathered my class and told them the story of the princess Chitrangada from an eastern kingdom of India. She was a skilled fighter and horsewoman, as good as or better than warriors in her kingdom. She eventually married the greatest warrior prince Arjuna (becoming one of his many wives). The girls (and boys, despite themselves) listened wide-eyed. On dress-up day, we had a couple of Princess Chitrangadas replete with armor, swords, and other battle gear.
One Dad's Ill-Fated Battle Against the Princesses But I was left wondering. Is a heroic woman always a battle-worthy one?
To understand where the girls' questions arose, and the need for Chitrangada's story, it's important to know that the Indian/Hindu epic mythological tales Ramayana, The Story of Rama and the Mahabharata are always told to children as male-centred stories. The prince is the hero and the story begins and ends with him. The princess is merely a natural aspect of the story—a prince finds and protects and loves one or more women along the way.
We don't spend much time on how Princess Sita felt or what Queen Draupadi thought. We don't start the stories with the women, nor do we end the stories with them. I suspect it's because the very stories themselves have changed as patriarchy grew stronger over the ages.
I wondered what the Story of Rama would sound like to little Indian kids if it didn't begin with Rama. What if it began with his wife, Princess Sita? I read several versions of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata to re-tell the stories of the princess in each. This is what I learned:
A true princess can live the plainest life possible because the gown and slippers don't matter.
Being a princess as the Disney consumer product definition goes meant nothing to Sita. Sita loved her husband Rama so deeply that when he was exiled from his kingdom, she chose to stick by him, leaving the wealth, the luxury, the princess status behind and living the harsh life of an ascetic woman in the forest. No beauty products, no rose and milk baths, no maids attending, no crystal-ware. For 14 years she washed her own clothes, grew her own food, cleaned her own hut, and slept on a mud floor happily, because she loved Rama, not his title. Sita was in a unique position: According to the rule of the exile she was not bound to leave the palace. But she chose to—that was the strength of her love.
A princess is a queen in the making. And a queen knows how to say 'no.'
After two exiles, one with Rama and one alone as a pregnant mother, and after bringing up their twins alone, Sita grieved at her husband's inability to trust her. When he refused to stand up for her and humiliated her by doubting her virtue in public twice, Sita said, 'Enough!' Perhaps the first feminist story ever, the Ramayana does not end 'happily ever after.' Sita walked away without looking back. Your 'no' is a valid choice. Make it when you need to.
A princess never relies on advertisements. She knows she is beautiful.
Watch Indian television for 30 minutes and you'll witness the frightening number of advertisements that bombard young Indian girls with fairness skin products. Being milky white as a means to a job, a date, a husband is promoted heavily in print and televised media. I have met eight year olds who felt ugly because they are dark-skinned. I have spoken to girls in Delhi schools about Princess Draupadi who was dark-skinned yet was perhaps the most coveted woman in Indian mythology. 'Princess Draupadi was miles from fair, but did that diminish her beauty? I have brown skin, and I'm proud of it. You should be too,' is what I tell them.
A princess does not cower in a corner when she is abused. She raises her voice and fights for justice.
Nothing could be more the need of the hour in India than the fire of the female spirit. Princess Draupadi was a queen when she was dragged to court and stripped. Her warrior husbands did not stand to protect her, for they said they were bound by a code of honor (patriarchal, no doubt). Draupadi cursed, fumed, and demanded her rights as a queen. For 14 years she waited, never allowing the memory of her abuse to be snuffed out. She was the catalyst for the greatest war in Indian mythology and her insult was avenged.
Indian stories have passed through the oral tradition down centuries. The more I read, the more I'm convinced that they have changed over time, and not for the better. We have much to re-claim and many princesses to bring back to life. Not the Disney ones. The real ones that lived in a real world just like ours, with all its light and shadows.
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Justine Marie SherryExcellent. Blueberries and Strawberries all day then.
Justine Marie SherryI like the girl smiling on the left. Nobody smiles in photos from 1911.
Three Yakama women. 1911
As with two previous examples, here and here, bear in mind that these are news headlines, not the editorial page. Also as in the previous two cases, the play and billing of the WSJ stories (and opposed to the details in the stories themselves) are more "Republican" than in the other two papers.
