the contrary flâneuse

Netizen Report: Uprising Edition

2012-01-26T21:21:00.000-08:00

Photo by Yogesh Mhatre

Most of this report was researched and written by Weiping Li, Mera Szendro Bok, and edited by Sarah Myers.

Netizens around the world took collective action with a mass Internet blackout on January 18 to protest the United States' Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act, which, in its effort to enforce copyright online, would have compelled Internet service providers and platforms to monitor and censor their users or risk being blocked or penalized in the United States, and would have weakened the Internet's domain name system, among other things. Global Voices and Global Voices Advocacy participated in the protest along with over 7,000 websites, including Mozilla, Wikipedia, Reddit, Flickr, TwitPic, Boing Boing. Advocacy groups including Public Knowledge and Free Press blacked out their sites and posted information about how to get involved in the fight against these bills.

Many protest websites tracked the bill's Congressional Representatives' supporters, ultimately pressuring many representatives to withdraw their support. In the end, Congressman Lamar Smith, SOPA's sponsor, pulled the bill and said it would not go to a vote until “issues are addressed”. Inspired by the American protests, netizens took action around the world on digital rights, including Chinese activists. An article in Ars Technica neatly summed up the impact of the legislation on the rest of the world.

After SOPA and PIPA’s Death

Now it seems that SOPA and PIPA are dead. But concerns about illegal file-sharing persist, and commentators warn that similar bills may be reincarnated. Ben Huh, The CEO of I Can Has Cheezburger?, states that we still have more work to do in order to defend Internet freedom and sustain the engine of netizen mobilization. His opinions echo an article by Alex Howard on O’Reilly Radar, which argues that citizens need to band together to work out alternatives to SOPA. Internet and Politics guru Micah Sifry discusses the broader political environment that produced the bills, and the need for Internet companies and netizens to work for political reform. Internet law Professor Yochai Benkler offers seven lessons and four proposals on where we go from here.

Censorship

Major Chinese cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen have enforced a registration system that requires users to register their real name on Weibo, the prominent Chinese microblog. Although the new regulation has been widely criticized by Chinese netizens, including Pony Ma (Ma Hauteng), the founder of Chinese Internet service company Tencent, the Chinese authority still plans to implement the rule in other parts of the country.

In contrast, South Korea, which adopted online real-name registration in 2007, has taken steps to abandon the practice. Having faced criticisms of infringing freedom of expression and concerns over hacking, some Internet companies have decided to stop asking customers’ resident numbers, and the Korea Communications Commission is also planning to abandon the real-name registration requirement.

Surveillance

The Argentinean government is launching a program to build a national biometric service named “the Federal System of Biometric Identification (SIBIOS)“. This system combines Argentinean citizens’ biometric information with other databases and be used by law enforcement. According to Katitza Rodriguez’s report for Global Voices Advocacy, the information gathered through the SIBIOS system would include not only biometric identifiers but also “an individual's digital image, civil status, blood type, and key background information”. The program has raised serious concerns over the government’s unrestrained power to surveil its people.

Sprint has promised to remove CarrierIQ tracking software from the cell phones using its network, making good on its word to improve security for its users.

To fight against the government’s intrusion into netizens’ personal Internet information, EFF and ACLU filed an appeal to challenge the U.S. district court’s decision to refuse disclosure of all orders in the Twitter/Wikileaks case.

A hacked document revealing that RIM, Nokia, and Apple provided the Indian government backdoor access to users’ communications may be fake. The three companies and security company Symantec have argued this document was full of incorrect information, and is not from the Indian directorate general of military intelligence.

Netizen activism

A recent study found that in Colombia, the Internet is changing the media landscape. The research pointed out that online journalism emphasizes local perspectives and incorporates more interaction with readers.

According to the Statistical Report on Internet Development published by the China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), the number of Chinese Internet users hit 513 million in 2011, which is almost equivalent to the number of Twitter users. Half of the the 513 million netizens are microblog users.

Is citizen journalism rising in China? Maybe. With the prevalence of digital cameras, videos, and social media, more and more Chinese citizens shoot newsworthy events and are uploading the clips to websites. Media scholars expect this trend may promote societal progress.

Want to know more about hacktivists who often hit the Internet activism headlines? This documentary may provide the audience with insight into hacktivist group Anomymous.

Sovereigns of Cyberspace

Twitter has announced that it now has the capability to restrict content from appearing in certain countries. The company says this will allow it to comply with local laws in different countries without having to remove content globally. When content is restricted in this way, the action will be reported to users through the Chilling Effects website.

Twitter also acquired a start-up company which has developed a service to summarize social media content and solve the information-overload problem.

Google announcement of an “upgrade” of its privacy policy and terms of service that integrates user information across its search engine, GMail, YouTube and its 57 other services stirred criticism from privacy groups and some members of Congress. In the weeks before the announcement, Google launched a “Good to Know” campaign to educate the public on how to stay safe online. Meanwhile, Google is also readjusting its China business strategy. Setting its past confrontations with the Chinese government over censorship aside, Google has decided not to miss out on this big market and plans to introduce more services.

And much more: read the complete report at Netizen Report: Uprising Edition

The Art of Mastering Many Tongues

2012-01-26T12:34:00.000-08:00

Peter Constantine in the New York Times Book Review writes

Among the most surprising qualities of “Babel No More,” Michael Erard’s globe-trekking adventure in search of the world’s virtuosos of language learning, is that a book dealing with language acquisition and polyglot linguistics can be so gripping. But indeed it is — part travelogue, part science lesson, part intellectual investigation, it is an entertaining, informative survey of some of the most fascinating polyglots of our time.

How is it, Erard asks, that certain people are able to accumulate what for the average person is a daunting number of languages? What are the secrets of polyglots who can master 6, 26, 96 languages? What are their quirks and attitudes? Are their brains wired differently from ours?

Erard, a journalist who writes frequently on language and whose previous book was “Um . . . : Slips, Stumbles, and Verbal Blunders, and What They Mean,” begins by visiting Bologna, Italy, the hometown of one of history’s most distinguished polyglots, the 19th-century cardinal Giuseppe Mezzofanti. The cardinal is said to have known 45, 50, 58 or even more languages, depending on whom you ask. Victorian travelers who met him at ecclesiastical banquets reported that he affably conversed in all directions with foreign visitors in languages ranging from French, German and Arabic to Algonquin and “Californian.” (Lord Byron, who challenged the cardinal to a multilingual contest of profanities, was not only summarily defeated but walked away from the contest having learned a number of new Cockney gibes.)

The Art of Mastering Many Tongues, 3 Quarks Daily. More here.

Assorted links, January 20

2012-01-21T11:58:00.000-08:00

Assorted links from economics professor and author (Creative Destruction) Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolution covering personal computing, economy and spending, a protest strategy, Facebook's timeline and a possibly prescient 2006 post about future generations paying for deficits

1. The rise and fall of personal computing.

2. How well has Japan really been doing?

3. Is health care spending finally under control?

4. How to dominate a metro station.

5. A conspiracy theory about how timeline is so bad.

6. 2006 Marginal Revolution post on whether future generations pay for deficits.

The week the web changed Washington - O'Reilly Radar

2012-01-21T00:38:00.000-08:00

SOPA = Stop Online Productivity Altogether. Chalk one - and a big one - up for Electronic Civil Disobedience and the League of Digital Ankle Biters. Does this qualify as Occupying the Internet?

"Think about that for just a second: A well-organized, well-funded, well-connected, well-experienced lobbying effort on Capitol Hill was outflanked by an ad-hoc group of rank amateurs, most of whom were operating independent of one another and on their spare time. Regardless where you stand on the issue — and effective copyright protection is an important issue — this is very good news for the future of civic engagement."

The week the web changed Washington - O'Reilly Radar

'via Blog this'

STOP SOPA: #SOPASTRIKE Jan18

2012-01-18T07:28:00.001-08:00

My favorire "stop sopa" page is Zachary Johnson's shadowbox with the moving light (just move your cursor) on Zachstronaut. Adding this one to my feed reader... tomorrow. Today .....

Sites are striking in all different ways, but they are united by this: do the biggest thing you possibly can and drive contacts to Congress. *Put the source code for this page your site* ~ it's my main page at Mountainair Online (the web page). I have no control over blog policies. I'm not really up to tinker with source code to show a black out page on my blogs. So I am settling for posting information and exhortations (like this one). Except for following #sopastrike on Twitter and @fightfortheftr) and Reddit, I'm staying off public pages today. No Facebook or

Personal blackouts seem to be running either 24 hours (midnight to midnight) or 8AM EST to 8PM EST. Major supporting sites like Wikipedia, WordPress, Google, Internet Archive (+ Wayback Machine), Electronic Frontier Foundation, Tucows and many, many more are striking for 24 hours. Looked like a major slow down on Facebook when I checked (before 8 am).

What can you do to support the strike if you don't have a blog or web page, can't blog and RT #sopastrike stories? Make a call; sign the petition; learn more; the action of the hour is to speak out. Write a letter to the editor of your local paper, opposing the bills. Contact local news stations and let them know that this is an issue worth covering. And there is still email, what they could be coming after next...

Today's Google search page:

Tell Congress: Please don't censor the web!

Invisible Cities

2012-01-03T07:00:00.000-08:00

Artwork series by Colleen Corradi Brannigan based on Italo Calvino's "novel," Invisible Cities (excerpts)

Invisible Cities - but does it float

As many American cities as possible

2011-12-09T16:45:00.001-08:00

Would cities be a places along the way topic or a one for flâneuse? Flip a coin. Un coup de dés jamais n'obolira le hasard. Next city post goes to the other. Maybe. Depends on what it is. Now, to post and get back to reading these gems. I need a cityspace break in the worst way today.

Mariana Valverde (Toronto): Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance. Dean Stansel (FGCU): Why Some Cities Are Growing and Others Shrinking. Michelle Wilde Anderson (UC-Berkeley): Dissolving Cities. From The American Conservative, a symposium on Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

From n+1, the City by City project gathers reports from as many American cities as possible, to see how things are going and what can be done, including Baltimore, Milwaukee, Northern Kentucky, Greensboro, theDistrict of Columbia, Cincinnati, Seattle, and Chicago. Why city rankings always get it wrong: Happiest cities, most livable cities, loneliest cities — the Web's filled with lists. Why do cities get so little respect from state and national governments?

An interview with Richard Florida, author of Who’s Your City? How the Creative Economy is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life. Joel Kotkin on the demise of the luxury city. Variety show: A new way to measure a city’s diversity. Ryan Avent on one path to better jobs: More density in cities. Nate Berg on defining cities in a metropolitan world.

Are freeways doomed? Several cities are tearing down highways, creating bold new public spaces — and building a future without cars. Suburban hip is where it’s at: UBS might like Manhattan — but for all the talk of an urban renaissance, most growth is happening beyond the city. Could you actually be hurting the environment by going green and moving to the suburbs?

"As many American cities as possible" at Omivore, the Book Forum blog

The Secret Lives of the Brain

2011-11-20T11:15:00.001-08:00

A multiple source ~ YouTube, The Guardian, WSJ, Wikipedia and Eagleman's own website ~ mashup on an intriguing topic, being incognito even from ourselves, How very flânerie-apropos... to stroll not just the streets exploring levels above and below but to explore the mind as well, la vraie chambre double

ForaTv just uploaded a video:

The Secret Lives of the Brain

Complete video at: http://fora.tv/2011/11/02/David_Eagleman_Will_We_Ever_Understand_the_Brain; audio clip from book,

David Eagleman, neuroscientist and author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain (something less than a rave review from The Guardian), discusses the relatively minor role that the conscious mind plays in comparison to the rest of the brain. "The conscious part is like a stowaway on a transatlantic steamship that's taking credit for the whole journey without acknowledging the engineering underfoot," he says.

As neuroscientists are learning more and more about our body's hidden frontier, we have gained fleeting insights into our own intuition, habits and seemingly unexplainable preferences. Can we solve those mysteries by creating a complete computer model of our brain? Or, is the brain an unsolvable puzzle? Two leading neuroscientists discuss these question and more as we look into the neurology of the brain.

David Eagleman's previous book, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, was a delightful collection of short fables, each offering a wish-fulfillment image of life after death in which the wish turns out to contain its own perverse consequences. The fable principle was grounded in a nicely ironic psychology, subtly underpinned by Eagleman's own profession, neuroscience. Using fiction, Eagleman found a neat way of revealing how the mind cannot escape the contradictions of its underlying construction.

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist and a fiction ... More

Taking a (Nature & Poetry) Walk to Remember

2011-11-12T12:06:00.000-08:00

#Mountainair is not urban. Of course not. How obvious can a statement get? Yet the organizing idea here and indeed a multitude of ideas from related areas: urban walking; freestyle walking; urban walking tours, art and poetry walks. Community planning and design, especially of public spaces, can encourage walking. This walk described here surely calls to the Manzano Mountain Art Council and iCreate, inviting the addition of public art. Miriam Sagan's Santa Fe Community College poetry posts come to mind too.

It's time to update Mountainair's Comprehensive Plan:

Sameer Reddy in the Wall Street Journal writes:

Nature and poetry share a long and loving history, as Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Ralph Waldo Emerson's seminal essay "Nature," can attest. So when the New York Botanical Garden was planning the dedication program for its Thain Family Forest, a lush swath of newly restored old-growth forest in the garden's northwest corner, it found a natural partner in the Poetry Society of America.

The Poetry Society, in turn, commissioned Jon Cotner, the author, with Andy Fitch, of "Ten Walks/Two Talks" and the creator of various urban walking initiatives, to design an experience for Garden visitors. He devised "Poem Forest," the goal being to re-introduce them to one of the area's few remaining pockets of 17th-century woodland.

Beginning last weekend and concluding this Saturday and Sunday, the public has the chance to walk the Sweetgum Trail, stopping at 15 spots along the path where they can enunciate a selection of poetic fragments that resonate with the landscape and focus the senses. The lines have been sourced from a diverse group of poets who share an attunement to the wonders of the natural world.

Taking a Walk to Remember. More here.

Temporary Insanity: 10 Lessons Learned from NanoWriMo — Happenchance

2011-11-06T20:46:00.000-08:00

A familiar story. I stumbled over it 7 years ago, not completing the first year but coming back every year thereafter (a few reluctantly) and completely all of them. Some people take exotic vacations, others might schedule annual assignation. I NaNo just to do it, for a lark, and with no ambitions to contribute a novel I probably would not want to read to the many already out there in that category.

