Category — Social Policy

Modesty Survey :: Main:

The Modesty Survey is an exciting, anonymous discussion between Christian guys and girls who care about modesty. Hundreds of Christian girls contributed to the 148-question survey and over 1,600 Christian guys submitted 150,000+ answers, including 25,000 text responses, over a 20-day period in January 2007.

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Paper Daisies and Feministing point out this very strange survey devolving through the Christian community of teenagers and young adults. Some conclusions of this community are things like : Women wearing jeans are immodest. Visible Swimming suit ties are immodest. etc. etc. … I have a problem here… To me, the posters fail to understand what modesty is. Modesty is not about the audience, it is about appropriate respect of oneself, which usually is implied through some relationship with a diety or a tradition. To be modest is not about the affects of your clothes on other people, as the affects of your clothes exist in the minds of others. To be modest, you need to feel comfortable with who you are, in your own clothes in a way that fits with whatever traditional beliefs you may have. Modesty is a ‘virtue’ in some cultures and it exists in the minds of those who are modest, and it is about them being comfortable with themselves . it does not exist in attempting to making men, boys, women, or girls more comfortable. It is not something that you should promote to make people feel bad about themselves or their bodies. It really is just an ideology in the end, but in that it is accepted by some women and men as part of their identity, we should respect those choices, as we are a plural society, but we should not extend those arguments to our own opinion about those people who choose or do not choose the values found in that ideology/tradition. If someone’s clothes makes you uncomfortable… if someone’s body makes you uncomfortable, then I suggest it is your problem and you should look toward the appropriate texts and communities to seek resolution within yourself. However, you should not be pursuing the line that argues that your lack of comfort with your own identity as a man or woman allows you to make claims about the propriety or modesty of other people, as that would be vicious, and immodest.

Links for 2007-03-09 [del.icio.us]:

• Big Brother State – an animated short by David Scharf
• fantastic animated short about government surveillance and our rights — i’m going to show this to my students.

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  Dan points toward this cool flash video explaining the nature and issues with the big brother state and mass surveillance.

Kroger responds to denied ‘morning after’ pill request – CNN.com:
ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — Kroger Co. said Friday it was reiterating its drug policies to all of its pharmacists after a Georgia woman claimed she was denied the “morning after” pill at one of the company’s stores.The Cincinnati-based grocery chain said if its pharmacists object to fulfilling a request, the store must “make accommodations to have that prescription filled for our customer.”

“We believe that medication is a private patient matter,” said Meghan Glynn, a Kroger spokeswoman. “Our role as a pharmacy operator is to furnish medication in accordance with the doctor’s prescription or as requested by a patient.”

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kroger has the right policy. treat people equally and do not let your pharmacist’s bias hurt people in your name.

Freedom for IP:
Ignite Seattle Video

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this is a good presentation about intellectual freedom, the the freedom to create and innovate.

OpinionJournal – Extra:
The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized–it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law.

snip
Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

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Ok, while I buy that not everyone should pursue higher education… This bit above.. it is just fabrication, a fiction, and an ideological one. There is no proof that this has ever been the case and there have been recent books showing that elite university and colleges.

Intelligence is not a gift, it is a natural capacity. I’m really not even sure it exists beyond a statistical inference. I know that some people seem to lack certain mental capacities that others seem to have, and that some people can master some skills of thought easily, but not everyone can master all skills of thought simply. I start from the idea, in my thinking, that the brain is a remarkable organ that is capable of all kinds of adaptations and transferrences in order to do something, but sometimes… it just can’t do something, but learning that it can’t do something is fascinating. Almost everyone that enters the educational system can learn from experience and can learn to be creative and inventive in interesting ways. They key is to take that and find a way to get them to be able to do that in our world. There is no single solution…. like ‘liberal arts’ that will work for this.