For years observers have noted the difference in tone and evident partisanship between the WSJ's news operations and its editorial pages. Essay question: Under Rupert Murdoch are we seeing a continued "harmonization" of the varied parts of the WSJ empire?
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I haven’t talked openly about race or racial difference on this blog before, but I actually think about it a lot. One of the most damning legacies of our racist history has been systematic libel against the minds of black and brown children (and adults for that matter). Meanwhile, in our culture, math is the ultimate signifier of intelligence. So the math classroom has heightened power, both to inflict injustice and to rectify it. Given this, plus the diversity of teachers and students, a comfortable cross-race conversation about racial matters is a must for the profession. In the spirit of contributing to that conversation, I offer
A Note to My Fellow White People
Guys, we have to chill out a little. It has to be possible for somebody to say to you, “that was ignorant,” or “that was racially offensive,” or even “that was racist,” without you flipping out, getting offended or defensive, or needing to be reassured you are not a horrible person. It’s not a good look, on any level: it’s not dignified, and it makes it impossible to have a productive conversation about race across racial lines.
I was at a cafe a couple months back trying to get some schoolwork done when I found myself distracted by a profoundly uncomfortable conversation at the next table. There was a white man in his early 50s and two black women, one close to his age and one closer to mine. They seemed to be sharing a familiar and friendly meal. Things started to go south when the man admitted to being afraid of a young black man on the street. The younger of the women said something to the effect of, “you might have work to do on that.”
Her tone was warm: she wasn’t being accusatory but rather seemed to be offering her words in the spirit of holding her friend to a high standard. But the man immediately became anxious, although his face and words were all smiles and jokes. His first response was that white people make him more uncomfortable than black people, as though he could re-establish his lost racial coolness with sufficiently loud declamations of prejudice against white people.
The women weren’t having it. “You’re being ignorant against white people now.” I interpreted their response as saying, “you can’t get off the hook with this diversionary tactic.” But he kept trying. His anxiety was as audible to me as a fire alarm, even when he wasn’t talking. I tried to concentrate on my math but I couldn’t get anything done.
Things stayed in this state, a tense, anxious impasse overlaid by a thin layer of too-eager conviviality and jokes, for about 20 minutes, till they got up to leave, no noticeable progress having been made in the conversation. At this point the man, in that same overly-eager joking tone, almost-but-not-quite-explicitly asked for reassurance that everybody was still his friend. They gave him the reassurance. On their way out, the younger woman leaned over to my table and apologized for her “ignorant friend.”
I’m not telling you this story to put the man down or call him ignorant. I don’t remember the context of the conversation and I don’t have my own opinion about it. Also, I think in all likelihood he’s a completely nice and decent person, and so are the women.
The point of the story is the man’s intense anxiety at being put on the spot racially, and the way that anxiety dominated both the conversation and its goals (so that what started as an attempt to raise consciousness was aborted, and turned into a reassurance fest), and the social and public space (so that the younger woman felt the need to apologize to a neighboring table).
Now I don’t fail to have empathy for him. If you are a white person with a modicum of sense and decency, you know that you are the beneficiary of an unjust history. (Shout out to Louis CK.) Just knowing that you’re benefiting is already a little uncomfortable to begin with. Feeling like you might be participating in that injustice can make the discomfort acute. I’ve been there many times.
But, guys, we’ve got to get it together! It is necessary to learn how to be with that discomfort and still function. First of all, the story I just told you is about a grown-a** man! Trying to prove how un-racist you are, and then needing to be coddled and preened so that you know the trouble is past, is unbefitting of the dignity of an adult. So is any other response aimed at removing the source of your discomfort rather than tolerating it – throwing a fit, acting defensive or offended, etc. Shouldn’t we aspire to some grace here?
Secondly, it makes it impossible for the conversation to advance! If we want to avoid participating in injustice we have to be willing to tolerate the possibility that we already are participating. Otherwise how will we learn what to avoid? In the anecdote I’ve recounted here, the man’s anxiety shut down the ability of the conversation to make any progress. He was blessed with friends who were willing to hold him to a higher standard and he was too busy freaking out to get the benefit of that! The bottom line question is, would you rather spend your time and energy proving how un-racist you are, or would you actually like to learn how to make the world better?
