April 2013
1 post
February 2013
3 posts
The Weekly Ansible: 50 Sci-Fi & Fantasy Works... →
theweeklyansible:
Reposted from Fantastic Metropolis, author China Mieville lays out a list of 50 science fiction and fantasy works he feels every socialist ought to read.
When I became a socialist I was also studying Sociology and Philosophy academically. I experienced something that seems to be a trend…
I haven’t read many of these, but if Mieville says I should…
Higher ed Mooks
Everytime I hear the term MOOC, I snicker a little. Particularly when I hear that MOOCs are bound to disrupt higher education. The term reminds me of Douglas Rushkoff’s PBS Frontline documentary Merchants of Cool, where he describes “the portrait of the teenage American male” developed by marketers to appeal to that demographic:
The Mook is what critics call the crude, loud, obnoxious,...
“Again, a MOOC that is truly open and free—and high quality—is a wonderful...”
– Aaron Bady, “Tree Sitting” (via thenewinquiry)
January 2013
3 posts
reflective writing and expropriation
I’ve been reading back through some of my writing over the past year (in part to make sure I’m not repeating myself in a piece I’m writing now.) I am often amazed at how repetitive writers like Slavoj Zizek are - telling the same joke in four or five books at once - but I can see how easy it if for that to happen, particularly when you appear to be shouting into a vacuum in terms...
“While his methods were provocative, the goal that Aaron died fighting for —...”
– https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz
Very distressed by Aaron’s suicide. Not much else articulate to say about this. But his manifesto still resides in Archive.org. I recommend reading it for more background on the goal he was fighting for.
Lessig Blog, v2: Prosecutor as bully →
lessig:
(Some will say this is not the time. I disagree. This is the time when every mixed emotion needs to find voice.)
Since his arresting the early morning of January 11, 2011 — two years to the day before Aaron Swartz ended his life — I have known more about the events that began this…
December 2012
1 post
Google "Tax Deadbeat": The Ultimate Google bomb
Yesterday, The Washington Post reported that Google is a tax dodger to the tune of avoiding $2 billion in 2011 alone.
Google Inc. avoided about $2 billion in worldwide income taxes in 2011 by shifting $9.8 billion in revenues into a Bermuda shell company, almost double the total from three years before, filings show.
By legally funneling profits from overseas subsidiaries into Bermuda,...
October 2012
7 posts
“Looked at from this angle, the standard practice of urban planning and...”
– I’ve been enjoying James C. Scott’s new book on anarchism tremendously. The opening concept of anarchist calisthenics remains one of my favorite, but another theme running throughout the book so far is really useful. It highlights the differences between vernacular understandings of...
“Hayek: “A society that wishes to get a maximum economic return from a limited...”
– Following along my post last week, I’ve been able to visit Corey Robin’s new tumblr page - in some ways marking a new focus in his scholarship: Hayek and the Liberal philosophers like him and their relationship to the broader changes in our society. In short, the anti-democratic,...
3 tags
“There’s this drumbeat at state legislatures to pass what I think is a scam to...”
– This entire article is essential reading if we are to understand how policy gets made. In this case, it is about education policy being guided by powerful interest groups, many of whom stand to gain financially from the deals. This has been true for several decades and it represents one of the...
Peter Theil, Libertarianism in Honduras - and what... →
The linked page above gives some interesting analysis by Latin American scholar Greg Grandin on the perverse new projects being proffered there (namely creating corporate owned and operated “Charter Cities” in Honduras - sorta like we did in the early days of capitalism, before the British monarchy was forced to take over the East India Trading company because of the social unrest it...
“The ascension myth of Jobs over Gates and of Apple over Microsoft is a...”
– Willie Osterweil has a by now conventional, but still relevant, take on the cultural distinction between the Mac and the Microsoft PC. I don’t know how far these distinctions hold, though. I wonder what it means that Gates has taken such an interest in reshaping the actual education system (a...
