October 27, 2015
Are Think Tanks Undermining Australian Democracy?
"Are Think Tanks Undermining Australian Democracy? The past decade, for example, has seen powerful American think tanks (link is external), headed by political elites and backed by significant philanthropic funding, fundamentally re-shape key aspects of schooling. This has raised serious questions about whether elite economic and political actors are ‘working through’ think tanks to undermine democratic processes and the ideals of representative democracy."
LYING.
Garfield minus Garfield Plus Lying Cat. (SLTumblr) In this remixed comic, Jon Arbuckle lives with a very different but equally dubious feline.
Catfishing in Amazon: looking for truth in cloudy waters of fake reviews
Do you know Dagny Taggart? She's a character in Atlas Shrugged. She's also a best selling author of language learning ebooks on Amazon. According to her bio, she speaks 15 languages, which she picked up in her life of traveling the world. There's just one problem: the author Dagny Taggart doesn't exist. She is the pen name for a group of anonymous authors who were hired by an Argentine "Amazon entrepreneur" and a follower of k(indle) money get rich schemes. [more inside]
Frozen
Lion cubs Found in nearly perfect condition. More from the excellent Siberian Times
It sounds like you're living your best life!
Lessons From a Decade of IT Failures
To commemorate the last decade’s worth of failures, we organized and analyzed the data we’ve collected. We cannot claim—nor can anyone, really—to have a definitive, comprehensive database of debacles. Instead, from the incidents we have chronicled, we handpicked the most interesting and illustrative examples of big IT systems and projects gone awry and created the five interactives featured here. Each reveals different emerging patterns and lessons. Dive in to see what we’ve found. One big takeaway: While it’s impossible to say whether IT failures are more frequent now than in the past, it does seem that the aggregate consequences are worse. [more inside]
Everyone sing along now. EVERYONE.
What's the 13.5? Why, it's 十三五 - China's 13th Five Year Plan. And here's a happy, chirpy pop song and video to explain it all. (slyt)
Henry Hook (1955-2015)
The crossword community has lost another of the greats: Henry Hook. The New Yorker ran a profile of Hook in 2002, calling him "the Marquis de Sade of the puzzle world." [more inside]
Visual note taking is back and it has a cool history
Sketchnotes, Graphic Recordings, Visual Notes, you may have seen them at the last conference or big corporate meeting you attended: beautifully hand drawn notes that summarize big ideas using simple visuals.
This Web 3.0 generation has adopted the term "sketchnotes" which was coined by interface designer, illustrator, and author Mike Rohde.
The field is actually called Graphic Recording which is "capturing everyone’s most salient points and making them stick", as described by experts at ImageThink.
Practitioners call themselves all sorts of things, Sketchnote Artists, Visual Note Takers, Graphic Recorders, Scribes, Visual Notes Artists, Live Sketch Artists, Group Graphics Practitioners and more. [more inside]
The Hateful Life & Spiteful Death Of The Man Who Was Vigo The Carpathian
You’ve seen a painting of Norbert Grupe. A heavy, creased brow and shoulder-length hair framing a frightening scowl, the massive work hung in the fictional Manhattan Museum of Art in Ghostbusters II. [...] Most people will only ever know Norbert Grupe as Vigo the Carpathian. But Norbert Grupe—a Nazi soldier's son, boxer, professional wrestler, failed actor, criminal, and miserable human being who was never so happy as when he could make someone hate him—was once a man so beautiful that other men wanted to paint him.
The future of low-wage workers
The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp: What the future of low-wage work really looks like. "In the years since Amazon became the symbol of the online retail economy, horror stories have periodically emerged about the conditions at its warehouses—workers faced with near-impossible targets, people dropping on the job from heat or extreme fatigue. This isn’t one of those stories." (SLHuffPost)
Wes Anderson // Centered
Ethical Clothing (formerly) Made By An Unethical Man
Zweckentfremdungsverbot
Purple-haired Marie Antoinette and an angel stabbing themselves
Claire Boucher / Grimes has released the first music video for two of the (relatively) guitar-heavy tracks from her upcoming fourth album, Art Angels: “Flesh Without Blood/Life in the Vivid Dream” (She has also been sharing cover art sketches for all of the album’s tracks on her tumblr.)
The school-to-prison pipeline, explained
"When a student at Spring Valley High School, South Carolina captured a cellphone video of a police officer flipping over a student and her desk, then throwing the student across the room, the video quickly got national attention: people were alarmed that a police officer in a school would do that to a teenager who didn't pose a threat."
Did you ever hear the story about GWAR and Eighties Night?
It's GWAR's turn again for the AV Club's Undercover and this year they're hitting the only Cyndi Lauper tune on Tipper Gore and the PMRC's filthy fifteen; folks, I present GWAR covering "She Bop"
The only biscuit to have survived the Titanic’s sinking
A cracker that escaped the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was recently sold at auction for £15,000 ($23,000), making it the most valuable biscuit in the world.