All of this puts me in mind of a much more public incident. In 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder gave a speech at the Dept. of Justice Black History Month program in which he said that Americans are afraid to talk about race and called upon us to do better. Multiple commentators immediately jumped down his throat.
Thereby proving his point.
The Attorney General made an effort to hold the nation to a higher standard. At the time, we didn’t react with grace or manifest any interest in growing.
How about now?
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IMO the best thing white teachers, or any teachers who find themselves teaching classes of black/brown students can do is to constantly hold their students to the same high standards they would hold their own biological children to. Giving these kids a high standard education is one of the few ways to equip these kids to deal with racism.
Justine Marie SherryThey call this the "canary in a mine" effect -- when you have a class that is super depressing/stressful/awful, students who feel like they "don't belong" leave first. But in reality? The class is painful and shitty for everyone -- the flight of minorities is a sign that everyone has a problem.
This article from TechCrunch seems mis-named, “No women in CS? Well, not for long!” The intro course at Stanford now has gender parity, which is terrific. But the article talks about how that isn’t translating into gender parity in the degree. Optimistic thinking is great, but ignoring the data isn’t.
Many students continue from 106A to further develop their skills in CS 106B. But those who want to major in computer science must continue from 106B to the daunting 107, often considered a “weeding” class to separate the wheat from the chaff before students can take upper-level courses.
Women do just as well as men in CS 106A and 106B but continue on to 107 in far fewer numbers. While many students, regardless of gender, drop the class, several students say that stereotypes, misconceptions, and lack of confidence cause women to drop the class in large numbers. The often anti-social, male-dominated culture is characterized by 107’s unofficial mantra of “dump your girlfriend before this class.”
via No Women In CS? Well, Not For Long | TechCrunch.
I can't express how cold it was... The cold was compounded by the fact that none of the buildings we visited were heated, which meant hour-long tours in cavernous, 30-degree indoor environments. It is quite extraordinary to have the Honored Guest Experience in such conditions: they're proudly showing you their latest technology or best library, and you can see your breath.Part of it is like nothing most of us have ever seen or experienced before. Schmidt, who is in her 20s, made the trip in the company of her father Eric, of Google, and former ambassador/governor Bill Richardson. Very much worth reading.
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The new Dominion expansion has ten “Knight” cards. Five are women, and all are wearing “realistic” armor. Here’s Dame Natalie:
Justine Marie SherryCountless freshman boys explaining to me why girls just aren´t good at math due to biology could also succeed at this conference venue.
Denim, disrupted.
![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/wrangler.jpg)
Wrangler via Fast Company Did you know about the scourge that is systematically sabotaging your beauty regimen? Did you know that the culprit is in your closet? Did you know that the culprit is, in fact, YOUR JEANS?
Apparently, yes: Your denim is out to get you. Specifically, by leaching all the youthful moisture straight from your skin with the crudest, cruelest weapon possible: your fashion. This, at least, according to the latest -- and also the most advanced, and also the most paradigm-shifting, and also the saddest -- leap forward in the field of Denim Technology: the moisturizing jean. "The pioneering skinny-fit style," Vogue UK announces of the denim disruption, "incorporates high-performance skincare ingredients to protect your legs from the dehydrating effects of denim."
The dehydrating effects of denim! Which is a problem I had no idea existed, but one that must exist given that it now has a high-tech solution!
The "pioneering" dungarees (unsurprising brand name: "Denim Spa") come in three "finishes" -- but instead of stonewash or indigo or what have you, Denim Spa offers Aloe Vera, Olive Extract, and Smooth Legs. The latter of which "aims to prevent cellulite." These finishes work their moisturizing magic by, essentially, working fatty substances into your skinny jeans: They incorporate such fashion-forward stuff as apricot kernel oil, passion fruit oil, rosehip oil, shea butter, and monoi de Tahiti directly into the weave of the denim. The ultimate convergence, apparently, will blend lotion and legwear.
Which makes sense: If wearing jeans systematically sucks the moisture from your legs, the most obvious retaliation is simply to buy jeans that come pre-lathered in butter. Your denim-dry skin will have no choice but to rehydrate, and you will once again be supple and un-arid! Denim Spa's beauty-products-cum-fashion-statements will cost you £85 -- about $136 U.S. dollars -- which is, of course, a small price to pay to arm yourself for a War on Denim.