“One day you will be called upon to break a big law in the name of justice and...”
– James C. Scott from his new book Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play. I can’t say I practice his advice enough, but I will certainly try to get this kind of exercise.
HT: Matt Zwolinski
September 2012
3 posts
August 2012
5 posts
“Whatever else you want to say about the for-profits, they work as a system. They...”
– A fair point, though we could say the same thing of all public institutions today. And while the answer might be that we need a clear vision, it is also true that coming up with a coherent vision will not, and cannot, solve the basic conflict at the heart of this debate: will we, as a society,...
6 tags
The wages of precarity, the costs of globalization
Last October, on the Wall Street Journal’s “Real Time Economics” blog, there was a discussion of a new work of economic analysis which purports to be “a model for predicting a nation’s future growth more accurately than any other techniques out there.” The model they discuss is rather sensible. It ranks countries according to their “productive...
June 2012
2 posts
PeerJ, or can we get this revolution over with...
I’m a little tired of every experiment in Open Access being declared revolutionary before it’s even launched (or on the day of its launch). And I am even more tired of the phrase “Cambrian explosion.” It does appear that PeerJ has some interesting attributes.
- The $99 one-time fee allows an author to publish one article a year; higher fees allow for more articles. The...
ARL Policy Notes: What does the GSU decision mean... →
arlpolicynotes:
We’ve just added the following set of questions and answers to our FAQ for librarians, which is part of the rich package of resource pages that we’re maintaining to support users of the Code. As you’ll see, the impact of Judge Evans’ decision in the Georgia State University course reserves…
May 2012
4 posts
5 tags
“It seems possible that what really troubles us about the success of machine...”
– I missed this terrific essay on writing pedagogy (and machine scoring) Marc Bousquet wrote back in April. He builds a very insightful argument, first pointing out that human scorers aren’t all that more “human” in their grading process. On this count, I was glad to see him cite...
WatchThe first installment of what Dennis Redmond promises will be a series of videos on global transformations that are only superficially visible in the Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring. Redmond, a prolific writer and teacher, with degrees in Comparative Literature and Communications, is well known among Adorno fans as providing one of the best English translations of Negative Dialectics - a...
5 tags
“If print on demand became widespread, publishers could cut their fixed costs and...”
– This statement appeared in a Business Week article about Amazon’s challenge to mainstream publishing and the role of print-on-demand (POD) in that strategy. While it has the breezy know-it-all tone of the business press, I don’t find their analysis of why big publishers aren’t...
April 2012
4 posts
4 tags
“There’s a dangerous group of anticopyright activists out there who pose a clear...”
– If you haven’t checked out Cory Doctorow’s novel Makers, it is a very easy read - easing you into what Stephen Johnson might call the “adjacent possible” of the contemporary world. The drama is mostly about the drama of enterpreneurship and culture at large, especially as...
4 tags
“With student debt so prevalent, young workers are assumed (known) to have loans...”
– Malcolm Harris’s close reading of the cultural and political implications of the film Sleeping Beauty is also a nice overview of the empirical condition of precarity facing young workers. Of course this market discipline is part of the design of the system. The problem today is less that the...
“A bat straight out of socialist hell, the first-sale doctrine is yet another...”
– My favorite line from a laugh-out-loud April Fool’s column in American Libraries Magazine: Let’s Put an End to Socialized Intellectual Property (via arlpolicynotes)
3 tags
“The emergence of Netflix and other digital distributors such as Amazon and Hulu...”
– The story above the “fold” on Larry David is fun for fans, but the overview of syndication rights is something all of us should understand. This dual stream of income will soon get combined in some way - USA and TNT will buy or start an online platform or Hulu will start a cable channel...
March 2012
4 posts
Watchthis is quite a video. I love the cops w their donuts.
“We’ve seen in the disruption of other information industries in recent years...”
