Listened to Body of Law: Beyond Roe from On the Media | WNYC Studios

Justice Ginsburg says she wishes it had been another case, not Roe v. Wade, that SCOTUS heard as the first reproductive rights case. On the Media and The Guardian take a closer look.

A majority of Americans polled by CSPAN last year couldn't name a Supreme Court case. Of those who could, Roe v. Wade was by far the most familiar, with 40 percent able to name it. (Only five percent could name Brown v. Board of Education.) And since it was decided in 1973, a majority — roughly 70 percent — have consistently said they want Roe upheld, albeit with some restrictions on legal abortion.

But what do we really know about Roe? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has often said she wishes it had been another case that the Supreme Court heard as the first reproductive freedom case instead. It was Susan Struck v. Secretary of Defense, and it came to the high court during the same term as Roe

The year was 1970, and the Air Force (like the other branches of the military) had a regulation banning female service members from having a family. If a servicewoman got pregnant, she would get discharged. Captain Susan Struck was a nurse serving in Vietnam, and she challenged the decision in court with Ginsburg as her lawyer. However, the court never heard the case because the Air Force changed their policy first. For this week's show, we partnered with The Guardian (read their story here) to learn more about Susan Struck’s fight and its bigger lessons for reproductive freedom and for women in the workplace. 

Our producer Alana Casanova-Burgess and The Guardian's health reporter Jessica Glenza spoke to Struck about the difficult decision she made to give her baby up for adoption in order to fight the regulation. Plus, we hear why legal scholars think this case "deserves to be honored by collective memory," and how Ginsburg's arguments to the Supreme Court differed from what the justices decided in Roe

Then:

- Slate's Dahlia Lithwick explains the threats to reproductive rights in the court right now;

Neil Siegel of Duke Law School puts the Struck case in context and discusses what better questions we could be asking about women's equality;

- activist and scholar Loretta Ross explains the tenets of reproductive justice and how they expand the frame beyond Roe and abortion;

- and Reva Siegel of Yale Law School tells the story of how abortion was discussed before 1973, including during the Women's Strike of 1970. And she describes the framework of ProChoiceLife, which expands the idea of what pro-life policy is. She is also the co-editor of Reproductive Rights and Justice Stories

Read The Guardian’s print version here, and share your story with Jessica Glenza if you were a woman serving in the military before 1976.

Music by Nicola Cruz, Kronos Quartet, and Mark Henry Phillips

Listened to Computers Judge What Makes The Perfect Radio Voice by Audie Cornish from All Things Considered | NPR

A few weeks ago, All Tech Considered asked the audience to send voice samples to analyze. Those samples were put through an algorithm to figure out what kind of voice would make an appealing radio host. NPR's Audie Cornish explains how this experiment turned out.

hat tip: What do authority and curiosity sound like on the radio? NPR has been expanding that palette from its founding | NiemanLab
Listened to Cool Tools 111: Nelson Dellis from SoundCloud

Our guest this week is Nelson Dellis. Nelson is one of the leading memory experts in the world, traveling around the world as a Memory Consultant and Keynote Speaker. A four-time USA Memory Champion, mountaineer, and Alzheimer's disease activist, he preaches a lifestyle that combines fitness, both mental and physical, with proper diet and social involvement. For show notes visit: http://kk.org/cooltools/nelson-dellis-usa-memory-champion

–Originally bookmarked on December 14, 2019 at 09:19AM
Listened to Making and Breaking Domain of One’s Own by Martha Burtis from Hybrid Pedagogy

What if the early Web adopters in higher education had imagined Domain of One’s Own instead of Course in a Box? Why didn’t they?

On Friday, 12 August 2016, Martha Burtis gave one of two closing keynotes at the Digital Pedagogy Lab Institute held at the University of Mary Washington. Below is the text of her talk; the audio above is edited from the video recording of that morning’s keynotes.

Some interesting history of the DoOO’s early movement here. Martha waxes perhaps a bit too nostalgic about the early web in her hindsight, but honestly we all had rose colored glasses then. I’m glad we’ve got some of that early magic back. It makes me feel like the web may eventually move in the right direction again.

She does make some great points about how uncreative things can be with the sterile big box LMS solutions. School administrations shouldn’t be trying to coop everyone up in neat tidy little boxes. As much as they may want to “disrupt” the space and make things better, easier, cheaper, and more streamlined, limiting creativity and innovation is the surest way to not get there.

Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 01:35AM

Listened to #16: Helping Students Build a Presence Online by Will Richardson, Bruce Dixon from Modern Learners

To what extent should we give students the opportunity to create their own presence and, dare we say it, brand online?