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Want to troll your federal government? It just got a lot more difficult.
![[optional image description]](http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/science/comp_jan-2013_3.jpeg)
Whitehouse.gov First of all, it should be said: Hahahahahahahaha. The White House -- the seat of federal power in the United States, the infrastructure behind the leader of the free world, the place so powerful and notable that even Aaron Sorkin wrote about it -- has been vanquished by a Death Star.
Well, pretty much. In September 2011, the White House launched "We the People," an online initiative designed to bring a digital spin to citizens' right to petition the government. The site allowed citizens to start and spread petitions, promising that any entreaties that received more than 5,000 signatures would receive consideration -- in the form of an "official response" -- from the White House. And the site enjoyed steady growth -- so much so that, in October 2011, the White House upped the number of signatures required to receive an official response from 5,000 to 25,000. In late 2012, however, the site -- driven in part by petitions to allow a selection of states to secede from the Union and to, yep, construct an $850,000,000,000,000,000, Star Wars-style Death Star -- saw a surge. Not only in terms of the number of users it registered (2.4 million) and signatures it collected (4.9 million), but also in terms of the number of requests it generated. The last two months of 2012, apparently, saw some 73,000 new petitions.
So, late yesterday, the White House admitted simultaneous victory and defeat for its "We the People" initiative, announcing that the new signature threshold will be, going forward, a whopping 100,000. The window for signature-gathering won't change: To garner a White House response, a petition needs to get that six-digit support within just 30 days.
You could read the changing of the threshold as the White House frames it: "a good problem to have," the result of the fact that the petition site's popularity "exceeded our wildest expectations," an action designed by busy people doing important things "to ensure we're able to continue to give the most popular ideas the time they deserve." Or you could read the change more like New York magazine does: as the White House acknowledging that its petition site "has become ridiculous."
But you also don't have to choose, because both things are true. "We the People," on the one hand -- by way of the petitions that have populated it -- is totally, ridiculously absurd. There was the Death Star request. And the secession movement. And the petition to deport British-born CNN host Piers Morgan. And the entreaty to designate and protect the Sasquatch as an indigenous species. And the appeal to nationalize the Twinkie. The "We the People" site has received, the White House says, 141,310 petitions over the course of its young existence. And many of those have been, effectively, hoaxes -- elaborate yet low-investment jokes played by citizens rising up, coming together, and exercising their constitutional right to troll.
But the petitions weren't all like that: Though, unsurprisingly, it was the Death Stars and Bigfoots that ended up with the bulk of attention to the site and its service, "We the People" has also fielded an urgently legitimate petition to legally recognize the Westboro Baptist Church as a hate group -- a request that, since its mid-December creation, has received more than 321,000 signatures. The Administration responded, in detail, to a petition to "VETO the SOPA bill and any other future bills that threaten to diminish the free flow of information." It has made moves to improve the regulation and oversight of commercial breeders in response to a petition to crack down on puppy mills. And late last week, in a petition reply that compensated for its lack of real-world policy implications with a broader policy of Nerdy Delightfulness, the White House issued a comically detailed, Star Wars reference-laden response to the Death Star petition. (Official title: "This Isn't the Petition Response You're Looking For.")
The Administration has also gotten flak, though -- for selective answering and long response times (the Westboro petition, having long passed its "merits a response" threshold, has yet to receive a White House reply), for boilerplate answers (the petition to reduce gun violence), for evasive replies (the petition to legalize marijuana). As Harvard's JH Snider argued in 2011, "We the People" will likely have "a short shelf life" for the same reason so many political initiatives have short shelf lives: because the interests of the public and elected officials are misaligned. "The public," Snider noted, "is inclined to ask politicians to take controversial stands that politicians have no rational self-interest in taking."
This could well prove accurate. But it's worth remembering, for all the spottiness, that these digital petitions are a relatively new platform -- the familiar petition, under the power of network effects -- and, like any new technology, they'll inevitably have their growing pains before they mature into a (relatively) finalized form. Much of that maturing, in this case, will have less to do with the technology itself and more to do with its users -- with people, essentially, figuring out how to make productive use of it. And with those people becoming more and more acclimated to a digitally networked world. Though the Administration certainly has some interest in being evasive or coy or otherwise engaging in transparency theater -- and though it will certainly, at times, act on that interest -- "We the People" offers at least the potential for nuanced dialogue. In politics as in most things, good faith begets good faith. We get -- even, and especially, in the digital world -- the government we deserve.