The points raised here are good ones: just doing it improves your focus and any other writing you do. Multiple blogging and social media, content as well as commenting, promote scattered writing: here a post there a comment here a tweet there a share. Blogs and other writing might suffer this month but will benefit in the long run.

"I stumbled across something called Nanowrimo: National Novel Writing Month. The task is this: write a 50,000 word novel in one month. This averages out to 1,667 words a day.

After your month is up, you copy and paste your text into a little word counter. If you reach the goal, nothing really happens except that you’ve written 50,000 words in a month. Nanowrimo is free and offers plenty of forums for people to talk about their WIP (work in progress).

Most people who start don’t finish. In 2008, there were 119,301 participants and 21,683 winners."

Temporary Insanity: 10 Lessons Learned from NanoWriMo — Happenchance

'via Blog this'

Gratuitous Graffiti: Robot Makes Random Wall Tags

2011-11-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

Makes more sense than any number of projects, concepts, delusions, attitudes, notions and so... some even encountered this very day by a bemused and bothered flâneuse. This is how best to deal with them.

Graffiti takes time whether you’re an amateur or a seasoned expert. This crazy robot lets you sit back with a cold beer while it goes at the work of tagging an entire wall with your choice of spray paint. The drawback, of course, is that it’s a completely random process involving a wildly waving spray paint arm and a bunch of shapeless scribbles. But hey, at least you’ll avoid that miserable sore finger that comes from holding down the paint can button for too long

The Senseless Drawing Bot was invented by So Kanno and Takahiro Yamaguchi for the singular purpose of scribbling random lines and swirls of paint on your chosen surface. The bot wheels itself back and forth in a straight line, swinging its metal arm and creating one-of-a-kind works of robot art.

We hear you out there asking “What’s the point?” But like so many other creative works out there, there’s no real answer to that. The Senseless Drawing Bot seems to exist solely to be weird, funny and different than most of the other graffiti projects out there.

Gratuitous Graffiti: Robot Makes Random Wall Tags and more good stuff from the Web Urbanist, a site the flâneuse adores, especially on those days when just being contrary is not enough

Best of TED, Nov 2, 2011

2011-11-02T17:44:00.000-07:00

This week, meet the molecule that could make us act morally ... explore two art projects about storytelling ... check in on the open-source future of science ...

What drives our desire to behave morally? Neuroeconomist Paul Zak makes the case for a hormone called oxytocin (he calls it "the moral molecule"). Watch now >>

After he ended up on an FBI watch list, artist Hasan Elahi was advised by local agents to let them know when he was traveling. He did that ... and more. Watch now >>

With scissors and paper, Béatrice Coron creates intricate worlds. Striding onstage in a glorious cape cut from Tyvek, she details her creative process. Watch now >>

How does cancer know it's cancer? At Jay Bradner's lab, they found (and shared)
a molecule that might be the answer. An inspiring look at the open-source future of medical research. Watch now >>

World Lit Mags

2011-10-24T14:26:00.000-07:00

The Review Review's lit mag news goes global this issue ~ but without interfering with usual interviews, book reviews, writing and publishing tips ~ featuring Flash Fiction and what it's about.

Firstly, it's not easy to fund a literary magazine when your finances are being bankrolled by the CIA. But Transition, a journal founded in Kampala, Uganda, has faced this very challenge and many others, ultimately gaining attention from Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and Ghani, I am slightly older, but still slightly foolish. That's why I'm still on it."

Read the rest at World Lit Mags

'via Blog this'

"Rose by Any Other Name"

2011-10-24T09:22:00.000-07:00

Umberto Eco on translation as negotiation, language and meaning. Read it. Yet more Eco on Porta Ludovica. Quotes and more: Eco is so quotable.... and of course, all PL is yet another irresistible item for the ravenous feed reader

Eco as reader of Colin Wilson

When all the archetypes burst out shamelessly, we plumb the depths of Homeric profundity. Two cliches make us laugh but a hundred cliches moves us because we sense dimly that the cliches are talking among themselves, celebrating a reunion . . . Just as the extreme of pain meets sensual pleasure, and the extreme of perversion borders on mystical energy, so too the extreme of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the Sublime.

-- "Casablanca: Cult Movies and Intertextual Collage" (1984) from Travels in Hyperreality

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would have not written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.

-- Postscript to The Name of the Rose (1984)

Eco - Writings: "Rose by Any Other Name"

'via Blog this'

Belated Bookish Links

2011-10-18T23:21:00.000-07:00

Beckett, Dublin 1948, Beckett Foundation

“One of the great productions of literary scholarship of our time,” the Beckett letters (via @seanjcostello). * Who is César Aira? * An encounter with the keepers of the Flannery O’Connor legacy. * Inside William Faulkner’s drinks cabinet. * F. Scott Fitzgerald’s guide to the good life. * The recipe for Anthony Burgess‘ infamous cocktail Hangman’s Blood. * From Baggot Street Bridge, a Patrick Kavanagh app. * When T.S. Eliot met Ezra Pound. * “I have been boiled in a hell-broth.” T.S. Eliot writes to Virginia Woolf.

* “This kind of long gestation period is pretty typical for America’s corps of young, elite celebrity novelists. Jonathan Franzen took nine years…Donna Tartt vanished for a decade…Michael Chabon has gone seven years between major novels.” * DBC Pierre & Nicholson Baker’s fictional excesses. * On “great American cynic” Ambrose Bierce (via Vol. 1 Brooklyn).

* Los Angeles, London, New York: when fiction makes real-world cities “better* ... Stephen Crowe tells Her Royal Majesty why he’s illustrating Finnegans Wake.

More on Stephen’s blog: http://wakeinprogress.blogspot.com

Welcome to the Occupations

2011-10-18T22:37:00.001-07:00

From the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, don’t be afraid to say “revolution”, #OWS. The "Last Place Aversion" Paradox: Ilyana Kuziemko and Michael I. Norton on the surprising psychology of the Occupy Wall Street protests ....

As the OWS protest blossoms across America, they are no doubt being watched over by the country’s patron saint of civil disobedience — Herman Melville’s Bartleby.

.... Immanuel Wallerstein on the fantastic success of Occupy Wall Street.... Nouriel Roubini on why almost every continent on Earth is experiencing social and political turmoil. In three months, an idea and a hashtag became a worldwide movement — here’s how they did it....Scott McLemee interviews four professors who are tracking the movement. What will become of Occupy Wall Street? A protest historian’s guide. Harvard Business Review on what businesses need to know about #OWS. ...

Read all of Welcome to the occupations at Omnivore

Introducing transliteracy

2011-10-01T19:06:00.001-07:00

This is one of the readings for Week 4 of CMC11, Creativity and Multicultural Communication. Transliteracies sure sounds like Multiliteracies. Is there any significant difference other than the discipline of origin? More emphasis on sociocultural aspects? I vaguely remember related (internet mediated cross cultural or transnational communication) terms from the late 90's that seem to have all but disappeared from use. Are there other related terms?

Quotes:

Introducing transliteracy
Transliteracy is recent terminology gaining currency in the library world. It is a broad term encompassing and transcending many existing concepts.

Transliteracy is such a new concept that its working definition is still evolving and many of its tenets can easily be misinterpreted.

Transliteracy originated with the cross-disciplinary Transliteracies Project group, headed by Alan Liu from the Department of English at the University of California-Santa Barbara. The main focus of that group is the study of online reading.

The term has its basis in the word transliterate, which means “to write or print a letter or word using the closest corresponding letters of a different alphabet or language.”

transliteracy is concerned with mapping meaning across different media and not with developing particular literacies about various media.

interaction among all these literacies

“the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and films, to digital social networks.”

working definition of transliteracy

Basically, transliteracy is concerned with what it means to be literate in the 21st century.

social networking, but is fluid enough to not be tied to any particular technology. It focuses more on the social uses of technology

Transliteracy is very concerned with the social meaning of literacy.

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Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

Multi(ple): literacies, tasking, connecting, networking #MOOC/s

2011-09-18T14:03:00.001-07:00

Would that be multimoocquing (or however spelled)? I favor qu for the hard c. Getting ahead of myself (we can do that here), I came across "Reframing Information Literacy as a Metaliteracy" in CMC1l readings for week. The article struck me as Multiliteracies relevant even if it uses the word "collaboration" too often. Call it coollaporation and let it be, let it be ...

Not the only thing I am doing out of order. In the interest of practicing an economy of scale, efficient multi-tasking and navigating chaos and especially to retain a modicum of sanity in this busy season, I've been thinking about how to connect, mentally relate, different but intersecting MOOCs. Currently in progress or about to start, these are the Program for Online Teaching, Multiliteracies, Creativity & Multicultural Communication and Change 2011. A more complete list includes previous ones. Participants remain connected on Google Reader, in personal networks and through sporadic posts on respective Facebook (& other) groups. Obviously, I'm going to need a mind map but not today.

Fractal Art Wallpaper, Chaos Theory

Network the distributed networks: MOOC+ or the landscape of a quondam, moocque futurus. This very distributed network or series of distributed networks connects differently for each of us depending on individual purposes. They also connect with our outside (personal, professional, creative, community and other) lives even more idiosyncratically ... but that's another post.

Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

The Human Cost of Social Connectivity, Brian Solis

2011-09-14T20:54:00.001-07:00

I'm not entirely sure where this article fits into Multiliteracies, but it does and maybe the sooner the better ~ part of the firehouse / filter / shallows / narrows discussion because they all contribute to "Social Media Fatigue" and "Follow Fatigue" ~ symptoms of "Chaos Navigation Failure Syndrome" (CNFS, a syndrome not a disordet and I just made it up)

Over the years, we’ve learned the importance of social media in our professional and personal lives. It is after all a revolution in of itself. From improving governments to socializing businesses to improving collaboration and learning to investing in personal development, social media is influencing and reshaping all it touches. But there are very real costs associated with social media and they extend well beyond technology, popular networks, trends or monumental events.

You are here because you live and breathe new media and with each day that passes, you place unprecedented value on social and mobile networks and the role they play in your livelihood. Your experiences are incredibly personal, but are also influenced by your connections. The value you glean from each network is directly correlated to the relationships you forge within each network. The content that you curate, create, and consume dictates the focus and significance of your interest graphs. The gravity that attracts people and information to your egosystem is essentially yours and only yours to define. And, that’s the point of this post. We must study the human cost of social media to improve how it is we adopt and employ it in life, study, and work.

via briansolis.com

About the human cost tied to social networking: "The reality is that the cost of social networking is great and without checks and balances, engagement can cost us more capital than we have to spend"

Is the new "tree of knowledge" is network?

Posted via email from Multiliteracies for Social Networking and Collaborative Learning Environments

Extraordinary Discourse

2011-08-20T13:59:00.000-07:00

What can I say? The link is on my feed reader now. Podcast themes (or would they be topics, with mashups one is never quite sure) work and the workplace (The World Owes You A Living 1 & 2) and knowledge (The Twisted Hairs Rhizome, Fractal Documentary, Delectables for Autodidacts) both relate to interests I blog and curate content about. There are more. I could blog selections on The New Faculty Majority (work, learning), Work and Life (more work) and Computers Language Writing (knowledge, learning). I may eventually. For now, c'est pour la flâneuse...

Jack Saturday explains in the header, "Extraordinary Discourse has been long in preparing. I offer a multi-voiced thought adventure, around an hour a week. Its many themes converge in the theme of Play" and quotes Whitman, "Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged. Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you."

Kairos lays out the plan in succinct detail and less playfully....

"Extraordinary Discourse" is the latest project of Canadian audio and new media artist Jack Saturday, previously best known for an enormous sound-collage called "The World Owes You a Living" which was self-published on 6 CDs back in about 2005.
His technique is to harvest thousands of short sound-bites from the infosphere - from pundits and commentators, from interviews with ordinary people, and sometimes from films or TV shows - then stitch them together into king-size sound-quilts. As the title "The World Owes You a Living" suggests, there is a polemical slant to his work: he's a millenialist who believes that there is plenty of wealth to go round and that we could all be leading fulfilling and meaningful lives, but that society has been rigged to keep both wealth and self-fulfillment in the hands of a priveleged few.
The resulting work is full of both visionary hope and libertarian outrage, but it's also full of artistic inventiveness, kaleidoscopic variety, humour and fun. "Extraordinary Discourse" takes the form of a series of podcasts - twenty-nine to date - built on an even larger scale than "The World Owes You a Living" and incorporating all the material from that earlier project. Check them out. His is a voice well worth hearing, particularly right now.

Extraordinary Discourse" by Jack Saturday, Kairos

Broadsided: Responses: Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011

2011-07-29T17:35:00.001-07:00

RESPONSES

Japan Earthquake and Tsunami 2011

At Broadsided, we believe that art and literature belong in our daily lives. We believe they are not just decoration, but essential communication. They inspire and they demonstrate the vitality and depth of our connection with the world.
Moved by the plight of post-tsunami Japan, Broadsided artist Yuko Adachi sent us the image "Love Heals Japan" (see right) and asked if we would help her find writing to accompany it. We were inspired by her idea, and decided to ask other Broadsided artists if they had been similarly moved and, if so, if they'd be willing to share their work.
We posted that art, and asked writers to respond. Below are the collaborations that resulted, as well as a short note from the writers and artists about this process. We hope that you will download, print, and share these with your community.
Yuko has created a high-quality giclee print of her collaboration with Hugh Martin. You can purchase it on Etsy. All proceeds will go to the relief effort in Japan.
Click each image below for the pdf; scroll down for more information about each collaboration.