On the college level, that’s being done with the project “Domain of One’s Own” which was started at Mary Washington University a few years ago and now has expanded to many other universities. The idea, in a nutshell, is that the school provides every student with a personal space on the web, hosted by the school, and administered by the student. It’s a way of teaching both digital literacy and digital citizenship in an age when being online is more and more a requirement for learning, for business, or just about anything else.

But what if we moved the idea of a Domain of One’s Own down to the high school level? Can we wait until college to provide students with a space online? That’s the question that Bruce and Will discuss in this podcast. Specifically, they talk about a must read post by Martha Burtis, one of the originators of DOOO. You’d be well served to check it out before listening to this episode. (You might also check out Audrey Watters’ great riff on the project as well.)

What are the tensions between having students publish their work online and making sure they act responsibly and safely? To what extent do teachers and leaders have presences online that they can use as models? What are some first steps that schools and individual teachers can take to begin to help students build their “findability” online?

A reasonable introductory discussion about the Domain of One’s Own concept by two people who generally agree with it, but don’t have the experience of some of those above them. This fact makes this a particularly interesting thing to listen to. I wonder what their personal sites modelling this sort of behavior look like?

Originally bookmarked on December 17, 2019 at 02:05AM

Listened to Scripting News: Tuesday, December 3, 2019 by Dave Winer from Scripting News

An open podcast to Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter. It's way too long and rambles too much, but the idea is imho worth 16 minutes.

The primary take away here seems to be that Twitter needs to keep evolving for it to survive.

Originally bookmarked on December 11, 2019 at 10:35AM

Listened to Alex Mullen On Mnemonic Speed, Mandarin And Medical Terminology by Anthony Metivier from Magnetic Memory Method

If you've ever wanted to bring efficiency to how you learn, use your PAO system to recall information, Alex Mullen, World Memory Champion has your back.

Interesting, but I don’t think I picked up any ideas or methods I didn’t already have.

Originally bookmarked on December 14, 2019 at 08:56AM

Listened to The Spirit Of The Web by Jeremy KeithJeremy Keith from Smashing Conference 2012 via Internet Archive

This talk was given at the first Smashing Conference 2012 in Freiburg. Here is the talk description:
With the explosion of Web-enabled devices of all shapes and sizes, the practice of Web design and development seems more complex than ever. But if we can learn to see below this overwhelming surface to the underlying Web beneath, we can learn to make sites not for specific devices but for the people using them. This talk will demonstrate how tried and tested principles like progressive enhancement are more important than ever. By embracing the spirit of the Web, you can ensure that your websites are backwards-compatible and future-friendly.

Amazing how apropos this talk is even seven years on. Good design and solid principles are obviously timeless.

I’m curious what, if anything, Jeremy might change all these years later?

Notes:

Donald Rumsfeld, known unknowns, unknown unknowns

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding…

–William Gibson, in Neuromancer

A tao of web design by John Alsop (A List Apart, April 7, 2000)

Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?

dConstruct audio archive of content since 2005

Performance is not a checkbox

style tiles (mood boards) for websites

Originally bookmarked on December 06, 2019 at 10:40PM

Listened to Sources and Methods #26: Alex Mullen from Sources & Methods

We cover a bunch of topics, including Alex’s memory training regimen and broader applications to education.

Originally bookmarked on December 14, 2019 at 08:31AM
Listened to Sources and Methods #34: Lynne Kelly by Alex Strick van LinschotenAlex Strick van Linschoten from Sources & Methods

Interview with Lynne Kelly primarily covering an overview of her memory-related works and focusing primarily on her academic work including her Ph.D. thesis and subsequent archaological-based texts. This appears to have been done prior to The Memory Code and so doesn’t cover those portions of some the more applied areas like her work in rapscallions or the bestiary.

Originally bookmarked on December 14, 2019 at 08:42AM

Listened to Memory Craft: Lynne Kelly On The Potent Power Of Ancient Mnemonics by Anthony Metivier from magneticmemorymethod.com

Cover of Memory Craft by Lynne KellyNot only is Lynne Kelly the author of several books on memory, but she is a highly skilled researcher, science educator, author and memory competitor.

Most known for her theory about Stonehenge’s purpose, she has also contributed to work in popular science and is a promoter of skepticism.

Lynne’s critical thinking and contributions to such a wide range of science subjects has led to awards from the Royal Zoological Society of South Wales among others. As a memory expert, Lynne Kelly is that rare practitioner who takes on large learning projects and shares the journey in addition to attending memory sport activities.

