reading
Sunday, 10 May 2015 - 6:18pm
Things have been more grim than ever (and that's saying something) in our little Colorbond-clad corner of sunny Sawtell. Fortunately, I can always escape reality via the Internet. This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations - Kyle York at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: "The Time Traveller: There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a different worker. The different worker is actually the first worker ten minutes from now."
- Do you ever really own a computerized device? - Toronto Globe and Mail interviews Cory Doctorow: "So this creates this really weird regime where effectively you get to make up your own laws: You put a lock on, you prevent something from happening and suddenly it becomes illegal to do that. Even if Parliament or Congress never sat down to do that. Can that law really pass constitutional muster?"
- The History of the Future of the Push-Button School - Audrey Watters: "'The high school becomes partially transformed into a center run by administrators and clerks, with a minimum of the routine assigned to the teaching staff. […] The creation of educational material moves partially out into industry, which goes into the education business in partnership with educators.'"
- ‘They,’ the Singular Pronoun, Gets Popular - Ben Zimmer, WSJ: People like me have strong feelings about issues like this.
- Government inquiry takes aim at green charities that ‘get political’ - Peter Burdon on the Conversation: "While conceding that the Hawke review may be interpreted as an “attack on [environmental organisations'] efforts to protect the environment”, [Gary] Johns also argued that governments “should be reticent” about supporting organisations that “promote viewpoints on issues where there is reasonable disagreement in the electorate”. It is difficult to see what organisations would satisfy such a test. Certainly not the Institute of Public Affairs, the Chifley Research Centre or Menzies House, which also enjoy tax deductibility but seem unlikely to face the same scrutiny advocated by Hawke."
- The triple crisis of sociology - Ivan Szelenyi at Contexts: "Sociology is indeed in a triple crisis. It responds the wrong way to “scientific” challenge coming from neo-classical economics and rational choice political science. It either imitates them or moves into trendy interdisciplinary fields just to regain its lost constituency." Also check out Ivan's Foundations of Modern Social Theory lectures. I didn't know he taught at Flinders University in the 70s. My, that Hungarian accent seems hard to shake off.
- Shorter - Cory Doctorow at Locus Online: "My experience contrasts with the moral panic over the decline in writing standards due to the Internet. Those who wring their hands at the informality and vernacular of instant messaging and social media prose have missed the point: when we practice writing short, for an audience, as a kind of performance, it makes us better writers"
Sunday, 3 May 2015 - 6:49pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Matter Over Mind - Paul Krugman, NYT: "[…] belief that income inequality is all about, and can be fixed by, education is even more wrong than you thought."
- Stop subsidising for-profit education - John Quiggin
- Ed-Tech's Inequalities - Audrey Watters: "Education technology will close the achievement gap; education technology will close the opportunity gap. Education technology will revolutionize; education technology will democratize. Or so we are told."
- 6 Things Warwick University’s New Temp Agency Tells Us About Academic Precarity - John Murray on Novara Wire
- Ezra Klein of Vox.com vs. Tom Standage of The Economist - Brad DeLong, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: Aggregation with attribution vs. authority silo.
- The shadowy world of IPA finances - Clive Hamilton on the Drum: "The IPA is notoriously secretive about its sources of funding. Its senior staff have refused to answer journalists' questions, although over the years enough information has leaked out to suggest that much of its funding has come from the oil and mining industries, including Exxon, Shell, Caltex and BHP-Billiton."
- Malice in Wonderland - Desmond Manderson, Arena: "Abbott’s ‘felicific calculus’ is that more people are made happier by ‘stopping the boats’, even if some people—those stuck on Manus or Nauru, for example—are made very unhappy indeed. Let me repeat: our government is prepared to turn a blind eye to, or to condone, perhaps even intentionally devise, actions that amount to torture, so long as it helps it realize its goals. Has there ever been a case like it in Australian history? The violation of human rights is not an accident; it’s a policy. Net happiness has increased, so we have nothing to apologise for."
- The hottest tax idea in Washington is actually terrible - Marshall I. Steinbaum, the Week: Consumption tax. This time, it won't just be an outrageous gift to the rich. Honest.
- Servitude: the way we work now - People who in law are free are bound by economic necessity to work for less than the living wage (‘apprenticeships’), no pay (‘internships’), or in uncertain conditions (‘zero-hours’ contracts). They are free to leave if they wish. Like Okies in the Dust Bowl they can load up the truck. They at least had Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. Who speaks for the zero people?"