"How Love Heals"
Yuko Adachi & Deborah Fried-Rubin
Download the pdf (352kb)
Artist Yuko Adachi is a Tokyo-born artist who was raised in Japan, Paris, London, and the United States of America. She has been painting since she was a little girl and has been showing her works through solo and selected group shows internationally. Her painting was featured for the cover of Artscope, New England's Cultural Magazine (May/June 2007) and Takara Magazine, the Japanese Culture and Information Magazine in New England (2007 issues). In 2007, her work was awarded best in painting for "Healing Power of Art" by Manhattan Art International. Today, she lives and works in Boston. In 2010, she opened an artist studio store, "Planet MOMEKO," in Rpckport, MA. www.yukoadachi.com.
Writer Deborah Fried-Rubin is a second year graduate student in the Queens College MFA program, pursuing an interest in poetry after many years of practicing law. A recipient of Queen's College's Silverstein-Peiser Award for Poetry, her work has appeared in Why I Am Not A Painter, an anthology of MFA poetry from the NYC area, published by Argos Books. She lives on Long Island with her husband and three children.
QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES
Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Deborah Fried-Rubin: Yuko Adachi's beautiful work automatically conveyed to me an image of one world, both fractured and unified. The lines reaching to circles illustrated trajectories of trauma engaging people across the globe, making the pain of one the pain of many. But the lines can also be seen as shooting from a place of brightness to reach circles of suffering. This back-and-forth reading reinforced the connectivity for me. The work also reminded me instantly of the kabbalistic concept of "shattered vessels" which humanity heals by acts of kindness, as well as teachings by the Ben Ish Chai, regarding the world as an orb spinning in space, constantly returning light to dark places. Yuko's saturated colors, both innocent and textured, felt like a hope for deeper understanding.
Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Yuko Adachi: I wanted to create an image that is positive, gentle and healing for Japanese people and to those who purchse this print. The reddish bubbles are love energy that is being sent to Japan and the circle represents the Japanese flag as well as the earth energy and the ray of light shining upon it, to indicate that the sun will rise again! The suffering that Japan is experiencing aches my heart to the point of numbness but I want to thank you for your support and love that you are sending to Japan. We feel it!
What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art?
Deborah Fried-Rubin: I hope art helps us make sense of the emotional content of "world" events, and shows us how to relate in our private capacities to make a cumulative impact. Because everything is ultimately reducible to millions upon millions of individuals, the best "political" poem is a personal one, with heart in it.
Yuko Adachi: An agile creative response with a purpose to the event that opens up our mind and willingness to make an effort to spread what we created and talk about it.

"The Horse of Higashi-Matsushima"
Yuko Adachi & Hugh Martin
Download the pdf (312kb)
Artist Yuko Adachi is a Tokyo-born artist who was raised in Japan, Paris, London, and the United States of America. She has been painting since she was a little girl and has been showing her works through solo and selected group shows internationally. Her painting was featured for the cover of Artscope, New England's Cultural Magazine (May/June 2007) and Takara Magazine, the Japanese Culture and Information Magazine in New England (2007 issues). In 2007, her work was awarded best in painting for "Healing Power of Art" by Manhattan Art International. Today, she lives and works in Boston. In 2010, she opened an artist studio store, "Planet MOMEKO," in Rpckport, MA. www.yukoadachi.com.
Writer Hugh Martin is a veteran of the Iraq war and a graduate of Muskingum University. He now attends the MFA program at Arizona State University and his chapbook, So, How Was the War? (Kent State UP, 2010) was a winner of the 2009 Wick Chapbook Competition. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, Nashville Review, Mid-American Review, Third Coast, River Styx, American Poetry Review, and War, Literature & the Arts.
QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES
Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Hugh Martin: The piece of artwork is a small, yet beautiful and important reminder that we need to keep Japan in our thoughts. I'd already drafted a poem about the picture of the horse, but the piece of art, focusing more on the disaster to the country as a whole, was a powerful juxtaposition to the specific, more concrete death of the horse, which ultimately leads us to the human deaths and the temporary graves.
Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Yuko Adachi: I wanted to create an image that is positive, gentle and healing for Japanese people and to those who purchse this print. The reddish bubbles are love energy that is being sent to Japan and the circle represents the Japanese flag as well as the earth energy and the ray of light shining upon it, to indicate that the sun will rise again! The suffering that Japan is experiencing aches my heart to the point of numbness but I want to thank you for your support and love that you are sending to Japan. We feel it!
What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art?
Hugh Martin: I think all art should help us acknowledge and be more aware of disaster, both in the sense of the collective and the personal. Art can help heal those who were victims; it can help those who were distant better understand.
Yuko Adachi: An agile creative response with a purpose to the event that opens up our mind and willingness to make an effort to spread what we created and talk about it.

"Children at Play"
Cheryl Gross & Susan Cohen
11" x 12"
Ball point, ink, handmade paper.
Download the pdf (424kb)
Artist Cheryl Gross has an MFA in New Forms from Pratt. She writes: "When asked about my work, I always equate it with creating an environment transforming my inner thoughts into reality. Much like an architect or urban planner, that reality and humor becomes the foundation of the work. Beginning with the physical process, I work in layers. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, my urban influence has indeed added an "edge" to my work. Coming from a totally vertical and intense environment, I now live in Jersey City, NJ." www.cmgross.com
Writer Susan Cohen is author of the forthcoming book of poems, Throat Singing, and two chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Poetry International, River Styx, Southern Poetry Review, Verse Daily and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley and is two-time winner of the National Association of Science Writers Science in Society Award.
QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES
Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Susan Cohen: I found "Children at Play" wildly imaginative, yet so strange and disturbing. When I made myself address it, that sense of being disturbed turned into a deep grief. I had a nephew who died a few years ago at sea and whose body later washed ashore, so I'm especially haunted by the idea of children in the waves. As I wrote, I realized I was hearing sounds of bicycles and surf and kids playing before supper, that the visual image had a strong aural effect on me. Was that triggered by the incongruous bird perched on the bicycle? I don't know, but I found myself wanting to intone or chant, which made this poem very different from those I usually write. Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Artist:-->
What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art?
Susan Cohen: Real-world events disappear so quickly and completely from the news. Perhaps art contains the capacity to focus our attention at least a little longer. Artist:-->

"sliding house/meditation for after an earthquake"
Ira Joel Haber & Lisa L. Moore
10 1/8" x 7 7/8"
Ink and crayon on notebook paper.
Download the pdf (420kb)
Artist Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn New York. He is a sculptor, painter, book dealer and teacher who sometimes writes poetry and movie reviews. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in USA and Europe and he has had 9 one-man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Whitney Museum, The Hirshorn Museum & The Albright-Knox Art Gallery. In 2004 he received The Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grant. Currently he teaches art at the United Federation of Teachers Retiree Program in Brooklyn. (View Ira's Work)
Writer Lisa L. Moore grew up hiking, skiing, trail riding and working on her family's ranch in the eastern foothills of the Canadian Rockies. After working as an arts journalist, Lisa went into academia and since 1991 has been teaching English and Women's and Gender Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. She is the author or editor of several books, including Experiments in a Jazz Aesthetic: Art, Activism, Academia and the Austin Project (Texas) and most recently Sister Arts: The Erotics of Lesbian Landscapes (MInnesota). She is the co-director, with Meta DuEwa Jones, of the Texas Institute of Literary and Textual Studies, which is offering a series of lectures, workshops, readings and symposia in 2011-12 on the topic of Poets&Scholars (more information here). Her poems have appeared in journals and anthologies including Sinister Wisdom, and she blogs at Sister Arts: Gardens, Poems, Art, Community.
QUESTIONING OUR RESPONSES
Why did this piece of art resonate for you or seem like it would give you an avenue into writing about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Lisa Moore: My poem started from a couple of awkwardly-translated sentences on a news report. A woman whose husband had just been found in the rubble was asked for a reaction and I was struck by the difference between watching her speak (in Japanese) and the rather bloodless subtitles: "I am relieved to see him, of course. But there are so many others still missing." Those words sounded so measured but the woman looked so distraught and desperate....not "relieved" at all. Those words and their inadequacy and what might be behind them rattled around in my brain for a few weeks and were called back to mind when I saw Ira Joel Haber's piece "Sliding House." The plainness and somber colors of the image combined with the terrifying movement of the house out of the frame seemed to capture that dissonance.
Why did this visual response come to mind when thinking about Japan's earthquake and tsunami?
Ira Joel Haber: I did this drawing in a notebook when I was living in San Diego teaching Art at UCSD. I lived in a very small apartment which was on a high hill. and had a patio overlooking the valley below. This drawing is of course about hanging, literally and figuratively. Some of my work, especially the work from 1969 to 1975 have a strong dose of catastrophe and destruction so this latest environmental disaster hit home.
What do you think is the role of art in regards to real-world, real-time events? In other words, what makes a "successful" occasional or political piece of writing or art?
Lisa L. Moore: I read a lot of eighteenth-century "occasional" verse composed for particular people or events, and the poems that last are the ones that speak with enough specificity to conjure the feeling of that moment in a way that grabs the reader even across centuries. Like Pope's "Epistle to Bolingbroke." Who cares about Bolingbroke? But the line "Hope springs eternal in the human breast" breaks my heart.
Ira Joel Haber: I can recall one work that I did in direct result of real world events and that was the Viet Nam war. The role of art with regards to the above is the same as any person's reaction should be.

"River Vessel"
Kevin Morrow & Mason Schoen
Download the pdf (300kb)
Artist Kevin Morrow is a native of Wisconsin who received his BFA in sculpture from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2003. Soon thereafter, he received his MFA degree from the University of Auckland, New Zealand where he studied in the Contemporary Maori Department (Te Toi Hou). Upon completion, Morrow returned to the U.S. to live and work in Austin, Texas where he spent a year or so concentrating on earthworks. Morrow now lives and works in New York. Images of other work at
Mason Schoen: I don't know, really. Of course art should capture experience, perspective. In my opinion, successful poetry or prose leaves a reader feeling stranded and tethered at the same time. That's what I shoot for, but often miss. Artist:-->

via broadsidedpress.org

Posted via email from Just Writing

A whiff of history

2011-07-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

Azra Raza, 3quarksdaily: A whiff of history

From The Boston Globe:

Think of some of your most powerful memories, and there’s likely a smell attached: the aroma of suntan lotion at the beach, the sharpness of freshly mown grass, the floral trail of your mother’s perfume. “Scents are very much linked to memory,” says perfumer Christophe Laudamiel. “They are linked to remembering the past but also learning from experiences.” But despite its primacy in our lives, our sense of smell is often overlooked when we record our history. We tend to connect with the past visually - we look at objects displayed in a museum, photographs in a documentary, the writing in a manuscript. Sometimes we might hear a vintage speech, or touch an ancient artifact and imagine what it was like to use it. But our knowledge of the past is almost completely deodorized. “It seems remarkable to me that we live in the world where we have all the senses to navigate it, yet somehow we assume that the past was scrubbed of smells,” says sensory historian Mark Smith.

It seems far-fetched to think we could actually start to smell the past - or somehow preserve a whiff of our daily lives. But increasingly, technology is making it possible, and historians, scientists, and perfumers are now taking the idea of smells as historical artifacts more seriously. They argue that it’s time to delve into our olfactory past, trying harder to understand how people experienced the world with their noses - and even save scents for posterity. Their efforts have already made it possible to smell fragrances worn a century ago, to re-create the smell of a rare flower even if it goes extinct, and to better understand the smells that ancient cultures appreciated or detested.

More here.

arts, letters & other cyber flânerie

2011-06-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

Good stuff from Arts & Letters ~ essays, opinions, articles, book reviews ~ while I ponder editorial policies for sundry blogs and their respective social media extensions and test drive alternate modes of blogging. The rss reader's added functionality for sharing / sending feeds to other social media platforms, Facebook's improved sharing and so on. On the other hand auto-posting syndicated feeds seems less reliable, oddly readable as jelly side up.

from Draper's Takes, On the Future of Blogging

Flâneuse seems the place to think in text: flâner et écrire. Écriture comme espèce de flânerie. The platforms ~ blog, microblog, social network ~ possess distinct characters, both in how they manifest and are used, as well appealing to distinct user, in not groups, then inclinations. Obviously, NFM's cyber personae will tend to belong the same group: adjunct / contingent faculty and their supporters, such as they are. Do I develop one as a single one stop portal, sync everything to post or just cross link platforms and cross post just some items? The mother ship (e.g. New Faculty Majority page, Web 1.0) should function as portal and centre de ville but does not, whether by accidental design or deliberate policy.

Each network is distinct, albeit with overlaps: none a silo. I'm looking at customizing policies for each network ~ community, literary, adjunct advocacy, teaching, personal ~ that will spare blogging from the worst ravages of social media. Each network has it's own character, purpose, audience parameters. Overall, Facebook and Twitter are better for the short, timely and perhaps more ephemeral. Grab and share it with minimal comment. Blogging thrives on reflection over sheer timeliness.

Reading and writing reflectively live: read on..

Boozing with the ancients. Nothing gives beer a bite like mugwort, dried doum-palm fruit, and liberal doses of hemp and poppy. Cheers... more

Are you glib and superficially charming? Do you lack empathy and remorse? You might have just what it takes to be a psychopath... more

The politics of rescue. Michael Walzer has questions: Is humanitarianism a duty or a gift? A responsibility of states or individuals? Maimonides has answers... more

Feeling blue? There’s an app to manage your emotions – your cognitive ability, weight, and attention span, too. How about an app for narcissism? ... more»

Stagnant wages, stalemated wars, growing debt. Depressing, right? Time for a dose of David Brooks's sunny optimism... more

It is becoming physically harder to read a book in print. Online connections have disconnected us from ourselves. Johann Hari is mounting a resistance... more

Arts & Letters Daily (26 Jun 2011)

New Elderly Rising

2011-04-26T13:40:00.001-07:00

Talking Revolution: The New Elderly Generation can Provide the Spark for an American Rising by Dave Lindorff

Posted to This Can't Be Happening April 22, 2011; Reposted on Common Dreams April 25, 2011

I am 62 and have just reached the age where I could apply for Social Security retirement benefits. Of course, I'd be crazy to do that and collect some $700 a month for the rest of my life, when I could keep working and wait until I'm 70 and get $2000 a month.

But the point is, I've arrived. I'm a "senior." And now I'm paying a lot more attention to what the Right and its paymaster, the corporate lobby, are trying to do, not just to my retirement plan (which is Social Security. period), but also to Medicare, the program upon which my medical care will depend once my wife decides to retire from her university job.

The picture is not pretty. Both the Republicans, and the pathetic Democrats, led by President Barack Obama,
are talking brazenly about cutting back on Social Security, and on Medicare. The Republicans openly say
they want to kill Medicare and secretly want to end Social Security too, which is the agenda of most of the
corporations which fund lobbies like the US Chamber of Commerce, the National Assn. of Manufacturers, the
Business Roundtable, etc. Oh, I know they say they're only talking about "changes" for people who are under
55, but that's just for starters. The goal is to ruin the program for younger workers, and then make them
resent what we older folks still get. Then the next step will be to eradicate both programs altogether.

But here's the thing. The reason these parties and lobbies are trying so hard now to use the recession and
the national deficit as cover to decimate and destroy these two proven and critically important social programs into which all working Americans have been paying all our working lives, is that they realize what most 50 and 60-something Americans haven't realized yet: that we are about to become the most powerful political force in the country, and that we are certainly going to demand both an excellent government Medicare program, and a decent retirement program.