Episode covers:

  • The real reason why stores play such upbeat, catchy music.
  • Why outdoor Memory Palaces can be so helpful for memory retention.
  • The benefits of “setting aside” time for memory training versus incorporating practice into everyday life.
  • How vivid, violent, or vulgar imagery can bring abstract concepts to life.
  • Why “rapscallions” are useful memory tools and not just mischievous little creatures.
  • How art can help you remember more in a Memory Palace.
  • The pros and cons to living with aphantasia.
  • The key to using hooks and layering to create dynamic visuals.
  • How to “dialogue” with your memory aids.
  • Why we should encode using music and places for maximum mental skill (and possible mental health) benefits.
  • The usefulness of memory techniques for school aged children and their long-term effects.
  • The secret to overcoming “ghosting” when using memory techniques.

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A fascinating interview, but likely needs some additional introductory material to make sense of what is going on. The audience here are people who have at least a passing knowledge of mnemonics and many of it’s methods. I could have stood to hear a few more hours between these two given my academic interest in the area.

There’s an interesting segment on aphantasia and post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in the middle here. I’d definitely be interested in looking into the research on aphantasia more. There’s also some more material here on memory methods for education (compared with other interviews with Dr. Kelly). She does use a physics example on force and the idea of push/pull with respect to Star Wars which I’ve heard her mention before.

Originally bookmarked on December 07, 2019 at 01:11PM

Listened to Lynne Kelly: unlocking ancient memory storehouses by Richard Fidler from ABC Radio

Lynne Kelly is a science writer who was researching the methods used by ancient cultures to retain vast amounts of information about animals and plants.

She was looking into the way knowledge was recorded through stories, song and dance.

On a journey to Stonehenge in England, Lynne was struck by the thought that the makers of that monumental stone circle were doing the same thing.

Lynne's research suggests the stone circles of England, the huge animal shapes in Peru, and the statues of Easter Island, were not so much objects of superstition, but tools allowing people to create a huge storehouses of knowledge.

An academic with diverse interests including spiders, history, and scepticism, Lynne applies the memory 'code' to manage her own stores of facts and information.

Duration: 48min 28sec
Broadcast: 

Great introductory interview on Lynne Kelly’s work on indigenous memory just after her book The Memory Code came out.

Originally bookmarked on December 07, 2019 at 01:08PM

Listened to The Indigenous memory code by Lynne Malcolm from ABC Radio National
Traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines hold the key to a powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world.

Have you ever wondered how ancient indigenous cultures maintain so much information about the thousands of species of plants and animals—without writing it down? Traditional Aboriginal Australian songlines are key to a powerful memory technique used by indigenous people around the world. It's intricately tied to the landscape and it can be applied in our everyday lives.

Duration: 28min 49sec
Broadcast: 

Another Lynne Kelly interview, but this one focuses more on the indigenous peoples of Australia and their memory techniques. Also some discussion of “dreaming” and songlines with Karen Adams here.

Originally bookmarked on December 07, 2019 at 01:13PM

Listened to The Dead Consensus from On the Media | WNYC Studios

The latest on Trump's impeachment, its parallels to the Andrew Johnson trial, and the rise of the "illiberal" right.

As House leaders begin drafting articles of impeachment, examples from the Nixon and Clinton eras abound. This week, On the Media rewinds to the 19th century — and the turbulent impeachment of Andrew Johnson. Plus, what a debate between two right-wing intellectuals means for the future of conservatism.

1. Brenda Wineapple, author of The Impeachers, on the acrimonious trial of Andrew Johnson. Listen.

2. Matthew Sitman [@MatthewSitman], co-host of the Know Your Enemy podcast, on the rise of illiberalism among the conservative intelligentsia. Listen

Listened to The "Pentagon Papers" Of Our Time by Bob Garfield from On the Media | WNYC Studios

A monumental report from the Washington Post reveals years of lies, futility and corruption.

On Monday, the Washington Post released the fruits of a three-year investigative effort: the "Afghanistan Papers," a once-secret internal government history of a deadly, costly, and ultimately futile entanglement. The hundreds of frank, explosive interviews — along with a new tranche of memos written by the former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld — revealed the extent to which American leaders misled the public on their efforts to hunt down Osama Bin Laden, rout the Taliban, expel Al Qaeda, install democracy, and undo corruption. In this podcast extra, investigative reporter Craig Whitlock tells Bob about the monumental story that the Post uncovered — and the extraordinary effort it took to report it out.