– Jeff Selingo, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Ed last week, discusses some new data on the “Student Swirl” - a concept used to describe the increasingly non-linear path through which students are working through their degrees. What is striking to me in the article is that he starts...
4 tags
“The global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the...”
– From Christopher Kelty’s excellent overview of what the shutdown of library.nu means. Of course I think it’s excellent because he mostly repeats the points I made in my post on the closure the day after it happened. I don’t know if I’d call all of the users middle class,...
February 2012
10 posts
“We have also heard from some Elsevier journal authors, editors and reviewers who...”
– This morning Elsevier announced it was withdrawing support for the controversial Research Works Act. The rhetoric is priceless. My favorite line is the one above. As if people were just stymied by the contradiction: “Elsevier is usually so good; why are they being evil?” The...
“If Amazon succeeds, the free market will have had little to do with it.”
– The Author’s Guild. is an interesting, pro-free market critique of Amazon - the state plays no role, and the monopoly solely comes from what is seen as an immoral use of economic power. The promise of an e-book future is completely overlooked; it says a lot about the position of the...
WatchLibrary of Congress = 28 Million books 1 book = 1 MB 28 million x 1 MB = 26-28 Terabytes = all the books
As Brewster Kahle says, “You could put it a single shopping cart at Best Buy - and not go completely broke! You could have all of the words in the Library of Congress and it would be [about the size of a single book box from a moving company.] It would spin for a while, but...
4 tags
Library.nu: Modern era's "Destruction of the...
The description above may come as a surprise to people who never sampled the wares of this fantastic resource. But the description, made by someone named Samir Huseyn on Twitter earlier today, is a fitting one. It was likely nowhere near as extensive as the library of Alexandria, but the last time I visited, it had thousands of pages and likely almost 100k objects in its catalog (according to...
“Of course, they had also grown up with a torrent of pirated resources available...”
– The passage above is from an essay in last week’s Inside Higher Ed written by two of my colleagues here at NITLE. It is an interesting read which touches on some of the key issues facing higher education - and a possible future for the people who have the most passion and commitment to its...
“What is crucial to understand is that academic publishing is not a free market....”
– From the same amazing Boston Globe piece, the quickest and clearest summary of academic publishing’s dysfunction I’ve ever seen. It is VITALLY IMPORTANT that everyone in the ecosystem understand these basic facts. (via arlpolicynotes)
Exit, Voice, and Education Reform
School choice and education reform are key examples of what led Albert Hirschman to write his economic treatise Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. In this long essay (written in 1970), Hirschman lays out the terms of his problematic in relation to the two major ways of thinking about human institutions: those of political science and those of economics. Voice belongs to the former and Exit to the...
Unraveling (some of) the mysteries of the Elsevier... →
I find the comments (in the linked post above) disparaging the people involved in this boycott quite tedious and ahistorical. I tend to agree with Mark Sandler and others who have pointed out that this is a political movement and that it is, quite possibly, just beginning. Elsevier is a big target, which explains why it was chosen. There are obviously mitigating circumstances that make it less...
“As we adapt to the digital age, arcane copyright laws that offer no benefit even...”
– Time to update copyright law? - CNN.com (via arlpolicynotes)
January 2012
14 posts
The Poseidon Option: an alternative to paying for...
> From: Rick Anderson > For the Good of the Order, I’m going to <snip> right there so as not to > create a ten-foot-long email string. And hopefully I can respond > effectively by simply saying that I think you’re trying to fit too much > cargo into the very small boat of my argument. To (hopefully) clarify:
[for some background to this exchange, you can look at...
The Poseidon Option vs. PDA: Intro
I’ve been engaged in an extended conversation about the issue of paying only for usage as a strategy for serials subscriptions in library collections. Or, more accurately, there is a long discussion going in within the library community about this as a possibility and I, as a faculty member interested and researching libraries, have been able to take part in it. As I understand it, paying...