Sunday, 26 April 2015 - 6:38pm
This week, I have been mostly sick as a dog. I might have read the following, though it could all have been a delusion brought on by fever and lack of sleep:
- Using Wikipedia: a scholar redraws academic lines by including it in his syllabus - Ellis Jones at the Conversation: Hooray! And well, d'uh. But mostly hooray!
- First we take Amsterdam, then we take The Hague - On April 1, representatives of staff and students from the occupied Maagdenhuis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) came to an agreement with the University’s Executive Board (CvB) concerning the formation of two independent committees, one to investigate UvA’s finances and another to investigate possibilities for decentralization and democratization."
- Students, Solidarity Strikes and Shutting Down Austerity at the Point of Production: The Social Vision of the 2015 Quebec Student Strike - Jonathan Leavit, Toward Freedom: "Bela recounts how inside his organizing conversations, technical education students were skeptical about organizing around education, because their programs are already commodified, privileging market demands over educational outcomes. 'If you tell them, well, you won’t have any kindergarten. You will have to stay at home or your partner will have to stay at home. What kind of society do you want? Then they’re ready to strike.'"
- Time Is Money Is Work Is Virtue - Colette Shade at the Baffler: "The iPhone has allowed office workers to be available anywhere, at any time. The Apple Watch is both a logical next step and a throwback to time measurement’s industrial origins."
- Warwick Uni to outsource hourly paid academics to subsidiary - Fighting Against Casualisation in Education
- The Automatic Teacher - Audrey Watters at boundary 2: "This does not mean, in any unfortunate sense, the mechanization of education. It does mean freeing the teacher from the drudgeries of her work so that she may do more real teaching, giving the pupil more adequate guidance in his learning. There may well be an ‘industrial revolution’ in education. The ultimate results should be highly beneficial. Perhaps only by such means can universal education be made effective."
- The Australian Sharia Lobby - John Quiggin: "The prospect of any significant legislation being based on Islamic sharia law seems pretty remote. On the other hand, those who claim to be concerned about sharia law (the Arabic term simply means ‘religious law) might want to consider the much more relevant issue of ‘sharīʿat al-Masīḥ’ (the Arabic term for ‘religious law of Christianity’)."
- The Big Chill: How Big Money Is Buying Off Criticism of Big Money - Robert Reich: "It’s bad enough big money is buying off politicians. It’s also buying off nonprofits that used to be sources of investigation, information, and social change, from criticizing big money. Other sources of funding are drying up. Research grants are waning. Funds for social services of churches and community groups are growing scarce. Legislatures are cutting back university funding. Appropriations for public television, the arts, museums, and libraries are being slashed."
- Dear Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook is not, and should not be the internet - SavetheInternet.in coalition, Hindustan Times
- Yanis Varoufakis in conversation with Joseph Stiglitz on the Eurozone Crisis – at the INET-OECD conference, 9 April 2015 (video)
Sunday, 19 April 2015 - 10:12pm
This week (and last), I have been mostly too busy to log—or even do—much extra-curricular reading. Here are some exceptions:
- Why is so much of the discussion of higher ed driven by elite institutions? - Corey Robin at CT: "[…] the way that elite institutions dominate our media discussions really skews how the public, particularly that portion of the public that is not in college right now, sees higher education. There is a war being fought on college campuses, but it’s not about trigger warnings or safe spaces; it’s about whether most students will be able to get any kind of liberal arts education at all—forget Shakespeare v. Morrison; I’m talking essays versus multiple choice tests, philosophy versus accounting—from mostly precarious professors who are themselves struggling to make ends meet."
- Lecture by David Graeber: Resistance In A Time Of Total Bureaucratization / Maagdenhuis Amsterdam (video): "Twenty or thirty years ago, when you said 'the university', people meant the faculty, the staff. Now when you say 'the university' you mean the administrition. We are no longer a community of scholars, we're a business. […] Creating knowledge, learning things, studying things, understanding the world, is no longer the point of a university."
- Joe Biden’s Israel stunner: American Jews should let Israel protect them - Corey Robin, Salon: What the…? I don't even… A country's vice president warns its Jewish population to keep a bag packed, just in case. Then receives "applause, and then photos, and then kosher canapés".
