-
Anis Shivani ° What Should Be the Function of Criticism Today? ° Subtropics
The premise of this essay is that criticism needs to play a central role in the revival of literature. At present, criticism, in the form of academic “theory,” is in the curious position of simultaneous self-exaltation and self-marginalization, being a highly esoteric affair that makes no effort to reach the mass of readers. For much of the history of literary criticism, writer-critics, especially poet-critics, have been the most important figures—Dryden, Sidney, Shelley, Coleridge, Eliot, Tate, Jarrell, to name just a few. Two things have happened since the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century to make this breed all but extinct.
First, “creative writing” -
Entertainment - Scott Meslow - 'Game of Thrones' and the Problem of Pretending - The Atlantic
On the season finale, the characters struggle to conceal who they really are.
-
- A powerful platform to help surface more content and conquer all of your digital and social strategy needs.
-
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
load01 06/06/2012
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Monday, June 4, 2012
load01 06/04/2012
-
Sept. 11 Memorial Museum’s Fraught Task - To Tell the Truth. - NYTimes.com
It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.
-
With those concerns in mind, curators reviewed hundreds of recordings. The family of Betty Ong, the flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11, which hit the north tower, for example, gave the museum a tape of her calmly informing ground control of the terror transpiring around her.
“It’s the most remarkable demonstration of professionalism under duress that I think anyone will ever hear, and they wanted us to include it because they felt it said so much about who she was,” Ms. Greenwald said.
-
-
We Only Think We Know the Truth About Salt - NYTimes.com
Oakland, Calif.
THE first time I questioned the conventional wisdom on the nature of a healthy diet, I was in my salad days, almost 40 years ago, and the subject was salt. Researchers were claiming that salt supplementation was unnecessary after strenuous exercise, and this advice was being passed on by health reporters. All I knew was that I had played high school football in suburban Maryland, sweating profusely through double sessions in the swamplike 90-degree days of August. Without salt pills, I couldn’t make it through a two-hour practice; I couldn’t walk across the parking lot afterward without cramping. -
Single motherhood's rise an economic disaster for women - latimes.com
The single-mother revolution shouldn't need much introduction. It started in the 1960s when the nation began to sever the historical connection between marriage and childbearing and to turn single motherhood and the fatherless family into a viable, even welcome, arrangement for children and for society. The reasons for the shift were many, including the sexual revolution, a powerful strain of anti-marriage feminism and a "super bug" of American individualism that hit the country in the 1960s and '70s.
Sunday, June 3, 2012
load01 06/03/2012
-
“Headhunter” explains why USA high-tech industry is declining
The United States has lost 28% of its jobs in high tech since its peak in 2000, claims a study released recently by the National Science Board. This means 687,000 positions have been lost. Why has this happened?
I’ve lived near Silicon Valley for three decades. I’ve always regarded the high-tech hub as a permanent dynamo in the USA economy, an employment source for it’s citizens, and ground zero for the future’s scientific breakthroughs. Imagine my surprise when I queried a “headhunter” recently who informed me that times-are-a’-changing; high-tech is migrating to Asia, and why be surprised? A huge percent of SV jobs are already filled by immigrants from that continent… -
Violence in Chicago - chicagotribune.com
Ten people were killed and 42 others were wounded in shootings over the Memorial Day weekend. In Baghdad? Basra? Kabul? Kandahar?
-
The Middle Seat: The Airlines' Squeaky Wheels Turn to Twitter - Bing Travel
The Middle Seat: The Airlines' Squeaky Wheels Turn to Twitter
Saturday, June 2, 2012
load01 06/02/2012
-
Mobile Opportunity: Fear and Loathing and Windows 8
I was very excited when I saw the first demos of Windows 8. After years of settling for mediocre incremental improvements in its core products, Microsoft finally was ready to make bold changes to Windows, something I thought it had to do to stay relevant in computing. What's more, the changes looked really nice! Once I'd seen the clean, modern-looking videos of Windows 8, the old Windows looked cramped and a little embarrassing, kind of like finding a picture of the way you dressed when you were a senior in high school (link).
-
Barack Obama Directs All Federal Agencies to Have an API @ API Evangelist
As a follow-up to the Executive Order 13571 issued on April 27, 2011, requiring executive departments and agencies to identify ways to use innovative technologies to streamline their delivery of services to lower costs, decrease service delivery times, and improve the customer experience--Barack Obama has directed federal agencies to deploy Web APIs.