The way I see it, we in the Baby Boom generation--those people born between 1946 and about 1964--are just starting to hit retirement age. In another 10 years, we will become a political force twice as powerful and
certainly more than twice as noisy and demanding as the current senior lobby. We can either wait until then,
after they have successfully gutted the two programs we depend on, making it so we have to fight to recreate or
restore them, or we can start organizing now to defend and improve them, and save ourselves a whole lot of trouble.

So here's my proposal.

Let's start building a coalition of Baby Boomers, working through every conceivable organization - labor unions, churches, veterans organizations, alumni organizations, political chapters, etc - with one goal: Defending and improving Social Security and Medicare.

Here's my idea for a slogan:

Tax the Rich and Save Social Security! No Cuts in Medicare! Make it for Everyone!

Here's the argument. Social Security is said to be in danger of "running out of money" in 2037, because there
will supposedly be too many retirees drawing checks and too few younger workers putting money into the so-called Trust Fund. The Trust Fund itself had its trust broken by our politicians, Republican and Democrat, who have for years been raiding the money we put into it, leaving us with government IOUs. These IOUs, the Republicans and the corporatists now say, they don't intend to honor. (The main reason for these raids has been to fund America's imperialist wars, which the public never would support if they had to pay for them up front through higher taxes.)

Well, first off, we need to demand that they honor those IOUs. Second, since that would mean raising taxes to fund our retirement, we need to demand that the money come not from our working kids and grandkids, but from the rich.
It's really an easy fix. Require that the FICA tax which pays for Social Security benefits apply to all income, not just the first $106,000 of income, and make it also apply to investment income, which currently pays no FICA tax. (I'm not talking about retirement investments. They can be exempted. I'm talking about regular taxable investment income.)

As for Medicare, which we're told is going to run out of money sometime before 2017, the answer there is to stop making it a program just for disabled and old people, and to expand it to cover everyone, which is what President Obama should have proposed way back in 2008, instead of the outrageous health "reform" that was pushed through Congress and which is going to be undone by the courts anyhow.

Poll after poll shows that Americans love Medicare. It's a program that works, that only spends 1% of funds on administration (compared to almost 30% for the private medical system), and that has vastly improved the health of older Americans since it went into effect in 1965. It's a program that actually is very similar to what all Canadians have (which is a program they also call Medicare), but here in the US you have to be either over 65 or permanently disabled in order to qualify.

That is nuts!

The truth, which our politicians are loath to discuss (both houses of Congress refused to include a discussion of a Medicare-for-all option during the health "reform" legislative process, and the Obama White House refused to bring in Medicare-for-all advocates to its planning sessions, or to invite experts from Canada to explain their program), is that a universal Medicare program in the US would provide care for every citizen, while costing significantly less than our current outrageous mix of private insurance for most working Americans, Medicaid for the poor, Medicare for the elderly, Veterans Administration care for veterans, and no care or charity care for tens of millions of poor people.

Think about it: right now the program funds the oldest and sickest part of the population. As it is, 90% of the cost of Medicare is for the care of the oldest 10% of the Medicare population. It doesn't cost that much to care for the "younger old." It would cost even less to provide medical care for the rest of the population that isn't even 65 yet. And covering everyone with Medicare would mean that Medicaid, Veterans care, charity care, employee disability insurance, etc., could all be eliminated, along with all private medical insurance!

We "new oldsters" need to demand Medicare-for-All not just because it's right, and not just because it's the most efficient, cost-effective solution, but also because it makes strategic political sense. Why should we let the Right divide us by creating a bogus generational conflict? Why let them claim we "greedy codgers" are making younger workers pay for our health care? We don't want that anyway! Those younger workers are our own kids and our grandkids! They should have access to decent affordable healthcare too, and shouldn't be bound to their employers like serfs, or forced to pay extortionate premiums to vulture-like insurance companies in return for problematic coverage. We should demand that they get the same thing we get: Universal health care! Medicare for All!

Such a campaign for secure retirement income and for a program of government health insurance for all could become the rallying point for a resurgent progressive movement that could grab back our politics and our
government from the narrow special interests that have hijacked them.

If we fight and win on Social Security and on Medicare for All, who knows what other issues we could fight and
win on!

[Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. He is co-author, along with Barbara Olshansky, of The Case for Impeachment: Legal Arguments for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, June 2006 and paperback 2007), he is also the author of three earlier books: This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy (Common Courage Press, 2004), Marketplace Medicine: The Rise of the For Profit Hospital Chains (Bantam, 1992), and Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal (Common Courage Press, 2003).]

Writing inspiration

2011-03-05T03:35:00.001-08:00

It's time for a writing inspiration roundup; all of these are from Writers' Rooms at The Guardian. (Go there: the pictures are interesting, too.)

Justin Cartwright:
I think the secret with writing is to do it every day. I have in this room more or less everything I need, from reference books to Post-it notes, so that I have no excuse for pencil sharpening. There is a small kitchen, where each day starts with an elaborate coffee ritual.
Alexander Masters:
There's no pattern about the way I write, except it's always the first thing I do. I wake up anywhere between 4am and 10am, depending on the merriments of the night before or if a dream jolts me, then scribble, type or slash through yesterday's work till I start to feel a little sick from not eating.
Miranda Seymour:
I don't start writing until I've done the research and got an idea pretty clear. When I sit down here, with my laptop, I've got my work pared down to a bunch of typed notes and a page of scribbles about the way the chapter or piece might take shape. It doesn't always take that shape, but I like the reassurance.
Peter York:
How could books drive me out of my book room? It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views. Mine is street-level urban W1, but I usually close the shutters.
David Starkey:
I organise my work in the form of a daily diary. Each chapter is strictly chronological but is also monothematic - say, a war, a set of peace negotiations, a joust. I normally begin my first paragraph just before I break for lunch and then work solidly through the afternoon. I start cooking supper at about half past five or six and then go back to the Mac for a final blitz before drinks. Every three or four days, I'll finish a chapter, which James reads over drinks, while I try not to watch his expression. It's better than any publisher's editor and instantaneous.
Jonathan Bate:
The very early morning, before the mayhem of the school run, is the best time for sustained writing. If I haven't hit 500 words by breakfast, the day can be forgotten - the rest of it will be squandered on emails, pencil-sharpening and web-surfing.

via notofgeneralinterest.blogspot.com

Good series, I'd forgotten about it but remember it now, worth looking up and over again. Maybe I'll post this to Scribes group too even if authors cited may not be that familiar to stateside readers

Posted via email from Just Writing

Fw: March Reverb Creative Prompt + Resources!

2011-03-03T09:49:00.001-08:00

FYI ~ on the grounds that you can never have too many writing prompts and that sharing is better than hoarding. Some interesting writing ones and a scaffolding for publishing / sharing them. Although some have yielded surprising responses, they can run a tad to the life-coach/saccharine for my tastes... Then again every year of the 6 I've done NaNoWriMo, I write something dystopian.

Email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser.

Hello Reverb community -

It's March -- and we're happy to be delivering to you a prompt and other resources in this new month. If you haven't already done so, you can connect with us on Twitter: @reverb10
What You Have to Say:

"Yay! So happy to see you back in my Inbox!" - Anita
"Thanks so much for continuing this project...I love it and have given it to my teachers to use with our students as a warm up writing assignment..." - Debra
"In love with your Feb email. So excited to have a direction again for writing. Looking forward to the monthly adventure #reverb11" - Amanda

March Prompt:
If March 2011 was your last month to live, how would you live it?
This prompt is yours to use as you like: answer it as-is on your blog, take a series of photos that represent your response, get out finger paints and go crazy, write a poem, or reflect privately in your journal. Be as creative or as simple in your response as you see fit. Share on Twitter, Delicious or Flickr with the hashtag "#reverb11" so others can find your response.

Reflect & Manifest Tools:

Engaging Your Vision & Identifying Your Abundant Resources - Bridget Pilloud & Tara Gentile, Bridget and Tara chat about how to get started with your life's work and engage your vision. A beautiful way to reengage the things you want to manifest in 2011. You can watch the video interview and also download a free "Engaging Your Vision" worksheet here.
What Can Happen When Things Fall Apart - Jen Lemen, You might be surprised what can happen when things fall apart.
Creativity in Times of Fertile Confusion - Tara Sophia Mohr & Jeffrey Davis
Two Reverb10 authors, Tara Sophia Mohr and Jeffrey Davis, collaborated in February after finding each other's work through Reverb10. They held a free call entitled "Creativity in the Times of Fertile Confusion." You can listen to the recording here.
The Mights that Live in Birds’ Noses - Megg Genge, Why you might want to hunt for bird mites.
10 Time-Saving Web Tools - The 99% Helpful tools to streamline your daily tasks.

Reverb HQ

Reverb10

1209 Pearl Street

Boulder, Colorado 80302

Posted via email from Just Writing

xposted to Manzano Scribes writing group

what the egyptian revolt means

2011-02-21T23:35:00.001-08:00

Herbert Bix (Binghamton): The Middle East Revolutions in Historical Perspective: Egypt, Occupied Palestine, and the United States. Gimme Fuel, Gimme Fire: What the Egyptian revolt means for nuclear proliferation. How does protest topple a government? (and more at The Monkey Cage) Tina Rosenberg on what Egypt learned from the students who overthrew Milosevic. A look at how shy U.S. intellectual Gene Sharp created the playbook used revolutions (and more). This is not an Islamic revolution: Olivier Roy on how the uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia show that Islam is now less potent politically, even as its social dominance grows. Immanuel Wallerstein on the World Social Forum, Egypt, and transformation. New World Order: Joseph Nye on Egypt, the information revolution, and the struggle for power in the twenty-first century. The Al Jazeera Effect: The inside story of Egypt's TV wars and how Saudi Arabia could be next. Why Mideast tumult caught scholars by surprise: Revolutions are easy to predict, but their timing sure isn't. Can the mass protests in Tunisia and Egypt succeed even though they have failed to produce real political leaders? "We all know our way back to Tahrir Square": Jon Bailes on Egypt, democracy and neoliberalism. The importance of these 21st century democratic revolutions for the rest of Africa cannot be overlooked. Robert Zaretsky on Egypt and the Longue Duree: What Braudel has to teach about the crisis. What's next after a revolution? Mohammadbagher Forough on promises of countries yet to come.

via bookforum.com

Posted via email from Meanderings

Issa's Sunday Service, #91

2011-02-20T08:37:00.001-08:00

Today's song, "40" by U2, is based on the Psalm 40, lifting a great deal of the lyric directly from the Bible. Here's U2's rendering:

40
I waited patiently for the Lord
He inclined and heard my cry
He brought me up out of the pit
Out of the miry clay
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long...how long...how long...
How long...to sing this song
He set my feet upon a rock
And made my footsteps firm
Many will see
Many will see and fear
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
I will sing, sing a new song
How long to sing this song?
How long to sing this song?
How long...how long...how long..
"40" comes from the album War, the most famous song from which is "Sunday Bloody Sunday," a song which dealt with the Bloody Sunday massacre in Northern Ireland. The reason I mention it is that, injected into the lines from Psalm 40 in U2's rendition, you'll find the refrain "How long, how long to sing this song," which it shares with "Sunday Bloody Sunday." "Sunday" opens the album, "40" closes it; the refrain they share book ends the theme of how long, how long must this go on (and on and on).
Something we continue to ask

Read the rest of the Sunday Service at lilliputreview.blogspot.com

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Perspectives on Egypt

2011-02-17T08:25:00.001-08:00

An Egyptian protestor decries the government’s theft of billions from
the pension fund. Photo by Jessica Winegar.
“I rushed to Tahrir as did thousands of Cairenes. My subway car was filled with young people who had spontaneously invented chants that expressed their joy. One of these was, ‘They said we were the youth of Kentucky (Fried Chicken), but we were the ones who protected you (Egypt).’ (It rhymes in Arabic.) Another: ‘We are the youth of the internet, not those only concerned with dating.’ I sat across from one man in his late 70s who sat with a smile on his face, staring at the teen and twenty-something men in amazement and admiration, with tears of joy in his eyes. He kept saying to me in English, ‘Revolution. Revolution.’

“He was going to Tahrir too, and when I got there, amidst the massive celebrating crowds, I saw countless older men and women, some quite old and in wheelchairs or with canes. They walked with their spouses, and/or children and in many cases grandchildren. Some of the mothers and grandmothers ululated. Fathers and grandfathers participated in the moving cheer, ‘Lift your head up, you are Egyptian!’ It seemed that they had once been able to lift their heads up in pride as Egyptians, and although now many were stooped from the effects of living under an oppressive dictatorship, they were clearly so thrilled that their offspring could now lift their heads proudly and that they were among the fortunate ones to live to see this day.”

So observed Jessica Winegar F’09, assistant professor of anthropology at Northwestern University, amidst the jubilant atmosphere in Tahrir Square when word came that President Mubarak had stepped down. She and other ACLS Fellows—from California to the Middle East, from computer labs to the streets of Cairo—understand the revolution as a moment both reshapes and is shaped by history.

Watching the revolution unfold in Egypt, Iza Hussin F’07, assistant professor of legal studies at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has been “struck by the uncertainty there has been about what these events ‘mean’ for the states, participants, and region.” Omnia El Shakry F’07, associate professor of history at the University of California, Davis, adds that media coverage of these events has lacked “any real sense of history.”

Jesse Ferris F’08, F’07, vice president for strategy for the Israel Democracy Institute, sees the roots of today’s revolution in Nasserism, and particularly the advent of the Egyptian military complex:

“Mubarak is only the fourth in a chain of military officers who have assumed the Presidency since the Free Officers overthrew the monarchy in the revolution of 1952. The structure of the regime has remained largely unchanged since the days of Nasser. A small cast of ex-officers stands atop an enormous bureaucracy intertwined with a bloated national party apparatus, all three of which are sustained in power by two parallel security structures: the military and an assortment of internal security forces. Although it has not seen action in decades, the military remains the most significant power broker in Egypt, and its power has been magnified over the years by the construction of a vast military-industrial complex that is thoroughly entangled with the civilian economy.”

El Shakry, however, argues that Egyptian society under Nasser was “equally characterized by an ideology and practice of social welfare,” a social contract between the state and the people in which “democratic political change was exchanged for piecemeal social reform” and the reinforcement of existing social relationships.

El Shakry reminds us that Egypt experienced three revolutions in the twentieth century: the 1919 revolution that ended British colonial rule; the 1952 military coup that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power; and the 1974 neo-liberal Intifah, or opening, that led to a free-market economy and strengthened the private sector at the expense of Nasser’s social safety net. This led to an “immense polarization of wealth, drastically exacerbated since the 1990s, [which] has left many Egyptians consumed by the search for food, shelter, and human dignity, with an estimated 40 percent living below the poverty line.” The ongoing decline in the quality of life set the stage for the 2011 revolution. For many of today’s older protesters, demonstrations are not new, Winegar notes; many of them have a history activism, fighting “against the privatization of health insurance and the theft of billions of pension funds.”