- Academia’s 1 Percent - Sarah Kendzior, Vitae: "The fate of aspiring professors is sealed not with job applications but with graduate-school applications. Institutional affiliation has come to function like inherited wealth."
- Letter from Amsterdam: Humanities, Rally! - George Blaustein at n+1: "David Graeber noted in passing that the demands of humanities students are, in a sense, actually quite conservative. It is the students who speak up for pure knowledge, for the value of study for its own sake, for the cultural or human heritage, for some of the things teachers aren’t always good at voicing anymore."
- Edutopia - Megan Erikson at Jacobin: "The great irony is that the very Silicon Valley reformers promoting and funding techno-utopian models for American schoolchildren refuse to submit their own children to anything like it, choosing innovative pedagogical models instead of newer touch screens."
Sunday, 5 April 2015 - 7:15pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Joe Hockey Blows Thought Bubbles On Housing Bubbles - the indispensible Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "The reason Australia has such a major housing affordability crisis is relatively simple. Our houses cost too much. A property bubble, driven by investors seeking capital returns, has inflated the price of Australian capital city housing well above its true value."
- The U.S. job skills mismatch and up-skilling - Nick Bunker, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "New research […] looks at what happened to employer requirements for positions during the Great Recession and the resulting recovery. What they find is that an increasing supply of unemployed workers leads to an increase in the requirements for jobs that employers posted. With a larger pool of talent to pick from, employers get to pick the cream of the crop."
- Applauding Themselves to Death - George Monbiot: "While almost all governments claim to support the aim of preventing more than 2°C of global warming, they also seek to “maximise economic recovery” of their fossil fuel reserves. (Then they cross their fingers, walk three times widdershins around the office and pray that no one burns it)."
- The Death of Blogs has been Greatly Exaggerated - Mark Thoma guest post at the Fiscal Times: "The reporting today on economic issues is so much better than it was […], and that is due in no small part to the interaction between reporters, the public, and academics willing to blog and put complicated, technical matters into terms that the general public can understand."
- Roosevelt’s money policy, 1933-1934 - Eric Rauchway, Crooked Timber: "He wanted to establish an international system of managed currencies, with an agreement that would allow them to remain stable for long periods, but adjustable in case of need – that was what he told the World Economic Conference at the end of summer 1933, and that was why it broke up – because other countries weren’t yet ready to join the US."
- Economists! Be more Marxist - Chris Dillow, Stumbling and Mumbling
- Don’t be surprised by Abbott’s comments about ‘lifestyle choices’ - Sydney's Christopher Mayes and Jenny Kaldor at the Conversation: "Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s claim this week that people living in remote communities were making a “lifestyle choice” that taxpayers shouldn’t be obliged to fund was not just the result of an unguarded moment. Rather, the phrase reveals an underlying view that social circumstances are the responsibility of individuals, rather than societies."
- Australian firm to assume Indiana Toll Road lease, pay $5.73 billion - South Bend Tribune: Rent seeking is now a major export earner! AU FTW!
- NSW can pay for the infrastructure it needs without privatisation - Frank Stillwell at the Conversation: "[T]here are viable alternatives. Indeed, in economic matters, there are always alternatives."
- Political philosophy now illegal in the UK - Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber: "Well, almost. The British government has just produced the guidance for its “Prevent” scheme for education, which aims to stop young people from being drawn into “extremism”."
- Blyth Devastates Congress' Approach to Budget - The Real News Network: Blyth absolutely nails it, in record time.
Sunday, 29 March 2015 - 8:13am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- “I found myself turning into an idiot!”: David Graeber explains the life-sapping reality of bureaucratic life
- Unemployment Not Due to Lack of Motivation - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono Australia: "You cannot punish people out of poverty"
- Iran and America’s Memory Hole - Dr. Arnold J. Oliver at Informed comment: As Doonesbury put it at the time of the revolution, "The Shah? What Shah?"
- Slandering the 70s - Paul Krugman, New York Times
- The Important Things Standardized Tests Don't Measure - Marion Brady at WaPo: "[R]eal learning is natural and inherently satisfying."
- The Higher Ed Disruptors Are Still With Us - Eric Loomis at Lawyers, Guns & Money: "This is classic Shock Doctrine. Underfund the universities, make people believe that they can’t provide a proper service, replace them with private companies, and then profit."