Vintage Travel Guides for African-Americans Now Online
"From 1936 to 1966, the “Green Book” was a travel guide that provided black motorists with peace of mind while they drove through a country where racial segregation was the norm and sundown towns — where African-Americans had to leave after dark — were not uncommon. ... The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which is celebrating its 90th anniversary, this year digitized its Green Book collection." (Previously.) [more inside]
"Tea with Jean-Luc, episode 1: Ménage à Tea"
The role of sex and gender in autism
The Lost Girls: 'Misdiagnosed, misunderstood or missed altogether, many women with autism struggle to get the help they need.' Part of Spectrum's Sex/Gender in Autism special report. [more inside]
Eyebrow game strong!
Charlotte Brontë sketch identified as self-portrait. [The Guardian]
A sketch of a woman’s head by Charlotte Brontë, previously thought to be of another pupil drawn while the author was at boarding school in Brussels, has been identified as a self-portrait. The literary biographer Claire Harman said the drawing, which she suggests shows Brontë looking into a mirror, preceded the novel Jane Eyre, in which the protagonist also draws herself in a similar fashion. The sketch dates from 1843, four years before Brontë published Jane Eyre, one of English literature’s great masterpieces, and when the young writer was suffering the agonies and insecurities of unrequited love.
Why Did Eva Moskowitz Publish a Student’s Disciplinary Record?
Recently, PBS' NewsHour ran a segment about the overwillingness of some schools to suspend even kindergarten students, in part driven by the desire to boost scores by pushing out weaker students. The segment focused in particular on the charter chain Success Academies, which has been particularly unrepentant in the use of suspensions at early ages. The PBS reporter, John Morrow, had spoken with a number of families, but only found one willing to go on camera: Fatima Geidi and her son, Jamir.
Why there was reluctance became clear very quickly, as the head of Success Academies, Eva Moskowitz, publicly posted Jamir's disciplinary record on the charter's website in response, very much likely in contravention of the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA). [more inside]
"Some said we were overwhelming them with food."
Reducing consumption of added sugar, even without reducing calories or losing weight, has the power to reverse a cluster of chronic metabolic diseases, including high cholesterol and blood pressure, in children in as little as 10 days, according to a study by researchers at UC San Francisco and Touro University California. (SLScienceDaily)
MLS Referees: What's it like?
Get an in-depth look at what it takes to be a referee in MLS. (Warning: Auto playing video)
Related: Behind the Scenes: See how PRO monitors its refs on matchday
The first-ever bootleg NES game was an erotic hack of Super Mario Bros.
I think he'd be very happy to be remembered as a film critic.
Philip French iconic Film Reviewer for the Observer (Sunday Guardian) has died aged 82.
On his retirement after 50 years as a critic The Wrap asked him some questions and here is an interview and some of his work.
On his retirement after 50 years as a critic The Wrap asked him some questions and here is an interview and some of his work.
An Interactive Guide to Ambiguous Grammar
Depending on whom you ask, the use of the active voice over the passive is arguably the most fundamental writer’s maxim, thought to lend weight, truth, and power to declarative statements. This absolutist view is flawed, however, because language is an art of nuance. From time to time, writers may well find illustrative value in the lightest of phrases, sentences so weightless and feathery that they scarcely even seem to exist at all.
No, where are you really from?
I envy you, being a librarian.
Down Cemetery Road (1964), from the BBC Monitor series, in which Larkin was interviewed by John Betjeman. - A casual conversation that halts and resumes in Larkinland. [more inside]
But that's the way I like it baby I don't wanna live for ever
But when it’s done—and it’s almost done—there will be no more Anguses, no more Lemmys. The bloody-minded, death-demolishing longevity of AC/DC and Motörhead cannot be counterfeited or repeated. Lemmy once roadie’d for Jimi Hendrix; these days, retiring postshow to his tour-bus bunk, he reads P. G. Wodehouse.Twilight of the headbangers.
Sex, Drugs and R&B: Inside the Weeknd's Dark Twisted Fantasy
When he first started recording as the Weeknd, Tesfaye was an unlikely star. "I was everything an R&B singer wasn't," he says. "I wasn't in shape. I wasn't a pretty boy. I was awkward as fuck. I didn't like the way I looked in pictures — when I saw myself on a digital camera, I was like, 'Eesh.'" Instead of his face, his album art and videos featured black-and-white photos of artful nudes — a topless girl in a bathtub, a woman's ass in a party dress. The aesthetic was American Apparel-style hipster catnip, right down to the Helvetica font.
Obviously the best thing to do is put a chip in it
Internet of Shit. Laugh now, while you can still buy a toaster that doesn't have Linux on it. The Internet of Things previously: 1, 2
Not human, lion-fronted and snake behind, a goat in the middle
When a Washington couple failed a paternity test, they thought the fertility clinic had used the wrong sperm. But the clinic was pretty sure it hadn't. A more detailed fertility test showed that the father wasn't the father -- his never-born twin brother was. [more inside]
Psychedelic Britannia
BBC Four Presents three programmes about the psychedelic era of British pop: Psychedelic Britannia, 60s Psychedelic Rock at the BBC, Arena - Magical Mystery Tour. Tune in, turn on, chill out.
It Begins With a Pitch
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