Demonstrators in Cairo. Photo by Jessica Winegar.

Winegar is currently in Egypt at work on her ACLS fellowship project on state secularism and the Islamic revival. She describes this as a multi-generational revolution, and watches as Egyptians who grew up during the different regimes bring the past to life in their activism. Under Mubarak, many “upper middle class Egyptians in their fifties and sixties who had been leftist student activists in the 1970s . . . watched their youthful dreams of creating a just society crumble before their eyes, as neoliberal capitalism, authoritarianism, and corruption, took vicious root in Egypt. They themselves sought greater stability in their lives and so, with marriage and children, they hunkered down in decent apartments and built comfortable lives for themselves and their families . . . Their 1970s street activism had, in the Mubarak era, been limited to signing intellectuals’ petitions, writing the occasional article, or going to the occasional demonstration and being cordoned off by the security police.” In 2011, they assembled in Tahrir Square, joined neighborhood watches, and argued with pro-Mubarak neighbors.

“I also saw many pro-democracy demonstrators in their late sixties and seventies,” she continues. “These men and women had been raised on Nasser’s revolutionary language; their childhood, teens, or twenties had been filled with the promise of a just and prosperous society. But their potential was curtailed by the steep decline in quality of life from the later Nasser years through Sadat and Mubarak.” Like their younger counterparts, “their struggle, and their disappointment, was marked on their bodies.” Many, including the relatively privileged, suffer from the ailments of a stressful life and poor health care: high blood pressure, diabetes, heart problems, mental stress, and cigarette addiction.”

The revolution transformed perceptions. After Muburak stepped down, “We never thought this would happen” became a common refrain, but Winegar concludes, “It was as clear as day.” Ferris agrees that the revolution could have been predicted, though “knowing that an event will happen is not the same as predicting when it will happen.” In this case, the overthrow of the Tunisian government and the Egyptian military’s restraint allowed the inevitable to finally unfold.

While Winegar was in Tahrir Square, Todd Presner F’06, professor of Germanic languages and literatures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his colleagues at the UCLA Center for Digital Humanities were creating “HyperCities Egypt,” a digital map of Cairo that locates and archives tweets from the uprising, bringing Egyptian voices to the rest of the world while also preserving them for the future. This program is based on “HyperCities Berlin,” an interactive, web-based research platform for analyzing the cultural, architectural, and urban history of a city space built with funding from the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship program.

Presner explains:

“We wanted the world to be able to hear these voices coming out Egypt since they add a very different perspective and dimension when compared to traditional broadcast media. To date, we have archived and mapped more than 300,000 tweets coming out of Egypt since the project began. These are searchable and can be studied by scholars interested in understanding the roles that social media played in documenting and fomenting the revolution in Egypt. At the project’s core are values central to the next wave of digital humanities: harnessing new technologies to expand the global public sphere, animating the archive in new ways, and using technologies to increase the purview, relevance, and importance of the humanities in the world."

Can humanities scholars tell us what is next for Egypt? Ferris argues that the emergence of a “genuine multi-party system” is unlikely, and that the “rapid population growth, scarce natural resources, a chronic shortage of wheat, and insufficient exports”—challenges that have persisted since Nasser’s time—will prove challenging to any future government. Instead, he sees a two-party system backed by the army, as emerged in Turkey in 1950, as one possibility, and a new secularist or Islamic dictatorship as another possibility. Hussin adds that “Islam never did, nor does it now, promise a monolithic shari’ah state, but presents a plethora of resources for mobilization, locally defined institutions, and the construction and contestation of new identities.”

She further describes the 2011 revolution as a “moment of making,” one that humanities research can illuminate in all its richness. We can look to engaged researchers to answer questions such as those posed by Hussin: “What structural elements of the moribund regime will become underpinnings of a new order? What symbols, logics, and languages of power will the new civic culture adopt, and what will it make anew?” As scholarship on Egyptian politics and society shows us, history is a process, and each day is informed by the day before.

Read more:
"Egypt's Three Revolutions: The Force of History behind this Popular Uprising" by Omnia El Shakry F'07
New UCLA project streams Twitter updates from Egypt unrest on digital map of Cairo

via acls.org

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The apocalypse, brought to you by the letters Y, A, L and E

2011-02-16T17:23:00.001-08:00

The Yale Daily News is republishing a dozen visions of the apocalypse commissioned from well known writers at a dollar a word (but because the editors were cash-strapped college kids in 1974, each writer was limited to 20 words). “As the editors noted in that 12th issue of the Magazine, ‘The writers that exceeded twenty words did so out of a love for their craft.’” Why the apocalypse? Perhaps they were just stunned to see their magazine reach its second anniversary.

Part one features John Cheever, Tom Wolfe and William Styron; part two includes Bernard Malamud, Eric Fromm and Anthony Burgess (who forgoes his fee so that editors John Tierney, Christopher Buckley, and Eric Goodman can buy themselves “a nice drink”); part three contributors range from Ayn Rand (who is still doing her part to bring about the apocalypse from beyond the grave) to John Barth, with visits from William Saroyan and Vladimir Nabokav’s wife:

VN thanks you for your charming letter. He says he is ‘trying to finish writing a novel before the end of the world.’ He regrets he must decline your kind offer.”

– Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov

But the hands down winner in the apocalyptic race is Ray Bradbury who has faith that humankind can outrun the four horsemen when the time comes. In part four, alongside Joyce Carol Oates and Art Buchwald, Bradbury writes:

Gloryosky, guys, there ain’t gonna be no end to no world! Sorry to disappoint you and depress you with my exuberant good spirits and optimism, but we will build starships and move on out to Alpha Centauri and beyond and then we won’t give a damn about what happens to Earth, for we will, in sum, live forever, give or take a billion years. End of quote. Send me my twenty bucks!

– Ray Bradbury

via poetryfoundation.org

Some days I have time and inclination to write more, some not. My thanks to Poetry News on Harriet the Blog from The Poetry Foundation for bringing this apocalypse to you

Posted via email from Meanderings

about About pages

2011-02-06T10:48:00.001-08:00

... which is an "about blogging" or meta-blogging post. Aside from the non-so-minor detail that the following article refers to blogs operated; whereas, none of mine ~ minimal Ad-Sense ads excepted ~ sell anything, not for $. I hawk my wares in the market place of ideas and information.

Most if not all advocate, stand on soap boxes and otherwise exhort ~ along with reviewing, critiquing, disseminating information ~ all in the public weal. They don't even surreptitiously hawk products or services for commission or other personal gain.

So why read let alone republish this piece? In the the interest of better blogging, I subscribe to a number of "about blogging" blogs. Most are about marketing and monetization. They are also about effective communication...online, blogging. Keeping readers interested, engaging an audience.

That's where the about page comes in. I've been thinking about adding one for ages. Or rather, adding them (plural) Despite overlaps and copy cannibalizing, no one version suits all. My 2011 blogging resolution.

So now onto Lea Woodward's Problogger guest post,

Did you know that the second place many new readers go after hitting the home page of your blog is your About page? Go and check your stats and you’ll probably see that if it’s not up there at #2, it’s probably still pretty high up on the list of “most viewed” links. Chris Brogan noticed this, so it must be true!

This isn’t really a surprise—most people are curious to find out more about who writes the blog they’ve just landed on. While they’re looking for this information, they’re probably thinking three things:

Who is this guy or girl telling me all about how to make money blogging?

Should I stick around and read more?

Is it worth me bookmarking or subscribing to this site and coming back again?

If you don’t lose readers at the home page (which you can avoid by compelling headlines and killer content to browse around), the second most common place to lose them is at your About page.

Here’s how to avoid that—and how to ensure your About page makes your blog, rather than breaks it.

Introduce yourself

Tell us what your name is, and include a photo. This sounds simple but I can’t tell you how many About pages I’ve read where the blogger frequently mentions “I” and “me”, or “we” and “us”, where the username is “admin” and there’s no mention of a name (or names) anywhere on the site—not even the About page.

The exception of course is if you’re blogging anonymously, but even so, it’s nice to give yourself (or your alter ego) a pen name. People like names and they like to put a face to a name, even if it’s cartoon one.

Remember the mantra: WIIFM?

Somewhere up near the top of your About page, it’s a good idea to tell readers what’s in it for them if they stick around on your site and even subscribe. They’ll be scanning your page thinking, “What’s in it for me? Should I stick around?” If you can answer that succinctly early on, you’ll save them time and attract the kind of audience you’re actually looking for.

About them

If your blog covers a wide range of topics and it’s not super-targeted, it can be useful to actually state who your blog is for. You can even be as obvious as to include a “Who this blog is for” section listing a few items describing your ideal readers. It’s a fast, simple way to help readers figure out whether they want to stick around or not.

Be personal, but not too personal

It depends upon the topic of your blog, but it’s usually a good idea to share your credentials or expertise in the topic you’re blogging about. If you don’t have any, and you’re writing more of a “share your journey” blog, then say this. It helps people figure out where you are on the path in relation to them, and whether they’ll get something from sticking around.

The depth and level of personal information you share will depend upon the type of blog you’re writing—whether it’s a topic-focused blog or more of a personality-based blog.

Determine the goal of your About page

As you’ve probably gathered by now, your About page isn’t just a place to tell people more about you: it can be so much more. You need to determine the goal(s) of your About page, and then make sure that your page achieves those goals. For example, your About page can:

be an ideal place to highlight your best content, allowing you to share links to deeper content within your site

encourage people to sign up to your newsletter—which works especially well for “behind the scenes” newsletters and those which are used to share more personal information from the blogger

give readers other ways to connect with you, by sharing links to your social media profiles and encouraging readers to connect with you there, too

provide readers with social proof and testimonials, helping to establish your credibility and authority from the start.

Always end with a call to action

Your About page is a great place to encourage those who’ve stuck with you until the end of the page, to keep going … but you do need to give them some direction. This goes hand in hand with the point above: once you’ve determined what you’d like your About page to do for your site and your readers, make sure you end strongly by giving readers pointers about the next steps to take, should they be interested.

The above advice can be summarized in the following three points. Your About page should, at the very least, achieve the following:

Introduce the person and personality behind the blog.

Help new readers easily identify whether your blog is for them.

Direct them to do something specific once they’ve read it (whatever it is you’d ideally like them to do next).

Take advantage of this golden opportunity to make another great impression on new readers and create an About page that helps your blog stand out from the others.

What does your About page say about you?

via problogger.net

A sensible list. Just strike out "all about how to make money blogging" and revise passage, which means coming up with something concise and coherent about what Blog X is telling you and why you should stick around, even bookmark or subscribe. A personal mission statement, or in terms of reader theory, identifying audience (ideal or imagined readers) and address them. Overall, the list is good. Heeding it should help me sharpen focus and blog better by writing for a more clearly envisioned but not too niche audience. The About page is also a cover letter to readers (with the blog itself being an application, albeit to read rather than hire or buy )

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Poet Charles Reznikoff Reading ‘Holocaust’

2011-01-26T16:35:00.001-08:00

Prof. Abraham Ravett: CD of Poet Charles Reznikoff Reading ‘Holocaust’

Filmmaker and Hampshire College professor Abraham Ravett’s latest creative project — a CD of poet Charles Reznikoff reading Holocaust — took more than three decades to bring to completion.

Ravett made the audio recording in Reznikoff’s New York City apartment in December 1975, the same year that Black Sparrow Press published Holocaust and shortly before Reznikoff died.
Holocaust is largely based on translations from the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials. Read in the clear, aged voice of the great Objectivist poet, the recording captures the poem as an aesthetic object rather than feelings or thoughts, making the images it contains all the more haunting. Eighteen sections are entitled by opening testimony content, such as “One of the SS men…,” “The state is to get hold…” and “The bodies were thrown out quickly... .”

Listen to excerpts from Holocaust, read by poet Charles Reznikoff >>

read the rest of the story at hampshire.edu

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cities rise and fall

2011-01-09T18:31:00.001-08:00

How nice to find a city something to blog (re-purpose) for places, among other functions, also designated citylit destination ~ all the more so when I'm behind on posting. All MLA'd out too, without even attending. Appropriate for places along the way though, all those LA images, plus irresistible "MLA in LA" (aka "MLALA") inspired juxtapositions ~ Academy in Hard Times, End of the Univeristy as We Know (and other examples of the genre), The Day of the Locust and so on.

From Lapham's Quarterly, a special issue on The City. From City Journal, Victor Davis Hanson on the destiny of cities: Throughout history, forces both natural and human have made cities rise and fall; Asian megacities, free and unfree: How politics has shaped the growth of Shanghai, Beijing, and Seoul; and Brandon Fuller and Paul Romer on cities from scratch and a new path for development. From THES, a review of The Just City by Susan S. Fainstein; and a review of City Life by Adrian Franklin. There is a growing understanding that it is actually “love” that will be the prime force in the future economy of successful 21st century cities. The 30 most dynamic cities on Earth: Which metropolis is leading the world out of the recession? The answer is Istanbul — and the rest of the list is equally surprising. Mario Polese on seven reasons why big cities matter more than ever. Ross Perlin on ten megacities of the near future. What makes a city grow and thrive, and what causes it to stagnate and fall? Geoffrey West thinks the tools of physics can give us the answers. Tom Vanderbilt on how a planned highway can change a city, even if it never gets built. A new era for the city-state: Joel Kotkin on the New World Order. An article on predicting the climate-changed city of the future. An innovator in every apartment: Conor Friedersdorf on how cities should unravel their pre-digital regulations.

Connect
Permalink

via bookforum.com

... time enough tomorrow (or whenever the rest of the convention post-mortems roll in) to blog collected observations and links.

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Every Professor an Entrepeneur?

2011-01-06T09:47:00.001-08:00

Testing for formatting and whether suitable for blogging by email

Quotes:

Every Professor an Entrepeneur?
What if all college professors were forced to be higher-education entrepreneurs, with salaries pegged to the number of students they attract to their classes? That's the model recently proposed by a Texas professor

All professors and lecturers would receive a base "living wage" of $30,000 plus benefits. Beyond that it would be up to the professors themselves to generate a "tuition-based bonus" for themselves consisting of 50 percent of the tuition income generated by students enrolled in their classes, "up to a maximum of 320 students (960 student hours)." All instructors would be allowed to teach up to eight classes a year.