- Metaphor alert on data: should it be anyone’s property? - Nicholas Gruen, On Line Opinion
- Militarism and the myths of Anzac - Anonymous Trot at Solidarity.net.au: "As historian Joan Beaumont said last year: 'The emphasis on Gallipoli and the Anzac legend has really been part of our political culture. It is not part of history.'"
- Underperforming nursing students 'could endanger public safety', say university academics - Linton Besser, Peter Cronau and Hagar Cohen for ABCs Four Corners: "Academics are confronted by a rising tide of student appeals for higher marks. As an increasing portion of them are part-time casual teachers, working through a series of 12-week, single-semester contracts, there is a reluctance to fail students as teachers said the work required to manage appeals was effectively unpaid."
- Tony Abbott And His Amazing Take On Invisibility - world-class snark from Richard Hil at New Matilda: "The ETS, he announced with Aristotelian hubris, is 'a so-called market in the non-delivery of an invisible substance to no-one.' Flushed with self-importance, Abbott gazed into the distance, as if he had just delivered the rhetorical equivalent of the Gettysburg address. Journalists gazed back and forth in bemusement, trying to figure out if this was indeed another gaffe, or a memorable utterance destined for a place in Brainy Quote."
Sunday, 22 March 2015 - 7:42pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Benign and powerful: the contradictory language of metadata retention - Adam Henschke in the Conversation: 'More than mere inconsistency, these “rhetorical contradictions” are used to convince us that we needn’t worry about retention and use of metadata, but at the same time is absolutely necessary for our individual and national security.'
- The Right Thing to Do: Homeless edition - Ian Welsh: "Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street."
- Profits up, investment down: why it matters for low pay - James Meadway, New Economics Foundation Blog: "[UK] Wages have fallen since the crash in 2007. Profits (net surplus outside of the North Sea) have gone through the roof. If it’s not quite a zero-sum game, it starts to look very close to one. The recovery has been driven by consumer spending. With real wages falling, this has come from a rise in borrowing by households." Yay for the credit card welfare system! Also: Almost 80% of UK Self-Employed Workers Living in Poverty - Catherine Phillips, Newsweek. Having been in that situation, I can easily believe it.
- Talking Trash: High-Status Explanations for Watching Low-Brow TV - The Reading List, The Society Pages
- A negative interest rate world? Why? - Ian Welsh: "In the United States more than all the gains of the last “recovery” have gone to the top 10% (really the top 3% or so.) There has limited broad based demand for new goods. Luxury goods, investment art, and London and Manhattan real-estate do not scale. Without widespread demand, opportunities for new businesses, with new employers, are limited."
- New Zealand Spies on Neighbors in Secret “Five Eyes” Global Surveillance - Ryan Gallagher at the Intercept: "Everything we do is explicitly authorized and subject to independent oversight." Oh. That's all right then.
- How Higher Education Perpetuates Intergenerational Inequality - Timothy Taylor: "The effects of these patterns on inequality of incomes in the United States are clearcut: higher income families are better able to provide financial and other kinds of support for their children, both as they grow up, and when it comes time to attend college, and when it comes time to find a job after college. In this way, higher education has become a central part part of the process by which high-income families can seek to assure that their children are more likely to have high incomes, too."
Sunday, 15 March 2015 - 1:50pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Knowledge Isn’t Power - Paul Krugman at the Gray Lady: "[W]hatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power."
- #SpeakBeautiful: Reinforcing a dangerous metric - jennydavis at the Society Pages: "In its very name, #SpeakBeautiful centers physical attractiveness as the proper metric with which to measure women’s value. Rather than decenter or reject this metric, it asks women to give one another high scores."
- Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens - Cory Doctorow at the Grauniad: "Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution"
- We Suck at HTTP - Deane Barker, Gadgetopia: "We have broken HTTP. We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it. HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away."
- Can helicopter money be democratic? - Simon Wren-Lewis
- Making Do with More - Brad DeLong: "All of the extracting and growing and building and making and carrying--even the carrying from the kitchen to the restaurant table, and even the making that is the transformation of coffee grounds and water into hot caffeine-laden liquid--takes up only three in ten jobs in the United States today."
- Power from the People - Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron at the IMF(!) say "the decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top".
