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Monthly Archives: June 2010
Islands in the Mire
Try to imagine, if you will, a person buried alive, growing desperately weak, fighting and struggling… to reach up through the dirt in order to grab some nearby stones to pile on top of his grave. That’s what watching the … Continue reading
Posted in Blogging, Information Technology and Information Literacy, Politics
Comments Off on Islands in the Mire
The Gods That Underachieved
The opening anecdote of this New York Times article on cyber-bullying led me to think about some bigger issues than what middle schoolers are doing on Facebook. The striking thing about the incident that opens the article is that the … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
2 Comments
It’s Complicated
“It’s complicated”. Jon Stewart tweaked Obama last week for repeatedly framing his approach to issues with this phrase, and he’s not the first to do so. That complaint was very likely the reason why Obama felt the need to awkwardly … Continue reading
Posted in Politics
Comments Off on It’s Complicated
Huge Untapped Natural Resources
Many moons ago, in my first teaching gig at a New England prep school’s summer session, I was responsible for a unit on Africa. I poked around in the school’s library and found an old educational film intended for American … Continue reading
iFlit? kk: uBore.
One thing you can say for the first wave of blogs: ubiquitious self-publishing was an unintended cure for the tendency of editors or publishers in old-media publications to seize the microphone for their own indulgence. A hundred thousand commenters up … Continue reading
Bench Pressing
Here in the heart of my middle age, I keep thinking about living in suburbia. I remember as a college student being sure that’s what I didn’t want to do, but now I have to admit that I find it … Continue reading
Posted in Domestic Life
18 Comments
Double Consciousness of Double Standards
Ah, the African Renaissance. Can you feel those winds of change? (photo by Chris Nevins) Feels more like a boat becalmed in the middle of the Sargasso Sea with no breeze in sight. Statues that charmingly invoke North Korean aesthetics? … Continue reading
Posted in Africa
3 Comments
Big-Tent Problems
One of the best experiences I’ve had in my career to date has been participating in a relatively informal group that meets irregularly at Bryn Mawr to talk about complex systems, emergence, and information theory among other topics. I’ve had … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
4 Comments
Imaginary Menaces
The dedicated Kool-Aid drinkers who brought us the entertaining proposition that risks should be made public and any profits that derived from public investment should be made relentlessly private have left a number of curious inversions in their wake. Witness … Continue reading
Precautions and Paralysis
In response to a prompt recently, I had to try and do a bit of forecasting about higher education. I’ve spent too much time teaching about the history of futurism and prediction to find that a comfortable invitation. No matter … Continue reading
Posted in Academia
7 Comments