The White House's digital petitions, for better or for worse, represent something rare in a republican democracy: direct interaction with the federal government. Even -- and, again, especially -- in a networked communications environment, that kind of explicit engagement is implicitly valuable. We have had, for the most part, two primary ways of making our opinions known, en masse, to the government that makes decisions on our behalf: voting and polling. Both are blunt instruments, and both are, for various obvious reasons, unsatisfactory as mechanisms of interaction with the government. We have had analog petitions, of course, but much of the actual, day-to-day, one-to-many communications between citizens and their government ends up mediated by, yes, the media. Which is unsatisfactory for a host of similarly obvious reasons.
But the online petition -- the petition that swells up, for the most part, from the greenest of the grassroots -- is a new and relatively efficient mechanism for interaction. Like voting, it offers citizens an explicit and active way to communicate their political desires. Unlike voting, it focuses on issues rather than representatives, and is unconstrained by mandated schedules. Like polling, it assesses public opinion. Unlike polling, it puts the onus on citizens to determine which issues and ideas are worthy of that assessment. The historian and media theorist Michael Schudson argues, convincingly, that one of the most significant inventions in the course of American democracy was the Australian ballot -- the secret ballot. That single, technological improvement, he says, by transforming voting from a public act to a private one, "shifted the center of political gravity from party to voter." It "elevated the individual, educated, rational voter as the model citizen."
The e-petition has the potential to have the opposite impact in a newly networked world: to re-shift politics away from that individualistic orientation. The secret ballot, for all its many benefits, also invested political activity with an aura of secrecy and defensiveness: my vote, my deeply held belief, my thing-you-don't-discuss-in-polite-company. "We the People," on the other hand, reframes and returns the political default to "public." The e-petition, a funnel from me to you, and from us to our government, is direct and participatory and in many ways pretty much exactly what the Founders were likely thinking of when they enshrined "the right to petition" as one of the precious few that would be guaranteed to themselves and to future citizens.
Well, what they were thinking ... minus a Death Star.
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When your six year old asks if the sun is going to explode someday, the answer is not “yes.”
No matter how good the data are.
Justine Marie SherryThis is all of Europe. Grids, folks, Grids.
and the address is something like “Quaint Cottage, Knoll Hill, Westfordshirebog, Coventry, United Kingdom”
(seriously HOW DO YOU PEOPLE FIND EACH OTHER???)
Downton Abbey Character Name Guide
Just jumping in to Downton Abbey? Or just bad at remembering people? Here’s the fastest, simplest character primer.
I hope this helps.
From the BPL molasses collection. Posted under this CC license.
On an unseasonably warm January 15, 1919, a 50-foot-high storage tank of molasses - meant to be turned into rum in the rush before Prohibition - burst on Commercial Street in the North End, creating a giant wave of sticky brown death that destroyed buildings, bent the el and killed 21 people.
Coffee and computing go hand in hand. The world’s first live streaming webcam was pointed at a coffee pot in the Cambridge University Computer Lab’s Trojan Room (yes, Americans, I know you think that sounds funny), back in the days when it was on a shared site in the centre of Cambridge and none of us had even heard of the internet.
It was 1991. A young Quentin Stafford-Fraser was researching ATM networks in the Trojan Room, and drinking too much coffee. Other people in the lab also liked fresh coffee, but there was only one coffee machine between 15 researchers, it was a long walk up an awful lot of stairs to get to the Trojan Room, and all too often, the pot was empty and the walk upstairs wasted. (I think “wasted” is pushing it a bit far. Quentin’s very good conversation.)
Ever practical, Quentin pointed a camera at the Trojan Room coffee pot, hooked it up to a video frame grabber the ATM researchers were using, got Paul Jardetzky to write some server software, and wrote the client software for it himself. Researchers downstairs could now ping the coffee pot to see whether there was anything in it. “The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.”