Professors with ultra-large classes could hire teaching assistants---but the money would again have to come out of their salary bonuses

a strict grading curve

Professors whose grades deviated from the curve would lose their bonus for every student whose grade exceeded the curve

some college instructors would make out very well

allow professors to keep whatever externally funded research grants

Not so fortunate would be most humanities instructors---but hey, isn't that what most of us want?

undergraduates---who would flee those classes even faster if they didn't satisfy distribution requirements that would be eliminated under the Publius model.

tenure would also be gone

overpaid and underworked faculty are not the sole reason---or even a significant reason--for the ever-escalating college costs that have generated a tuition inflation rate that over the past three decades has outstripped general inflation rate by a ratio of up to 2-1

there are a few problems with Publius' analysis.

the real culprit is bloated campus administration

over the last two decades colleges and universities "doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent,"

Even the 50 percent increase in the net number of full-time faculty over the past 20 years is somewhat misleading

according to an analysis of Education Department data by the American Association of University Professors, adjunct professors both part-time and full-time accounted for 43 percent of college and university teaching staffs 20 years ago; today they account for nearly 70 percent

colleges themselves have already figured out on their own how to lower instruction costs drastically, and have done so quite ruthlessly

without trimming their ever-escalating overall costs one whit.

tenure as a two-edged shield that often protects conservative faculty members

Second, the entrepreneurial professor model, with its rewards for attracting large numbers of students to successful entrepreneurs' classes, could very well backfire as an effort to encourage an infusion of conservative thought

into campuses along with the free-market ethos

The strongest objection to Publius' model, however, is its cynical (perhaps understandably so) implicit assumption that the humanities are irredeemable and that all humanities scholarship is worthless

In short, there wouldn't have been a classics department

much of what passes for humanities scholarship these days is jargon-saturated junk---but some of it isn't.

universities aren't meant to be entrepreneurial entities, even if some free-market thinking can help them operate more efficiently. They're more like opera companies or museums: entities that cater to niche interests in learning. They sponsor scholarly research that is valuable but could not exist if they had to pitch themselves on a purely commercial basis to a wide swathe of people. This was something that Leland Stanford understood, for he declined to run his university in the way that he ran his railroad.

One place to start would be getting rid of the administrative frills that have turned college into a lifestyle, not a place of learning. Now that would save some money.

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Name That Weird Invention!

2011-01-03T08:58:00.001-08:00

Life surrounds us with weird inventions and practices. Some we become so accustomed to that they no longer seem weird ~ normalization. I'll spare you extended references structuralism and Gombrich on the visual arts.

It’s time for the Name That Weird Invention! contest. Steven M. Johnson comes up with all sorts of crazy ideas in his weekly Museum of Possibilities posts. Can you come up with a name for this one? The commenters suggesting the funniest and wittiest names will win a free T-shirt from the NeatoShop. Let your imagination run wild, and good luck!

via neatorama.com

Somehow this also reminds me of Mountainair Moments. What would you designate as the oddest / weirdest structures, practices, stories, etc. about Mountainair? If unnamed, then go wild naming it. Yes, we have no free T-shirts today. Sorry about that...

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well worth paying attention to

2010-12-30T21:48:00.000-08:00

What else is there to say?

Daron Acemoglu (MIT), Georgy Egorov (Northwestern), and Konstantin Sonin (CEPR): A Political Theory of Populism. Mathias O. Royce (SMC): The Rise and Propagation of Political Right-Wing Extremism: The Identification and Assessment of Common Sovereign Economic and Socio-Demographic Determinants. From Edge, who gets to keep secrets? The question of secrecy in the information age is clearly a deep social (and mathematical) problem, and well worth paying attention to. Kathryn Schulz on 2010: The year in mistakes. Five years in, gauging impact of Gates grants. Putting the "American business model" in its place: The key to understanding why market economies have outperformed planned societies is not recognition of the ubiquity of greed, but understanding of the power of disciplined pluralism. A review of The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives by Gilbert Achcar. Cartoonist Darryl Cunningham investigates climate change. The deep pain of awkward silences: Remarks that stop the conversation cold at social gatherings can instantly elicit deep-seated feelings of exclusion. From NYRB, Ahmed Rashid on the way out of Afghanistan. The American Wikileaks Hacker: Jacob Appelbaum fight repressive regimes around the world — including his own. Rachel Botsman says we're "wired to share" — and shows how websites like Zipcar and Swaptree are changing the rules of human behavior.
Denis Dutton, the author, philosopher, and founding editor of the pioneering web digest Arts & Letters Daily, is dead at age 66.

via bookforum.com

Posted via email from Mountainair NM

Dec 8, #reverb10

2010-12-08T14:50:00.001-08:00

...the prompt is Beautifully different. "Think about what makes you different and what you do that lights people up. Reflect on all the things that make you different - you'll find they're what make you beautiful."

this machine designed by Max Factor measures the beauty of a woman's face but looks like a scene from

Frankenstein meets Hellraiser. Aother article gives a different view of this instrument of ~~torture~~ beauty.

Post-modern has its uses after all. The only way I see to do this one is with an image, just the right image ~ ironic, snarky, hilarious, perhaps even gross. Neither Wiki entries on beauty nor lists of "notable" quotes on beauty will cut it for this one. There's always going Derridada with différance ~ essay Différance translated by Alan Bass + notes . Apply as you will. Or not.

I'm old. Life is Beautiful. Sometimes ... Deconstruct that!

#reverb10, day 7/Dec 7...

2010-12-07T15:05:00.001-08:00

Prompt: Community. Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

This prompt has all the earmarks of a saccharine overdose in the making. Time to free write to turn over sweetened lemonade into zest from fresh lemons, silk purses into sows ears by free associating "community." Who does not belong to many communities? Sometimes too many communities; some are, if not faux, ersatz, counterfeit, then superficial. If not superficial then limited. A taxonomy of communities might run from all inclusive superficial to limited (functional/ situational) inclusive to exclusive. Then there is classification by function or location, perhaps even Library of Congress and Dewey Decimal classifications. There are obvious overlaps.

Function or purpose: family, neighborhood, age cohort, voluntary associations, common interests or community of interests (professional, avocational), team, workplace, causes, projects, campaigns.

Location, IRL (in real life) or virtual (cyberspace): neighborhood, apartment building, office, school, playground, public space, semi public space, private space, social media circles or groups, discussion lists.

Once again, I defer to Wikipedia (yet another community):

In biological terms, a community is a group of interacting organisms sharing a populated environment. In human communities, intent, belief, resources, preferences, needs, risks, and a number of other conditions may be present and common, affecting the identity of the participants and their degree of cohesiveness.

In sociology, the concept of community has led to significant debate, and sociologists are yet to reach agreement on a definition of the term. There were ninety-four discrete definitions of the term by the mid-1950s. Traditionally a "community" has been defined as a group of interacting people living in a common location. The word is often used to refer to a group that is organized around common values and is attributed with social cohesion within a shared geographical location, generally in social units larger than a household. The word can also refer to the national community or global community.

The word "community" is derived from the Old French communité which is derived from the Latin communitas (cum, "with/together" + munus, "gift"), a broad term for fellowship or organized society.

Since the advent of the Internet, the concept of community no longer has geographical limitations, as people can now virtually gather in an online community and share common interests regardless of physical location.

Community is both cliché and tie that binds (in many senses + being yet another cliché). My communities are real and virtual, immediately present and distant but still preserved in memory, shared experience and ongoing communication (similar etymology to community). I have a local community in Mountainair NM, geographical proximity, common interests tend to the community-specific; a batch of professional and shared interest community. Friendship draws from all the preceding. Family seems the most fragile and fractured.

Community may originally been mostly involuntary (in the same figurative boat). The voluntary/involuntary divide is another taxonomic consideration: where you are stuck and have to make the best of versus where you chose to be ~ want to be if only for a while.

Poets's Basement: Ford, Yankevich and Orloski

2010-12-07T10:46:00.001-08:00

Commentary seems superfluous here: 3 poems + a call for submissions from a possibly unexpected source. Consider though social protest in oral tradition ~ ballads, songs, oral and print poetry. Slam poetry, samizdat, broadsheets, Shelley's Mask of Anarchy (which became the anthem of the British Labor Party). Brecht, anonymous romances (ballads) from the Spanish Civil War and after.

Weekend Edition
December 3 -5, 2010
The Long Unemployed
by FRANK FORD
are pressed to become messiahs
for ordinary soap or the like.
Friends and relatives gain cupboards
groaning with the crap. Hey it's all
disguised charity. Better straightforward
thirties with rent parties where players
threw a buck or two in a hat
and proceeded to drink a bathtub
of gin and lose a spouse and gain
another's for the nonce. In screaming
over the roar, some excoriated Capitalism, but
the gin made the vile monster not worth spit.

Frank Ford lives in Cocoa Beach and witnesses space-bound rockets from his
front window. He feels that one day we'll reach aliens, and shoot or bribe them--more of such nonsense can be glimpsed at http://motleycrisp.blogspot.com/

A Plurality of Worlds
by LEO YANKEVICH
Intensities of pain—
of those once persecuted
and those once executed.
The scientific gain
belongs to us, but who knows
of Giordano Bruno’s
suffering on the square,
tongue-tied on cobble stone,
as he met fire alone?
Around him everywhere:
wine spilt amid the jeering,
grimaces and cheering,
squeals from a paederast,
smiles from thieving hawkers,
bishops, whores, and gawkers.
—“Into the Tiber, cast
his ashes!” —could be heard,
“for every wicked word.”

Leo Yankevich’s poems have recently appeared in Blue Unicorn, Chronicles,The Flea, and Trinacria. He has lived in Poland since the mid 1980s.

Crossing the River in the Wrong Direction
(Winter 1777-1778)
by CHARLES ORLOSKI
Ground along the Delaware River,
moss stones, Addie Bundren bones,
a likable old leap frog,
and a string tied to a maple tree branch .
My feet, blistered and sore,
I heard British cannonball whistle,
and removed my wool socks.
Fate, it was war – interrogation,
search-time before boarding.
Beneath a gray candle, a frozen willow,
I answered corkscrew questions
about the Tea Party, the Boston Massacre,
“do you own Crown property?”
No, no, Admiral Sacajawea.
I own only lakefront property in Orleans,
hold stock in the English Channel Tomorrow Tunnel,
support Blairite marketization,
and Catholicism's Just War Theory.
Yes, yes, Admiral –
just war, “all we need is just war,”
and I trade in fur and GMC troikas.
And Sacajawea gave me that Inquisition look,
And how many boats have I missed?
Stamped “T.S.A. Unfit for Waterway Travel”--
it was that flintlock Hershey chocolate-bomb
stuffed in my back-pocket that did me in. .
Unforgettable,
I watched USS George Washington sail across
the Delaware's swirling waves,
and shined a Gatsby light upon him.
A spectator, I yielded,
yelled, “to the left, to the right!”
And I returned to the dragoon Bushes,
cared not about that old indentured frog,
leaping behind me, denouncing me,
following my chickenshit retreat.
It knew I could not bear the paddling anyway.

Charles Orloski lives in Taylor, Pennsylvania. He claims that in order to properly understand his works, one must know the password, possess secret identification. He can be reached and broken-down at CCDJOrlov@aol.com.

Editorial Note: (Please Read Closely Before Submitting)
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via counterpunch.org

Posted via email from Meanderings

Dec 6: #reverb10

2010-12-06T18:33:00.001-08:00

Prompt: Make.

Make it short, make it so, make my day. Maker, hechicero, hacedor, factotum. Faire, hacer, machen, מאַכן, dhéanamh, gwneud, καταστήσει, fer, fazer, facer, fè, fare. Dolce far niente. Make time, make room, make money, make music, make dinner, make a mess. Forget the nimble fingered clever crafty stuff. Not my craft and I'm not blogging a recipe, not sharing my personal gumbo recipe with anybody. Fait accompli.

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

Dec1: #reverb10:

2010-12-01T11:41:00.000-08:00

Prompt for December 1 - One Word. Encapsulate the year 2010 in one word. Explain why you’re choosing that word. Now, imagine it’s one year from today, what would you like the word to be that captures 2011 for you? Confused yet? More about #reverb10 until I get around to posting an explanation ~ this is all very spur of the moment, on impulse. I'm trying to resist the impulse for signing up under more than one nom de blog and theming them.

Concordance. Harmony, putting things in order, mostly coming to terms, but not quite acceptance, not yet and certainly not total acquiescence or subservience.

According to Wikipedia, Concordance can mean:

Concordance (publishing), a list of words used in a body of work, with their immediate contexts
Concordance (genetics), the presence of the same trait in both members of a pair of twins (or set of individuals)
Concordance (medicine), involvement of patients in decision-making to improve patient compliance with medical advice
Agreement (linguistics), a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase.
Concordance system, in Swiss politics, the presence of all major parties in the Federal Council
Concordance database, tailored to legal applications, distributed by LexisNexis
Lambda-CDM model of big-bang cosmology
Link concordance, a relation between mathematical links in knot theory
Inter-rater reliability, in statistics, the degree to which multiple measurements of the same thing are similar
Concordance correlation coefficient, in statistics, a measurement of the agreement between two variables

That should do for now and on so many levels, some (cosmology, math, statistics) I'd have to know more about. Concordance suggests connotative relations too: Concordat, concord, concordant. [Middle English concordaunt, from Old French concordant, from Latin concordns, concordant-, present participle of concordre, to agree, from concors, concord-, agreeing; see concord.]

Do I really have to pick a word for 2011 now? I'll take "multiliteracies," bearing in mind that I could just as easily switch them out, "multiliteracies" for 2010 and "concordance" for 2011. Does that mean there a connection? Do you see it? Good, explain it to me when you get a chance.

Political economy of crisis

2010-11-25T18:59:00.001-08:00

from David Rucio's occasional links & commentary (a fave). Yes, there's more. Read on...

Slavoj Žižek explores what the the idea of political economy means in terms of understanding the current crises:

Happy Holidays... all of them

2010-11-25T09:47:00.000-08:00

Blogger Lit or Meet the Urbloggers

2010-11-23T17:00:00.001-08:00

What Bloggers Owe Montaigne
November 12, 2010 | by Sarah Bakewell

The weekend newspapers are full of them. Our computer screens are full of them. They go by different names—columns, opinion pieces, diaries, blogs—but personal essays are alive and well in the twenty-first century. They flourish just as they did in James Thurber’s and E. B. White’s twentieth-century New York, or in the nineteenth-century London of William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. There seems no end to the appeal of the essayist’s basic idea: that you can write spontaneously and ramblingly about yourself and your interests, and that the world will love you for it.