-
U.S., Long Engaged in Cyberwar Against Iran, Has Now Declared It - IEEE Spectrum
Just a week ago, the Flame virus, suspected to be a weapon in a heretofore undeclared cyberwar, was discovered by computer security experts. Now, unnamed U.S. government officials have told a New York Times reporter that the Stuxnet worm, another sophisticated piece of malware that was discovered in 2010, was the brainchild of secretive U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies. Stuxnet, designed to deliver information about Iran’s uranium enrichment program and subsequently hamper it, was clearly a cyberwarfare tool. But previous discussions of its authorship were, at best, a series of educated guesses and unverified allegations.
-
Reminder To Congress: Cops' Cellphone Tracking Can Be Even More Precise Than GPS - Forbes
In the wake of a historic Supreme Court ruling that police can’t use GPS devices planted on a car to track suspects without a warrant, Congress is reconsidering the question of what kinds of location tracking constitute an invasion of privacy. And one privacy and computer security professor wants to remind them that the gadget we all carry in our pockets can track us more precisely than any device merely attached to our car–even without the use of GPS.
Friday, June 1, 2012
load01 06/01/2012
-
Model Behavior – The New Inquiry
Model Behavior: A Laurie Penny essay on gender presentation, anorexia, neoliberalism, capitalism, queerness, gender, drag, media, America's Next Top Model, and a few other things.
posted by latkes at 10:06 AM - 35 comments (26 new) +
"Gender determines the shape of our fantasies. Good little boys are supposed to dream about changing the world, but good little girls are supposed to dream about changing ourselves. From the first time we open a book of fairy tales, we learn that beauty is destiny, and when we grow up, we’re told that this destiny is ours to command. If we can consume wisely enough to be beautiful and fashionable, we can transform everything about ourselves." -
Go Get Windows 8 | John C. Dvorak | PCMag.com
The world was treated to a minor fiasco when various Microsoft blogs posts told of the availability of the newest Windows 8 download, the Release Preview. You can look around for it but my advice is to download an ISO image here, then burn it onto a DVD and go from there. The direct download site actually tries to download Windows 8 onto your actual machine, which I do not recommend. You should put this on a sandbox or other machine, not the one you use daily.
-
Engineers-Excel.com: Little Man Computer
This tool shows the working of a computer CPU using the Little Man Computer Model (LMC).
-
How a trio of hackers brought Google’s reCAPTCHA to its knees | Ars Technica
Hackers exploit weaknesses in Google's bot-detection system with 99% accuracy.
Thursday, May 31, 2012
load01 05/31/2012
-
Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: -2000 Lines Of Code
Author: Andy Hertzfeld
Date: February 1982
Characters: Bill Atkinson
Topics: Software Design, Management, Lisa
Summary: It's hard to measure progress by lines of code
Revision: most recent of 1 -
Authors@Google: Kyle Johnson 'Inception and Philosophy' - YouTube
"The question of whether or not Cobb's top falls doesn't really matter." Kyle Johnson, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, gives a detailed, multi-layered analysis of Inception as part of Authors@Google talks. Very insightful and interesting, even if you think he's dead wrong.
posted by litleozy at 2:38 AM - 57 comments (57 new) + -
(CBS) - When Ohio emergency room physician Dr. Howard Mell heard that Rudy Eugene, the man who allegedly chewed another man's face off in Miami over the weekend, might have been high at the time on a synthetic stimulant known on the street as "bath salts," he wasn't terribly surprised: in the past year, Mell says seven people - all under age 27 - have died in the two Cleveland-area hospitals where he works after using "bath salts."
-
20 lines of code that will beat A/B testing every time - Steve Hanov's Programming Blog
A/B testing is used far too often, for something that performs so badly. It is defective by design: Segment users into two groups. Show the A group the old, tried and true stuff. Show the B group the new whiz-bang design with the bigger buttons and slightly different copy. After a while, take a look at the stats and figure out which group presses the button more often. Sounds good, right? The problem is staring you in the face. It is the same dilemma faced by researchers administering drug studies. During drug trials, you can only give half the patients the life saving treatment. The others get sugar water. If the treatment works, group B lost out. This sacrifice is made to get good data. But it doesn't have to be this way.
-
The Design of LLVM | Dr Dobb's
In the last five years, LLVM has evolved from an academic project to the universal back-end of C, C++, and Objective C compilers. The key to its success is its performance and adaptability, both of which derive from its unique design and implementation.
-
How Facebook's Timeline is like genital herpes | Technically Incorrect - CNET News
A film that spoofs the TV ads for Valtrex shows how Facebook's Timeline tries to dominate your life. But you can manage it. No, really. You can.