"It's not worth thinking about this as an isolated incident and instead a manifestation of what ails all of Silicon Valley."
Reads, Listens, Watches
Reading list of books, magazines, newspaper articles, other physical documents, or online posts
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
Playlist of posts listened to, or scrobbled
Playlist of watched movies, television shows, online videos, and other visual-based events
👓 Exclusive: Here’s The Full 10-Page Anti-Diversity Screed Circulating Internally at Google [Updated] | Gizmodo
Update 7:25pm ET: Google’s new Vice President of Diversity, Integrity & Governance Danielle Brown has issued her own memo to Google employees in response to the now-viral memo, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” Brown’s statement, obtained by Motherboard, can be found in full at the end of this article.
👓 How Rachel Carson Cost Millions of People Their Lives | The Daily Beast
Rachel Carson is, and should be, a revered environmental icon. But her crusade against one pesticide cost millions of people their lives.
👓 A Field in Which the Old Devours the Young is a Field that is Dying: A Post about Graduate Student Empowerment by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
When I was in graduate school during course work, a fellow grad student told me this anecdote: Just as their seminar had finished up, and the 10 or so students were mulling around and packing their things, the professor, who was nearing retirement, turned to them and said: you have no idea how much the faculty is afraid of you graduate students.
👓 Why I Left Academia: Part III, The Aftermath by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
The next few days following my defense, or to be honest, the next few weeks, still feel emotionally distant, almost as if it happened to someone else. I felt numb, the dumb shock of the loss of my career, was, and in many ways, still is too acute to bear. I was in mourning for the passion and love I had poured into my dissertation. I was mourning the reality that my ethics-driven account of how intersectional feminism can-and must- be applied to contemporary art history didn’t matter, that it had never really mattered.
The academy already has some horrific problems. Those shown here in gory detail really make me want to vomit. This feels to me like it should be the equivalent of Susan Fowler writing about Uber in her damaging article Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber, but she’s writing about the academy. Somehow it feels like this story is not going to be damning enough or get the traction it needs to make sweeping changes where they ought to happen either at her former institution or at institutions across the world.
I hope that trustees at universities and colleges everywhere read this and push hard for change since it appears that the issue isn’t being solved at the Dean level. This type of academic dishonesty is rotting away at the structure that underpins the enterprise–it’s not just a small blemish on the exterior of the facade.
If you’re not following Dr. Harbin, I recommend her blog.
👓 Why I left Academia: Part II by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
The two weeks leading up to emailing my dissertation to the entire committee plus my outside reader (a professor from a different university who also need to approve your dissertation, a requirement for most humanities Ph.D.s) are a blur. Every waking moment was spent writing, editing, and emailing drafts that never received comments, or even acknowledgement that they had been read. This was followed by proof-reading and re-writing my dissertation entirely on my own. This was nothing new. I had to email my dissertation mostly un-read by my advisor to my entire committee (a scandal in and of itself), because, as my advisor wrote in a terse email to me, they did not have time to read it.
The harrowing plot thickens…
👓 Why I left Academia: Part I by Allison Harbin, Ph.D.
This is my personal story of why I decided to leave Academia. While sad, I know I'm not the only one to have experienced this. This is why I am sharing the story of my Ph.D, my dissertation, my dissertation committee members, my experience with the dean, how my defense went, and why.
A gut-wrenching story with a brutal ending. I’m hoping that multiple outlets will pick up this entire story and give it greater exposure.
👓 Trump Defends McMaster Against Calls for His Firing | New York Times
Nationalist wing of the president’s political coalition unleashes a relentless attack on the national security adviser. “He is a good man,” Trump replies.
👓 Pirate Bay founder: We’ve lost the internet, it’s all about damage control now | The Next Web
At its inception, the internet was a beautifully idealistic and equal place. But the world sucks and we’ve continuously made it more and more centralized, taking power away from users and handing it over to big companies. And the worst thing is that we can’t fix it — we can only make it slightly less awful. That was pretty much the core of Pirate Bay’s co-founder, Peter Sunde‘s talk at tech festival Brain Bar Budapest. TNW sat down with the pessimistic activist and controversial figure to discuss how screwed we actually are when it comes to decentralizing the internet.
👓 Kill Process or How I discovered the IndieWeb (finally) by Lars Peters
I'm currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It's about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That's when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.
Includes a recommendation for my article…
🎧 This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition, July 22nd – 28th, 2017 | Marty McGuire
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for July 22nd - 28th, 2017. This week features a brief interview with Johannes Ernst recorded at IndieWeb Summit 2017. Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11 Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Thanks for the kind words about the Introduction to the IndieWeb article Marty!
🎞 Step Up Revolution (Summit Entertainment, 2012)
Directed by Scott Speer. With Kathryn McCormick, Ryan Guzman, Cleopatra Coleman, Misha Gabriel Hamilton. Emily arrives in Miami with aspirations to become a professional dancer. She sparks with Sean, the leader of a dance crew whose neighborhood is threatened by Emily's father's development plans.
I caught the tail end of Napoleon Dynamite and then found myself getting sucked into the next movie in the VH1 rotation.
This didn’t have the heart of the original, but had a cheesy enough plot to keep me engaged. And somehow they got Peter Gallagher to show up for it as well. It was a bit reminiscent of the schmarminess of Breakin’ 2: Electric Bugaloo.
I also managed to write about 2,000 words while watching it too, so at least I was productive.
👓 If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? | New York Times
The platform offered a public space with monetization as an afterthought. Now it could simply be deleted.
What does it mean if someone can delete hundreds and thousands of hours of sound culture overnight?
in If SoundCloud Disappears, What Happens to Its Music Culture? in the New York Times
📺 Linguist and Cognitive Scientist George Lakoff on Tavis Smiley (PBS)
The esteemed academic discusses Trump supporters who stay faithful to him even when he works against their material best interests and well-being.
Dr. Lakoff does a solid job of dissecting Trump’s communication style and providing some relatively solid advice to journalists and media outlets who aim to disrupt what Trump is attempting to accomplish. The discussion of morality and its role in our political system, albeit brief, was incredibly interesting.
In the last third of the interview, Lakoff provides an interesting reframing of much of the public/private case that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson make in their recent book American Amnesia.
Apparently there is another interview Smiley’s done with Dr. Lakoff. I can’t wait to watch it. I certainly would have appreciated an extended hour or two of their conversation.
I can see people like Jay Rosen and Keith Olbermann appreciating these interviews if they haven’t seen them.
This was so solid that I actually watched it a second time. It may also be time to dig into some of Lakoff’s other writings and research as well. Some of it I’ve read and seen before in general terms, but it’s probably worth delving into more directly.
📺 The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: July 25, 2017 – Rola Hallam
The Senate votes to begin a debate on health care, Democrats unveil a new slogan aimed at working-class voters, and Rola Hallam explains how her company CanDo is aiding Syria.
Not as solid as most episodes. The interview with Dr. Rola Hallam on Syria was the solid piece of work here.