No end—but there was a beginning. The essay tradition blossomed in English-speaking countries only after being invented by a sixteenth-century Frenchman, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne. His contemporary, the English writer Francis Bacon, also used the title Essays, but his were well-organized intellectual inquiries. While Bacon was assembling his thoughts neatly, the self-avowedly lazy nobleman and winegrower Montaigne was letting his run riot on the other side of the Channel. In his Essais (“Attempts”), published in 1580 and later expanded into larger editions, he wrote as if he were chatting to his readers: just two friends, whiling away an afternoon in conversation.

via theparisreview.org

Without hesitation or combing through the classics (maybe later), I nominate Montaigne, essays published in 1580, as likeliest candidate for 'first among urbloggers.' Montaigne's invention, the literary form of essay, a short subjective treatment of a given topic, is the made-for-blogging genre, just as aphorisms are for tweeting.
Fast forwarding to the Enlightenment, salons and London Coffee House culture, writers there would have taken to blogging like second nature and put us all to shame.

Posted via email from Meanderings

The Origin of America's Intellectual Vacuum

2010-11-19T15:58:00.000-08:00

Reposted from Portside, by Chris Hedges, originally appearing in TruthDig.com, November 15, 2010, The Origin of America's Intellectual Vacuum.... so much for tenure as a safe haven. See also Davis' essay, "The Purge" describing the fates of tenured colleagues.

The blacklisted mathematics instructor Chandler Davis, after serving six months in the Danbury federal penitentiary for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), warned the universities that ousted him and thousands of other professors that the purges would decimate the country's intellectual life.

"You must welcome dissent; you must welcome serious, systematic, proselytizing dissent - not only the playful, the fitful, or the eclectic; you must value it enough, not merely to refrain from expelling it yourselves, but to refuse to have it torn from you by outsiders," he wrote in his 1959 essay "...From an Exile." "You must welcome dissent not in a whisper when alone, but publicly so potential dissenters can hear you. What potential dissenters see now is that you accept an academic world from which we are excluded for our thoughts. This is a manifest signpost over all your arches, telling them: Think at your peril. You must not let it stand. You must (defying outside power; gritting your teeth as we grit ours) take us back."

But they did not take Davis back. Davis, whom I met a few days ago in Toronto, could not find a job after his prison sentence and left for Canada. He has spent his career teaching mathematics at the University of Toronto. He was one of the lucky ones. Most of the professors ousted from universities never taught again. Radical and left-wing ideas were effectively stamped out. The purges, most carried out internally and away from public view, announced to everyone inside the universities that dissent was not protected. The confrontation of ideas was killed.

group photo with students at Toronto

"Political discourse has been impoverished since then," Davis said. "In the 1930s it was understood by anyone who thought about it that sales taxes were regressive. They collected more proportionately from the poor than from the rich. Regressive taxation was bad for the economy. If only the rich had money, that decreased economic activity. The poor had to spend what they had and the rich could sit on it. Justice demands that we take more from the rich so as to reduce inequality. This philosophy was not refuted in the 1950s and it was not the target of the purge of the 1950s.

But this idea, along with most ideas concerning economic justice and people's control over the economy, was cleansed from the debate. Certain ideas have since become unthinkable, which is in the interest of corporations such as Goldman Sachs. The power to exclude certain ideas serves the power of corporations. It is unfortunate that there is no political party in the United States to run against Goldman Sachs. I am in favor of elections, but there is no way I can vote against Goldman Sachs."

The silencing of radicals such as Davis, who had been a member of the Communist Party, although he had left it by the time he was investigated by HUAC, has left academics and intellectuals without the language, vocabulary of class war and analysis to critique the ideology of globalism, the savagery of unfettered capitalism and the ascendancy of the corporate state. And while the turmoil of the 1960s saw discontent sweep through student bodies with some occasional support from faculty, the focus was largely limited to issues of identity politics - feminism, anti-racism - and the anti-war movements. The broader calls for socialism, the detailed Marxist critique of capitalism, the open rejection of the sanctity of markets, remained muted or unheard.

Davis argues that not only did socialism and communism become outlaw terms, but once these were tagged as heresies, the right wing tried to make liberal, secular and pluralist outlaw terms as well. The result is an impoverishment of ideas and analysis at a moment when we desperately need radical voices to make sense of the corporate destruction of the global economy and the ecosystem. The "centrist" liberals manage to retain a voice in mainstream society because they pay homage to the marvels of corporate capitalism even as it disembowels the nation and the planet.

"Repression does not target original thought," Davis noted. "It targets already established heretical movements, which are not experimental but codified. If it succeeds very well in punishing heresies, it may in the next stage punish originality. And in the population, fear of uttering such a taboo word as communism may in the next stage become general paralysis of social thought."

It is this paralysis he watches from Toronto. It is a paralysis he predicted. Opinions and questions regarded as possible in the 1930s are, he mourns, now forgotten and no longer part of intellectual and political debate. And
perhaps even more egregiously the fight and struggle of radical communists, socialists and anarchists in the 1930s against lynching, discrimination, segregation and sexism were largely purged from the history books. It was as if the
civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had no antecedents in the battles of the Wobblies as well as the socialist and communist movements.

"Even the protests that were organized entirely by Trotskyists were written out of history," Davis noted acidly.

Those who remained in charge of American intellectual thought went on to establish the wider "heresy of leftism"
in the name of academic objectivity. And they have succeeded. Universities stand as cowardly, mute and silent accomplices of the corporate state, taking corporate money and doing corporate bidding. And those with a conscience inside the walls of the university understand that tenure and promotion require them to remain silent.

"Not only were a number of us driven out of the American academic scene, our questions were driven out," said Davis, who at 84 continues to work as emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto. "Ideas which were on the agenda a hundred years ago and sixty years ago have dropped out of memory because they are too far from the new center of discourse."

Davis has published science fiction stories, is the editor of The Mathematical Intelligencer and is an innovator in the theory of operators and matrices. He is a director of Science for Peace. He also writes poetry. His nimble mind
ranges swiftly in our conversation over numerous disciplines and he speaks with the enthusiasm and passion of a new undergraduate. His commitment to radical politics remains fierce and undiminished. And he believes that the loss of his voice and the voices of thousands like him, many of whom were never members of the Communist Party but had the courage to challenge the orthodoxy of the Cold War and corporate capitalism, deadened intellectual and political discourse in the United States.

During World War II Davis joined the Navy and worked on the minesweeping research program. But by the end of the war, with the saturation bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, as well as the dropping of the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he came to regret his service in the military. He has spent most of his life working in a variety of anti-war and anti-nuclear movements.

"In retrospect I am sorry I didn't declare myself as a conscientious objector," he said. "Not at the beginning of the war, because if you are ever going to use military force for anything, that was a situation in which I would be happy to do it. I was wholehearted about that. But once I knew about the destruction of Dresden and the other massacres of civilian populations by the Allies, I think the ethical thing to do would have been to declare myself a CO."

He was a "Red diaper baby." His father was a professor, union agitator and member of the old Communist Party who was hauled in front of HUAC shortly before his son. Davis grew up reading New Masses and moved from one city to the next because of his father's frequent firings.

"I was raised in the movement," he said. "It wasn't a cinch I would be in the Communist Party, but in fact I was, starting in 1943 and then resigning soon after on instructions from the party because I was in the military
service. This was part of the coexistence of the Communist Party with Roosevelt and the military. It would not disrupt things during the war. When I got out of the Navy I rejoined the Communist Party, but that lapsed in June of 1953. I never got back in touch with them. At the time I was subpoenaed I was technically an ex-Communist, but I did not feel I had left the movement and in some sense I never did."

Davis got his doctorate from Harvard in mathematics and seemed in the 1950s destined for a life as a professor. But the witch hunts directed against "Reds" swiftly ended his career on the University of Michigan faculty. He mounted a challenge to the Committee on Un-American Activities that went to the Supreme Court. The court, ruling in 1960, three years after Joseph McCarthy was dead, denied Davis' assertion that the committee had violated the First Amendment protection of freedom of speech. He was sent to prison. Davis, while incarcerated, authored a research paper that had an acknowledgement reading: "Research supported in part by the Federal Prison System. Opinions expressed in this paper are the author's and are not necessarily those of the Bureau of Prisons."

Davis, who has lived in Canada longer than he lived in the United States, said that his experience of marginalization was "good for the soul and better for the intellect." "Though you see the remnants of the former academic left still, though some of us were never fired, though I return to the United States from my exile frequently, we are gone," he said. "We did not survive as we were. Some of us saved our skins without betraying others or ourselves. But almost all of the targets either did crumble or were fired and blacklisted. David Bohm and Moses Finley and Jules Dassin and many less celebrated people were forced into exile. Most of the rest had to leave the academic world. A few suffered suicide or other premature death. There weren't the sort of wholesale casualties you saw in Argentina or El Salvador, but the Red-hunt did succeed in axing a lot of those it went after, and cowing most of the rest. We were out, and we were kept out."

"I was a scientist four years past my Ph.D. and the regents' decision was to extinguish, it seemed, my professional career," he said. "What could they do now to restore to me 35 years of that life? If it could be done, I would refuse. The life I had is my life. It's not that I'm all that pleased with what I've made of my life, yet I sincerely rejoice that I lived it, that I don't have to be Professor X who rode out the 1950s and 1960s in his academic tenure and his virtuously anti-Communist centrism."

Like Chandler Davis, screenwriters Dalton Trumbo, left, and John Howard Lawson were sent to prison for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

[Chris Hedges, whose column is published Mondays on Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years. Hedges is a senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City and has taught at Columbia University, New York University and Princeton University. He currently teaches inmates at a correctional facility in New Jersey.]

urbanites and their cities

2010-11-17T17:29:00.001-08:00

Urbanites and their cities
1:00PM
Nov 17 2010

Andrey Korotayev (RSU): The World System Urbanization Dynamics: A Quantitative Analysis. William A. Fischel (Dartmouth): The Evolution of Zoning Since the 1980s: The Persistence of Localism. Urban-rural divide no more: An increasing number of urban dwellers are retreating to the country — and taking the city with them. Witold Rybczynski, author of Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities, on the cities we want (and part 2 — and a review). Could the increasngly complex systems needed to manage the next generation of megacities become our first true artificial intelligence?

An interview with Saskia Sassen: Forget London and New York, the rest of the world should want to be the next Miami. A review of The Wealth and Poverty of Regions: Why Cities Matter by Mario Polese. Boosters still maintain that big cities remain unique centers for social uplift, but evidence suggests this is increasingly no longer the case.

From New Geography, Zachary Neal on why city size does not matter much anymore. How to shrink a city: Not every great metropolis is going to make a comeback — planners consider some radical ways to embrace decline. Megacities: Here is Foreign Policy's guide to the coming urban age. From H-Net, a review of books on North African and Middle Eastern cities.

How will climate change impact urbanites and their cities? Matthew Kahn on his book Climatopolis: How Our Cities Will Thrive in the Hotter Future. Alphabet City: What does a city’s signage tell you about its character? The introduction to Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City. Sustainable urban mobility in 2020: To make the car of the future, we need to make the city of the future. Here is a radical public transportation solution straight out of a sci-fi novel.

via bookforum.com

Posted via email from Meanderings

unlikely to go anywhere

2010-11-16T10:26:00.001-08:00

Unlikely to go anywhere
11:00AM
Nov 16 2010

Wolfgang Nedobity (Vienna): Casanova and the Italian Taste. The world is lousy with aspiring novelists who will probably never be published; Alix Christie offers insight into what keeps them working. From The Chronicle, apes and monkeys, dogs and cats are being unnecessarily confined, vivisected, and killed while animal advocates are ignored as a lunatic fringe; the cruelty of much animal experimentation cannot be justified on scientific grounds, because it has proved largely unproductive; and letter-writing campaigns may ease consciences, but they won't cure diseases. David Weigel on Pete Peterson's unserious campaign to get America to think seriously about the national debt. Annie Lowrey on why the deficit commission's proposal is unlikely to go anywhere. Moral judgments in social dilemmas: How bad is free riding? Die, Phone Book, Die: After a decade of obsolescence, the local phone directory is finally getting the chop as states wise up to reality. Hope, change, reality: Attorney General Eric Holder entered the Justice Department on a mission to reinvent it — unfortunately, Washington doesn't like an idealist. Year-end best-of lists can make for predictable reading — does anyone not know that Jonathan Franzen wrote the big novel of 2010? Instead, Bookforum asked the authors of our favorites to tell us what they liked reading this year. In the grip of the new monopolists: Do away with Google, break up Facebook? We can't imagine life without them — and that's the problem. Fool's Gold: Why the idea of a gold standard is best relegated to the dustbin of history (and more). Are we hardwired to love taxes? Jonah Lehrer on feeling rich, poor or overtaxed. Why conspiracy theorists think The Simpsons may have predicted 9/11. Police State 2010: A series on American MP's in Kandahar. Bringing the coffin industry back from the dead: How barcodes and touch screens are resuscitating a casket factory.

via bookforum.com

another interesting, semi-themed collection of annotated links from Omnivore, the Book Forum blog, xblogged to flâneuse, arts and places ("nowhere" is a place, isn't it? An "unplace" at the very least.

Posted via email from Meanderings

midday musings to the contrary

2010-10-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

"Musings" makes a workable series for blogging disorganized thoughts and those other otherwise not subject to easy categorization. How to blog blogs (redundant, meta or what?) recommend series as way to organize blog posts and even keep them on some sort of regular feeding schedule. Including the series name in the title signals to readers in advance whether or not to bother with the post. The lazy sots like that. Stuck in a feedback loop: maybe meta is a synonym of sorts for redundant. Wouldn't that twist a knot in the skirts of culture theory wonks?

Don't grumble. I warned you "musings," by definition, would be disorganized. This one's for me so I get to do what I want the way I want. No public service announcements, no concern with community spirit, no advocacy unless ironically intended, no calendar announcements, no free PR for virtual parasites and other ingrates: in short, no business whether as usual or otherwise. Musing + graphic (appropriate or even just selected at random) seems like an easy recipe for keeping up.

