May 2012
11 posts
I just discovered a wicked awesome cafe full of studious, prose producing academic people — the kind who read books on paper sometimes — at 24th and Folsom in the Mission. Extension cords! Wifi! Natural light! A garden patio! Nearby inexpensive food!
Problem is that getting there requires Caltrain to BART transfer. This process involves buying two separate transportation tickets,...
Signs of life: the people who scan Google Books →
Spotted a fingertip in Dewey & Tufts’ Ethics
Watching Ted Turner being interviewed by Piers Morgan on CNN and the poor guy seems like he’s self-lobotomizing to be politic. Morgan asks if he likes what he’s seeing on CNN and if he watches it. Turner says he definitely watches and with a pause and awkward glance askance he says he likes a lot of what he sees. Later, Turner is talking about watching CNN International and he’s...
Browsing for Hindi stuff, I found an old textbook in Google books with the bored students’ doodles scanned and preserved.
“On “the corruption of indicators:” “The more any quantitative...”
– Donald Campbell (1976) quoted by Howard Becker in Writing for Social Scientists
This was being written in the 1970s, and then by the 1990s we were well into audit culture, and now there’s the “quantified self” and the drive to quantify teacher quality through kid test scores....
April 2012
24 posts
BOSTON REVIEW: Locking Down an American Workforce →
Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced…
“A second way to break with tradition and introduce new norms is via the...”
– Ford Foundation funded 1962 book The Achieving Society by David McClelland [[how to use feminism to make the world safe for western modernity]]
How to learn a foreign language >> Savage Minds →
What Ms. Chen did that was so different from my previous teachers was to have us first spend lots of time listening to audio of the new lesson. Doing this before we had studied the vocabulary or the grammar. Just listen. Use our knowledge of the language to try to guess the meaning. Like a baby. Only after we had listened numerous times, tried to write down what we heard, and tried to guess the...
Google is so sweet. Even though I searched for “affect” it gives me results for “effect” as well, worried that I might be confused.
Cockroaches write their dissertations faster when... →
I commented at the writing group today that I’m writing a lot more today than I have in a week. My friend, a new addition to the group and a neuroscientist, said that it’s social facilitation effect.
What?
Cockroaches who are running through a maze run faster when they’re being watched by other cockroaches. <end science>
By implication, cockroaches write dissertations...
Will drinking make me a better problem solver?
That’s what journalists imply in their article Drinking on the Job? Please Do Say These Employers. It’s based on a study by University of Illinois at Chicago psychologists who found that inebriated people (at a 0.075 blood alcohol content level) solved more problems in a fixed amount of time. (The problems were on a “Remote Association Test.” I don’t know what that...
“9. Lisa Frank is not the name of a woman, it is the name of a movement, a...”
– From 10 things 90s kids will have to explain to their children. Cracked me up and gave me the warm and fuzzies. Is it messed up that this framing of Lisa Frank reminded me of SF design culture? I wonder if rich children of the 2010s get Noguchi coffee tables and vintage cameras.
Hiltzik: Let's bring back the idea of a free UC... →
Spread this around. Plan to fix the UC by offering free education that students pay for with 5% of their salary after graduating for 20 years.
latimes:
Tuition increases are threatening to place a University of California education out of the reach of working-class and middle-class students.
March 2012
22 posts
“The transformation of the idea of justice into the industry of human rights has...”
– Arundhati Roy in Outlook India, “Capitalism: A Ghost Story”
Arundhati Roy studied in Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture, so she’s particularly interesting to me as a designer gone rogue!
“Had Daisey left the unionists out of his show, he would have painted an...”
– Al Bradbury on This American Life and what counts for truth on that show
I was talking with my friend Martha about this the other day. Kony doesn’t have any bold factual errors, but stitches together a thinly researched, simplistic narrative that is grossly untrue in the impression it leave...
“A TED talk, at this point, is the cultural equivalent of a patent: a private...”
– How TED makes ideas smaller by Megan Garber
I think that TED takes its legitimacy precisely because of how patents and intellectual property are valued in many spheres over intellectual *exchange*. Knowledge can and has been lots of things, in addition to “public concepts”: secrets that...
Gandhi never said "be the change," Mandela never... →
Gandhi’s words have been tweaked a little too in recent years. Perhaps you’ve noticed a bumper sticker that purports to quote him: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” When you first come across it, this does sound like something Gandhi would have said. But when you think about it a little, it starts to sound more like … a bumper sticker. Displayed brightly on the back of a Prius,...
Gave up and started watching Invisible Children so I know what the controversy is all about. It is quite painful to watch. Others will do a better job of chronicling the problems with this video and I won’t add to that. But if the substance of style says something about the broader values structuring an expression, then these are my red flags.
From the start, I’m watching a woman...
White Savior Industrial Complex →
But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are...
Whitney Biennial Breaks with Corporate Sponsors;... →
I read this hopefully, jubilantly, shocked and pleased at the clear and unwavering articulation of the problem. Then I recognized that voice — that feeling. Must be the Yes Men.
If not the Yes Men, then their spiritual kin. Nobody has yet claimed responsibility: New York Times: Whitney Biennial Punk’d In any sense of the word.
alexainslie:
“The Whitney is proud to be able to...