Several times a day I encounter yet another exemplar of the decline of, well gosh, pretty much everything in civic life: Nazgul politicians, vapidity of mass media, venalities great and small, eduscams, etc. Here’s a masterful summary of the higher ed side of the malaise, via E.D. Kain’s Forbes blog. But WHAT is to be done?
I’ve been imagining this sort of presentation, like, forEVER. Here it is as a history of wars, but one can imagine other possible contents. Very nicely done! (via the ever-fascinating Gizmodo)
Jim Stogdill chez O’Reilly Radar:
Here’s what you need to know: Your mind is advanced enough to experience a self, a self that you think has intrinsic value. But that’s just a construction in your head. Your actual extrinsic value, I’m sorry to say, is just the sum of your known behaviors and the predictive model they make possible. The stuff you think of as “your data” and the web thinks of as “our data about you — read the ToS,” is the grist for that mill. And Facebook’s shiny front room is just a place for you to behave promiscuously and observably.
Amen.
that I should make more space and time for reading Dorothy Parker: Doc Searls’ questions about the provenance of a couple of quotes (which she may not have written, but who cares? Still a brilliantly sharp-tongued person, and perhaps it would be interesting to look into how she’s been misquoted).
and yet here it is:
Thomas Kuntz: