Posts from — December 2006

By being normalised, that is to say, by extending the logic of equivalences to everyone, society, socialized at last, excludes every antibody. It then creates, in the same movement, specific institutions to receive them, and so, throughout succesive centrueies, prisons, asylums, hospitals and schools have flourished, not to forget the factories, which also began to flourish with the Rights of Man (this is how labour must be understood). Socialisation is nothing but the immense passage from the symbolic exchange of difference to the social logic of equivalence. p. 169

PistolWimp – Scary Mary:
Scary Mary

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i fail to see how this recut of mary poppins is scarier than the original. i mean think about mary poppins the original kids movie… that’s some scary social engineering.

War On Want : Corporate accountability : Fashion Victims:
Workers in Bangladesh are regularly working 80 hours a week for just 5p an hour, in potential death trap factories, to produce cheap clothes for British consumers of Primark, Tesco and Asda’s ‘George’ range. The charity War on Want today issued these findings in a new report, Fashion Victims, based on research among employees at six Bangladeshi factories in the capital Dhaka which employ over 5,000 workers, mainly women, making clothes for the three bargain retailers. Meera Syal, star of the television series The Kumars at No 42, is supporting moves for regulation to bring these companies to account.

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join the war on want!

Human Rights Day (10 December 2006):
Human Rights Day (10 December 2006)

10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which has become a universal standard for
defending and promoting human rights. Every year on 10 December, Human
Rights Day marks the adoption of the Universal Declaration. On Human
Rights Day it is celebrated around the globe that “All human beings
are born with equal and inalienable rights and fundamental freedoms”.

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keep in mind that i am against the whole ‘negative freedoms’ construction of rights, and the whole ‘natural rights’ construction of rights. i think that rights are conventions, generated by people’s fundamental respect for each other’s equality of autonomy in as much as we desire autonomy and equality ourselves. rights are in short the institutionalization of desires, the institution of the will to protect others, which is the construction that i prefer.

African Foldaway House:
Rajan Harinarain, a South African entrepreneur and inventor has come up with a temporary foldaway house for use in emergency situations complete with electrical wiring and fittings, doors and windows that can be erected by a small team in 5 minutes.

The patented structure weighs less than a ton, collapses to under a foot in height and can be modified with insulation/ventilation for hotter or cooler environments.
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seems much more practical to give housing than to give computers….

Democratizing elearning:
What if workplace learning became democratized. The needs of the learners would rule. The learners would have the right to learn what they needed when they needed it in a way that served their level of understanding. There would be a safety net to catch those that fell short of the performance outcomes. There would be support systems to nurture damaged learners back to being self-motivated, curious, reflective practitioners.
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what if? what if learning is engaged in as equals? what if?

Mass hysteria forces evacuation of school – Newspaper Edition – Times Online:
Mass hysteria forces evacuation of school

Michael Horsnell

A specialist science college was evacuated yesterday after a film on human biology apparently sparked mass hysteria.
More than 30 pupils, aged from 11 to 13, as well as a teaching assistant were taken to hospital after three children initially told teachers that they were feeling unwell.

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Fear is a contagion in herd animals… one gets afraid, the next does, and blammo, they all get afraid and feel ill, etc.

Is College Worth It?:
Few young people will be able to independently assess the value in advance and counter the societal and parental pressures which push them to attend college at any price. It’s imperative those with influence over young people make an unemotional analysis prior to college and point them to an appropriate path. For top students this means selecting public schools instead of private. Mediocre students should take advantage of lower cost options like Junior colleges to reduce costs and insure they are benefiting from advanced education. Both should be sensitized to the importance of selecting a high income major to increase the likelihood of a positive outcome. Half the students should be discouraged from attending college and pointed to a vocational career path. The expensive traditional 4 year liberal arts education approach is now failing the majority from an economic perspective. New approaches with a greater emphasis on direct vocational skills are required. Quick realization of the economics of college education is imperative to avoid dooming half a generation of young people to inescapable, life limiting debt.

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this is an interesting economic argument about whether college is ‘worth it’

Prokofy Neva banned from the Linden Blog:
Prokofy Neva, certainly one of Second Life’s most outspoken and energetic critics of Linden Lab and it’s policies was banned today from the official Linden Blog, apparently for his comments in this thread. He received an IM from Torley Linden informing him of the ban, apparently for ‘trolling’.
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My position is that Prokofy should be banned from the world for using too much of LL time and resources. She has the right to her opinions and the right to voice them. She does not have as she seems to claim the right to response. That she demands response, and frequently garners it, eats time and effort that is better spent elsewhere. Just set the precendent, ban her for overuse and abuse of ll resources. At this point in the game, having talked to her many times, i cannot see him as anything other than a griefer by other means. She doesn’t shoot bullets, she shoots arguments, but the arguments are all centered on her vision and interests… claimedly based on ‘research’, but in the end… she’s just griefing.

The Geopolitics of Asian Cyberspace — December 2006:
What happens to
your request when you click on a link to a Web site or send an email? For most
surfers, the Internet experience begins and ends with what happens on the
computer screen in front of them. However, if you follow that email or Web
request as it leaves your computer and passes down the fiber-optic cable to the
servers and routers of your local Internet Service Provider (ISP), through the
Internet Exchange Points (IXPS), international gateways, and on to the undersea
trunk cables of telecommunications companies, you will find a complex and
largely hidden infrastructure of filters and choke points.

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some of this is related to things that i’ve been saying for too long… should have written them up.