Homework: drafting a firm but tactful policy guide for service and expository (information) blogs. Tricky combination. Musing, in this case, vents less tactful tendencies currently in ascendancy. Having a paid gig doing pretty much what I've been doing for free casts free online services and the bad behavior of the recipients in a whole 'nother light. I was already out of sorts with the whole syndrome and its tribe of accomplices. Had been long enough for it to be an old song. That not only strips me of bitching rights but makes me an enabler. Whoa. Come to a screeching halt. Make a sliding stop right there

Now time will be tighter. Much. Necessity that mother requires I tend to matters by weeding out virtual parasites and other time thieves. Thank you Mother Necessity for saving me from myself.

accept only easy to turn around submissions, preferably ready to blog but let's be realistic
DOWNSIZE it dammit (images, files): 1MB limit is beyond generous.
no more doc conversions or accepting files I can't open
no more unlimited reminders, 1 reminder after original query, 3rd time just shoot them like in the old joke about the stubborn mule and training Kate
speaking of time and time thieves, make those submissions in a timely manner

Consume!

2010-09-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

'nuff said, via David Ruccio's occasional links & commentary

The Dunning-Kruger effect

2010-09-14T11:16:00.001-07:00

The masses are a$$es ... and so are their handlers. We already knew this. But did you know there is a theory for it it? Dear (and likely imaginary) Reader, I'll leave the specifics of local and global applications up to you. More colloquially known as "confident dumb people." Post cheerfully cribbed from Wikipedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the situation in which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence: because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

The Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward by Justin Kruger and David Dunning. Similar notions have been expressed–albeit less scientifically–for some time. Dunning and Kruger themselves quote Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge") and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision."

The Dunning–Kruger effect is not, however, concerned narrowly with high-order cognitive skills (much less their application in the political realm during a particular era, which is what Russell was talking about. Nor is it specifically limited to the observation that ignorance of a topic is conducive to overconfident assertions about it, which is what Darwin was saying. Indeed, Dunning et al. cite a study saying that 94% of college professors rank their work as "above average" (relative to their peers), to underscore that the highly intelligent and informed are hardly exempt. Rather, the effect is about paradoxical defects in perception of skill, in oneself and others, regardless of the particular skill and its intellectual demands, whether it is chess, playing golf or driving a car.

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, then both of Cornell University. Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

Links

post about DKE on "You Are Not So Smart," subtitled "a celebration of self-delusion" (how apropos) and self-described as " a blog devoted to self delusion and irrational thinking." Flâneuse is putting this one on the rss reader immediately
The Anosognosic's Dilemma (Opinionator, NYT)
Confident Dumb People (Boing Boing)
DKE even has its own web site
and b-net tells you what to do about it

It's everywhere: government, management, organizations, the education system. Spread the word, warn everybody.

about The Pedestrian

2010-09-13T12:00:00.000-07:00

C'est nous... mais en anglais

About The Pedestrian | The Pedestrian

maquillage du blog

2010-09-07T11:12:00.000-07:00

Overdue part deux of post-downer recovery from doing the digital for the public weal. It is not enough to change editorial course or resume a previous one, ever bearing in mind that the very notion of any kind of heading is contrary to the principles of flânerie. Whether nostos or heading off in an entirely new direction, one must also look different. Appearance and costume matter. Nothing quite like remodeling or a face lift for a psychic pick-me-up. Can't afford either, so it's just as well the inclination is lacking in other spheres. Electronically, enter new templates and features for blog makeovers. Maquillage... in art and flânerie.

I've been redecorating the rest of my personal blogosphere. Design choices range from elegant to clean lined simplicity, a green grass, blue skies evocative of picnics under a summer sky or dignified without being stuffy.

... and now la chère flâneuse ... each makeover suiting their blog personae and purpose. What delicious irony to use purpose and flânerie in the same sentence. A blessing to never ever again use either "mission" or "mission statement" unless with max pomo or post-pomo irony (wonder what that last might look or read like...). Mission = WTF I want it to be. Don't Feed the Trolls? Sh**t ! I am the troll.

So, what now? Update the Sunflower Festival essay? Something on rural development in the time of economic cholera? Grant fantasies? If "Grants = welfare for organizations supporting the status quo," would that make the Chamber of Commerce a Welfare Queen? How does institutionalizing (and thereby controlling underlying impulses) affect advocacy and good works? The makeover demands that I remember to avoid real names unless I'm saying something nice. Maybe not even then. I have other blogs for that sort of thing.

Implying let alone stating anything resembling a "purpose" contradicts flânerie. I wander the City of Bytes and house of memory wherever curiosity and my fancy take me.

global e-flânerie

2010-08-31T16:44:00.001-07:00

reposted from Omnivore, Book Forum's splendid blog of links briefly annotated and grouped thematically, adding up to

A proper philosophy of globalization

From Synthesis Philosophica, Zagorka Golubovic (Belgrade): Philosophical Principles as a Foundation of the Concept of Globalisation; Arto Mutanen (Lappeenranta): About the Possibility of a Proper Philosophy of Globalization; Tomas Kacerauskas (VGTU): Discourse of Globalization: Bios, Techne, and Logos from the Phenomenological Point of View; Tomaz Grusovnik (Primorska): A Distant View: Globalization Inside Philosophy; Bela Mester (HAS): Space and Time in a Global World; Vojko Strahovnik (Ljubljana): Globalization, Globalized Ethics and Moral Theory; Mislav Kukoc (Spli): Liberal Philosophy and Globalization; Dragica Vujadinovic (Belgrade): Global Civil Society as Concept and Practice in the Processes of Globalization; and Gottfried Kuenzlen (UniBw): The Other Side of Globalisation: The New Power of Religion as a Cultural and Political Challenge. From the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, James Brassett (Warwick):Cosmopolitan Sentiments After 9-11: Trauma and the Politics of Vulnerability; Nick Srnicek (LSE): Conflict Networks: Collapsing the Global into the Local; Victoria Ridler (Birkbeck): Word and World: The Imperium of Reason and Possibility of Critique; and a roundtable discussion on Transnational Militancy in the 21st Century. Are nations going extinct? Our conception of what constitutes a "country" is deteriorating — say hello to post-national entities, "other guys" that stand outside of the dominant system. Beyond city limits: The age of nations is over — the new urban age has begun. A review of Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works by Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux. From Newsweek, a special section on the world's best countries. World's Happiest Countries: Bhutan started the gross national happiness trend, but here's what Gallup did with it. From Foreign Policy, an article on the geopolitics of Google Earth: It's not just for busting swimming pool cheats.

I succumbed to Shunflower Syndrome and am still in the post-event ease taking phase ~ sharing link collections I want to read + comments. Also a necessary antidote to provincialism, both local and academic. If you still don't get it about globalization (here to stay so deal with it), consider this survival homework and get rid. Don't let the flâneuse get virtual blisters for nothing. That's not quite true: this where flâneuse quite contrary goes her merry way, online flânerie is a state of mind, a virtual version of traveling with an open ticket ~ and I've noticed a popular handle for bloggerinas. Did you catch the city references? Globalization as a new urban age. I bet if I'd ever submitted that dissertation, a) it wouldn't have improved my employment options, and b) I'd be so sick of cities and city lit that I wouldn't still be researching and collecting links.

"Places along the way" is city related too, although not exclusively, and somewhat cit lit too. A whole 'nother blog for city lit (with or without dissertation) would be excessive. Combining city lit ~ my places as read, visited, inhabited, even just imagined ~ would spare it the sad fate of being just another travel blog.

An Existential View of Personal Blogs in Cyberspace

2010-08-25T20:50:00.000-07:00

Arash writes, "Without the reader, the blog would not exist." I blog therefore I am... or what? Is then the world a blog or vice versa?

Arash's World: The Author-Reader Relationship: An Existential View of Personal Blogs in Cyberspace

are we obsolete?

2010-08-12T09:58:00.000-07:00

Selected links to articles and websites, thought provoking and entertaining. A brief sampler:

The ideals of inclusivity and diversity are losing ground in the general public. Joel Kotkin on the changing demographics of America.... Michael Lind on the fantasy of a vast upper middle class: College isn't for everyone, neither is the stock market.... From New Politics, what happened to the American working class? .... The richest few don't need the rest of us as markets, soldiers or police anymore.

Are the American people obsolete? - links from bookforum.com / omnivore

PS ~ when I get a handle on regular schedule, an appropriate if thinly veiled anonymization, apps to facilitate clipping for post content and the like, I'll saunter back into the public domain.

Media Matters

2010-06-20T22:04:00.001-07:00

Links from a guilty pleasure blog

2010-04-29T03:49:00.001-07:00

I have some thoughts fermenting in my mind about the recent surge of "blood and soil" nationalism in this country, from the birthers to the recent law in Arizona to all the talk of "real America," but it'll be awhile before they coalesce into something worth reading. For now I'll offer some links for your edification.

First off, I have to thank Chauncey DeVega for tipping me off to this brilliant piece in New York magazine detailing Sarah Palin's political grifting.

In case you didn't know, the new law in Arizona was written with the help of someone connected to white supremacist extremists. The principle author, Russell Pearce, likes to hang out with neo-Nazis. My worst fears are coming true: these fascists (these are the real kind!) have used the Tea Party movement to move from the fringe to the mainstream.

When I feel like getting my 80s on, " Suddenly Last Summer" by The Motels always gets the job done. "Bette Davis Eyes" does too, though more the reverby guitars than the airy synths.

The Times has a great piece on the problems with PowerPoint, which has gotten me thinking about using it less in my classes.

This is one of most wonderful People of Walmart photos I've ever seen. By wonderful, I mean horribly disgusting.

Tim Wise has some interesting thoughts on what the reaction might be if the Tea Party were black, instead of white.

The ever insightful Eugene Robinson gives his two cents on the Arizona law.

And, to close it all out, the great Frank Rich lowers the boom on Goldman Sachs.

The Rejectionist is my other guilty pleasure blog... you'll meet her soon. Brace yourself...

taking my social media pulse

2010-04-20T01:10:00.000-07:00

I'm keeping up with blogs, more or less, Thatis this week, no telling what next week will bring. Caring about keeping up is harder than the blogging itself.

The Chinese menu formula (one each from columns A, B, C, etc) for the New Faculty Majority blog keeps posts distributed between official, unofficial but relevant and personal. I should add a column D for humor if only for my own sanity. It may work out. Time will tell.

Mountainair Arts runs to the haphazard, depending on mood and what lands in my mailbox. I think I may be getting past the blog-malaise that stalks me, blocking blogging, more there than any place else. Poets and Writers Picnic seems less susceptible. That will no doubt change as picnic slouches toward the Shaffer garden like some proverbial beast waiting to be born.

NaWriPoMo

2010-04-02T17:37:00.001-07:00

I'm starting a day late (today being April 2) but still giving NaWriPoMo a try via the ReadWritePoem prompts and blog. Maybe just the prompts.

So this is how I participate: I write a poem a day, every day, for the month of April. I can keep them to myself, or post them online ~ obviously I intend to post them online, less sure about the sharing part. I can put myself on the official NaPoWriMo participants' list by emailing my name and/or the name/address of this website where (if it happens at all, I'll be posting my poems) to napowrimo2010@gmail.com. NaPo (for short) then links this site on its main page.

There's another process for NaPo on RWP. I won't go into it now because I'm still reading that post.

Posted via web from Meanderings

But there's more... including a cautionary tale, the Web 2.0 version ... Posterous is a useful tool for quick multiple posts but be careful using that you don't send posts more places than you intend and then have to dash about deleting them. If you posterous-post from the website, the damn things sends them everywhere it has a connection for. The same can happen when you post by email, but you can control destination/s by addressing. The information is on the site.

algorithms, filters and social networks

2010-03-26T22:10:00.001-07:00

from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 20.03.2010, via Sign and Sight's from the Feuilltons feature

Jürgen Kuri assistant editor-in-chief of c't, explains why web filters are so important, and why only social networks have the power to counteract the Google algorithm: "Algorithms are not moral and not intelligent. Algorithmic filters lead to mainstreaming, which smacks of the Matthew effect: "To all those who have, more will be given".

Things that are known are strengthened by repetition and more versions of the same; the unknown things and things that don't conform are blended out. But user behaviour on social networks demonstrates that filters can work differently. The network of relations between circles of friends on Facebook and groups of followers on Twitter, creates a social filter of tips, links, retweets, statements and comments."

be your own futurist

2010-03-10T02:58:00.001-08:00

Professional futurists continue to make outstanding contributions toward the development of understandings of the future, but is futures thought limited to this select group? Definitely not! With a do-it-yourself attitude, and leverage of the right resources, anybody can become an effective futurist. Here's why:

Nobody knows the future – don't trust anybody who says otherwise. The world is changing at an accelerating pace, and it's simply getting harder and harder to imagine what will happen next, let alone 20 years from now. We are all white belts when it comes to approaching the future. We have never been there before, and it is hard to model a world that does not exist yet. What futurists provide is their "best guess" — hopefully supported by quality research and trends analyses.
Futuring is easier than you think. While some futures research methodologies, such as the Delphi method, require an element of professional experience and expertise, many others are easily done — and should be done — by just about anybody. Environmental scanning, for example, involves simply exposing yourself to as much data and information on a broad range as possible (i.e., reading as many newspapers as you can, daily). The futures wheel is related to mindmapping, and can be easily done within individual or group settings. Jerome Glenn and Theodore Gordon wrote an excellent volume on methodologies used by futurists, Futures Research Methodology Version 3.0 (Available at Amazon.com). For do-it-yourself futurists or those wishing to explore the field, it is an excellent resource that will get you going.
We are all futurists. Few activities are as natural and universal among humans and human cultures as storytelling. We use stories to share our memories and imaginations of events that have happened or will happen. We use stories to share histories, fables and myths of the past. We also use stories to share visions of and for the future — including goal setting, promises of change, narratives of how we improve ourselves, and even apocalyptic nightmares. Even in our sleep, we often dream about future scenarios. Futurists explicitly tap into our stories and the power of storytelling to share their visions and dreams. So can everybody else.
You can access the same information as professional futurists can. Unless if you're divining knowledge from an isolated and highly controlled information source, the ubiquitous availability of data and information in today's networked society mean that you can easily and cost-effectively build up your knowledge base of future trends. Moreover, you are welcome to join the same professional societies that professional futurists participate in, such as the World Future Society, providing you with the same connections and access to professional society-level knowledge they have.
We all create the future. Futurists do not create the future, everybody does. Time may move forward, but the future does not just "happen." Rather we share a responsibility to ensure that the futures we create are positive (ideal outcomes for humanity, the world, etc.). Moreover, in our interconnected world, we cannot disconnect from our futures. We cannot "futureproof" an organization. Nor can we find ways to fight it as individuals. Rather we can harness our inner futurists and lead in the creation of futures of our own design.

Cheerfully cribbed from Education Futures, "Five secrets futurists don't want you to know" by John Moravec