The $100 laptop: What went wrong – MSN Money:

Anyway, in general a free computer to everyone on the planet it interesting. The tool is cool. And there are many massively problematic issues involved. But that’s interesting is that this article is publishe din MSN Money. MSN isn’t part of this. I’ve read the M$ does not like open source. I wonder how much big computing, like big oil and big tobacco is willing to thumb the nose at doing something good (Gate’s work on aids in africa is not part of this debate of course) useful when it might get in the way of a little well planned out hegemony. But that’s just my personal opinion on it.

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This is one place where i disagree with Jason. The ‘cool tool’ is not a solution, it is a distraction from more serious infrastructural and educational issues and the ‘leapfrog’ of those infrastructures that it ‘represents’ actually will be impossible. I don’t think big computing is actually against this, in fact, most of them have bought in. You see, you don’t sell these things to people… You sell them to governments and the money that comes from governments will be be backed by other governments, so there is no real possibility of profit/loss . The economics of this project looks great, I think, for companies. The future of these objects as computers… is not great. The design is completely wrong for any use outside of a clean, classroom environment. It has too many moving parts and it is ‘american cool’ instead of globally useful. If you look at army troop laptops, designs that actually work in diverse environments…. they do not look like this and there is a good reason for that….. Design is one issue with OLPC, but there are certainly major socio-political implications… I’ve written on that before here. I think… OLPC is a bad program and mainly exists as a promotional tool. Putting the same money into the Million-book project’s bookmobiles would be far more productive.

Boing Boing: Fly with rubber band ball, go to jail, forced blood test:
Fly with rubber band ball, go to jail, forced blood test

A traveller who had a rubber-band ball in his bag was pulled over by the TSA. They insisted that the ball had something metal at the center (it didn’t), then concluded he was on drugs. They put him in jail, forced a blood-sample from him, and continued to hold him after they cut open the ball and finished testing his blood.

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This is getting out of hand…. they should have seized the ball at most… this guy should sue … big time. There are clear procedures that TSA is supposed to follow in these and it reads like they broke someprocedural rules.

Change Magazine Article(s): A Tectonic Shift in Global Higher Education:

For two decades, worldwide enrollment growth in higher education has exceeded the most optimistic forecasts. A milestone of 100 million enrollments was passed some years ago, and an earlier forecast of 120 million students by 2020 may be reached by 2010. If anything, enrollment growth is accelerating as more governments see the rapid expansion of higher education as a key element in their transition from developing to developed countries.

That is the situation in China, where enrollments doubled between 2000 and 2003. With 16 million students enrolled by 2005, China had overtaken the United States as the world’s largest higher education system. Malaysia also illustrates the trend. It plans to increase enrollments in higher education by 166 percent in the next four years, from 600,000 to 1.6 million, to achieve college participation rates similar to those of developed nations. Mauritius has recently passed legislation to create a third university for its 1.2 million people, having added its second only five years ago.

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Some would say that this will ruin…. the american university… I say… contrarily that the key is to encourage learning and that doesn’t have to be ‘american’

How many calories are in Coke Zero?:
If you answered zero, go to Question 2: how many calories are in Pepsi One? If you answer one, you are wrong. Nancy, a friend and colleague of mine, told me her son did a college project to find out how many calories are actually in soda. Pepsi One, it turns out, has something like 28 calories. Pepsi One pays a little fine every year to the Food & Drug Administration for lying about its calorie count, because it is much more profitable to pay the fine every year than change the calories.

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ahhh trüth in advertising is great…. government complicity is better.

I made it to newark airport… My only hangup of course is that is did something to my back yesterday afternoon and basically haven’t slept much, but eh, that only caused me to walk up and down 34th street for 10-15 minutes wondering where the heck the penn station door was, because I’d never been in before, eventually i just decided to walk against traffic and voila, it was at the end of stream of people. Beyond that, the symposium looks interesting, I’m really happy that I was invited even though… it means flying across the u.s. 2 times in 48 hours so that i can be back in time for the digital archives class.

Governance and conflict resolution in probably a better construct for the Linden Lab meeting, but I think that I’ll easily fit in, and make some of my points. The symposium is all day tomorrow. Tonight I’m trying to meet up with my friend and colleague David Silver, whose teaching until 8pm.