Saturday, 7 March 2015 - 11:10am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Max Weber - The School of Life
- Government recovers over $41 million worth of false claims after 'rorting' of Job Services Australia scheme - ABC News, via tregeagle
- Junk the phrase 'human capital' - Branko Milanovic at Al Jazeera America
- University Deregulation - Nick Riemer in Arena
- On the old saw, “Islam isn’t a race.” - Adam Kotsko
- Using population forecasts to project the health outcomes of suburbs - .id
- Why The Coalition's Attacks On The Census Make Perfect Sense - Ben Eltham at New Matilda
- Get a TAN, Yanis: A Timely Alternative Financing Instrument for Greece - Rob Parenteau at NEP; also related: The FT Coin, a complementary government currency proposed by Yanis Varoufakis - Michael Bauwens at P2P Foundation
Like Spacfiller
I am tired on these summer mornings. The hot days and the humid stuffy nights leave me lying awake in the pre-dawn, tired to the bone. For the first few minutes I don’t want to get up and face the day. Then my bladder lets me know I have a hard choice to make so I get up. Zaida is staying with us at the moment. We have borrowed Grendells Mother and Normans caravan which gives her a room and us some space. Suzy and Rodney are watching the tennis on the telly in the shed. Suzy is obsessing over who plays who on the ipad. She and Rodney just got back from a trip to the Tennis Open in Melbourne. Tennis is their chosen obsession and I am not interested in them or it. This week I have been talking, walking and hanging out with Zaida. Prior to her arrival I was home alone with Agrippa. He played lego and nerded on the computer. He persuaded me to let him install a couple more games on the already overheating and overfull mini-mac.
Last night I finished rereading Utz by Bruce Chatwin. I enjoy how he transparently mixes the biographical tale with what he imagines to be and what he observes. I am still annoyed that he was criticised for this. Story telling can be true and dull or embellished with the authors suspicions, innuendoes and bias leaving the tale to glitter and dazzle. I also enjoy Chatwins pretentious little anecdotes; historical name dropping or potted historical asides. He has been so copied since. Some years ago I read a book about Bottringer; the golems and porceline alchemy which felt like the author had decided to write ‘Utz volume 2’. I thought I would take Utz around to MJD. I would like him to read it. He might enjoy the references to all the various obscure historical philosophies and characters. He may also enjoy discussing the notion of the collector or the ‘fan’. In fact I have a mind to reread it with this in mind before I lend it to him.
Zaida has told me Carmen’s current man is a bit of a ‘useless drunk’. She can be unkindly judgemental sometimes. However in truth that did lead me to think about the possibility of a future relationship with Carmen. Such a calculating and stupid brain as mine looking to fill the gaps in my present situation. That last sentence makes relationships look like spacfiller. The bog of human kindness.
I have been kayaking with the Bonville canoe club for the past two Saturdays with Dan Arden. I have really enjoyed pushing myself through the race but I lack in technique and need practice. It is fun though, I’d forgotton how much I crave that kind of exercise where I use my open arms, my torso, shoulders and chest. Opening my upper body up and pulling myself through the water feels so clean and refreshing. I feeling like it balances nicely against running or cycling nicely. I am still running. Not as much as I imagined I was which is a little disappointing. I suppose if I keep going I will balance out my regular ability with the recorded facts. Then I will begin the painstaking task of trying to improve myself. I am considering not only the Kokoda Challenge with Sonya but also the Gold Coast Marathon with Sophia. They are two weeks apart, the marathon second. I feel that I could do it if I train hard. I can walk the Kokoda and rest then run the marathon. It would be an awesome way to finish my degree.
I am worried that when University begins again I shall find myself too busy to exercise. Having lost my licence may prove to be a bonus as I can only retain my independence of travel if I do so by running or cycling. Of course I could cadge a lift from C, J or a bus - but I’d prefer not. I have put towels in the fire-station and will also add soap and deodorant. I will do the same at a locker on the University Campus. This will allow me to get ‘de-sweated’ after my run/ride before classes. I feel like I need to prepare for training. Indeed I need a training plan. To that end I have been recording my runs and rides with Endomondo and notes in my diary. Earlier in the month I decided to try for increasing my endurance for six weeks. This should give me a measure of my distance ability. Then I can spend six weeks working on my strength. This will entail heading inland to go up and down the mountains before of after Uni. Or, I could use the gym for strength training, very dull. I imagine it will end up being a combination. After that if I am still going I will need to plan more…
It’s eight thirty. Everyone else is up and doing. I should be too. The past two days I ate so today I will fast. Coffee is allowed though.