Quentin didn’t realise it at the time, but he had laid the grounds (badoom tish) for the world’s first webcam. In 1993, the <img> tag was added to HTML, meaning you could embed pictures on a webpage. The same year, two more researchers at the lab, Dan Gordon and Martyn Johnson, made changes to the original coffee pot setup to allow it to respond to requests from the internet, and xcoffee became the first ever live webcam.
The Trojan Room Coffee Pot stayed in place (and maintained an online presence: in 1996 it got its millionth hit, and journalist Steve Farrar noted that it had had more ‘visitors’ than King’s College Chapel and was therefore the number one tourist attraction in East Anglia) until 2001, when the University Computer Lab was moved out of its ramshackle old site to a shiny new building in West Cambridge. I was lucky enough to be at the university just before the move, and drank a couple of cups of coffee from the machine, courtesy of friends at the lab. (Quentin is right about the greyscale thing. Historic it might have been, but it was bloody awful coffee.) Eventually, the pot was auctioned on eBay to raise money for coffee-making in the new lab; Der Spiegel Online bought it for £3350. Apparently, Krups refurbished it free of charge, and it’s still making greyscale coffee for an office full of German journalists.
Anyway. This long preamble doesn’t have much to do with the Pi. (About an hour after I originally posted this, Barney Livingston pointed out on Twitter that The Trojan Room Coffee Server was an Acorn Archimedes, so shares its ARM processor heritage with the Pi.) But it does demonstrate that projects involving coffee and computers have a long and storied history in this part of the world. Technology has moved on, but the coffee is still supremely important. So Sacha Wolter from Deutsche Telekom has incorporated a Raspberry Pi into his coffee machine. It’s a bit more sophisticated than the Trojan Room Coffee Pot; Sacha’s coffee machine rings him up when the coffee’s ready, and if Sacha places a call to the machine, it’ll get a pot ready for his arrival.
Sadly, Sacha hasn’t made the code available, but he does talk some more about the project in this blog post, and points the intrigued at the Pi4J project, which is meant to bridge between native libraries and Java for full access to the Raspberry Pi.
And back in the UK, Quentin Stafford-Fraser is still pratting about with webcams; those of you with long memories might recall this grab-bag from last summer which featured him…pratting about with webcams. More power to your history-making elbow, Quentin.
It’s a brave new world out there. The state will be endorsing and licensing an activity that is still officially illegal according to the Federal Government. Is there any chance that we can get a real Cascadia out of this?
Or better yet, could someone I know take this job just so I get to hear about how friggin weird it is?
Those are some choice last words, Captain Oates. And a great sweater to boot.
From submitter laurielover1912
This is Captain Lawrence Oates, a member of Captain Scott’s doomed Antarctic expedition of 1910-1912. Oates was a cavalry officer who was in charge of the ponies on the expedition. I’ve had a huge historical crush on him for years and have him to blame for my username. Oates is best remembered for walking out into the blizzard to his death when he couldn’t continue due to the pain he was in, thereby giving his friends more chance of pulling through (sadly they didn’t). Just before leaving the tent, he famously spoke the words: ‘I’m just going outside and may be some time.’ The epitome of the competent but reserved English hero, he was also one very fine looking man.
Students are busting down the doors at all of the nation’s top computer science programs.
At UW, Winter Quarter enrollment in CSE 142 (“CS-1,” the first introductory course) is 810; the previous all-time high was 659. And 1/3 of the students are women, also an all-time high. Enrollment in CSE 143 (“CS-2,” the second introductory course) is 530, also an all-time high.
Enrollment varies from quarter to quarter. One way to understand the long-term picture is to graph a 1-year rolling total. CSE 142 enrolled 2,070 students in the past year; CSE 143 enrolled 1,340; for a total of 3,410 students in these two courses during the past year.
Wowzers!
Dave Wilkinson performed some back-of-an-envelope statistical calculations to determine the probabilities of various gender balances if a conference line-up of 15 speakers were selected in a gender-blind process, leading to this dramatic conclusion:
So, the probability of having 15 men and 0 women is 3.5% given 20% of the tech world are women. A rather unlikely outcome. What is more interesting is that the probability of having more than 3 women is 35.4%. Therefore, a conference with a selection process that is blind to gender is 10 times more likely to over-represent women than to not represent women at all.
Keep that in mind next time someone claims an all-male speaker selection is an expected occurrence in an industry free from discrimination.
