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"If you skim Sunlight’s findings, and bring to them a sporting quotient of party prejudice, you might conclude that Republicans are, say, “idiots” and Democrats are, oh, “showoffs.” To use the pre-K-level idiom preferred by the biased twerp in each of us.
If, however, you listen to a sampler of speeches by various congresspeople at a range of oration grade levels, you might find something completely different."
"The United States' failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country's ability to thrive in a global economy and maintain its leadership role, finds a new Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)–sponsored Independent Task Force report on U.S. Education Reform and National Security."
"This post brings together several threads I've been pondering recently: the explosion of conversation over the new aesthetic (see Ian Bogost and Bruce Sterling), conversation about the future of digital humanities (see Steven Ramsay and Ted Underwood), and an insightful post from Cathy Davidson on attention and education."
"Astrologists didn't discover the cosmic microwave background radiation...ufologists didn't discover extrasolar planets...cryptozoologists didn't find these insects...just a friendly reminder of who's doing all the damn work."
"Given the well-known Republican antipathy to evolution, President Obama’s recent description of the Republican budget as an example of “social Darwinism” may be a canny piece of political labeling. "
book review of The Exploit: a Theory of Networks
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To understand what went wrong, let's look at three distinct ways that the term network is used in the literature. (See Milton Mueller's excellent book Networks and States for more on how the term is used in different ways.)
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In network analysis, a network is a set of nodes (units) connected by links or edges. Since this is a form of analysis, anything can be considered a node - an academic paper (linked via citations), a set of phones (linked by wires and switches), a group of people (linked by communication lines), you name it. As long as the units are consistent and the links are identifiable, you can perform a network analysis. That doesn't mean that the phenomenon you're studying is a network in an objective sense.
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"I love this quote for its twisted logic. It’s Russell’s paradox all over again. Economists are different from everybody else, because . . . economists “assume everyone is fundamentally alike”! But if everyone is fundamentally alike, how is it that economists are different “from almost anyone else in society”? All we can say for sure is that it’s “circumstances, not culture.” It’s certainly not “differences in how entire groups of people think and act”—er, unless these groups are economists, anthropologists, etc."
"That’s just the way it is, these things happen, nothing to be done about it, and if it means that most of us have to spend our golden years pushing brooms or bagging groceries, well, at least we have the consolation of knowing we’re not as bad off as those children in China and we can stop off at McDonalds on our way home from work we’re damn lucky to have to pick up a Value Meal to eat while watching the flat screen TV that only has ten payments left on it until it’s ours."
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The movement has also provoked derision. Let's consider the latest Norquist/Limbaugh memes as the protest nears the one-month mark:
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1) "They're just spoiled hippies who can't get a job." A quick glance at the "We are the 99%" tumblr could easily dispel this notion. The economic suffering in this country is deep and broad. As one news story put it, "one in three Americans would be unable to make their mortgage or rent payment beyond one month if they lost their job."
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Robert K. Merton’s “functionalist” sociology viewed “science” as a kind of Weberian ideal type — a form of thought that is identifiable by its peculiar, philosophically-defined characteristics. Merton’s sociology of science held that this thought could also be identified with social behaviors, characterized by a set of “norms”, which made the thought possible.
The Merton Thesis (which slightly predates Merton’s enumeration of science’s norms) holds that the rise of science in early-modern England could be linked to the social behaviors valued by the Puritanism of that milieu. This was the subject of Merton’s PhD thesis and his 1938 book Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.
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Shapin observed that the link Merton drew between Puritanism and seventeenth-century English science was a matter of happenstance rather than determinism. According to Merton, science requires certain “values” and “sentiments” allowing intellectual individualism, and fostering not only an interest in the transcendent, but also secular improvement. It so happened that these values and sentiments were to be found in Puritan asceticism and sense of social obligation, which thus provided a social context in which science could develop.
Definitively, this was not to say that Puritanism provided a unique source of these values and sentiments, or that science did not have other roots. It was obviously possible for science to develop in Catholic contexts as well, despite the less hospitable value system of Catholicism. The confluence of values simply seemed to promise some insight into the growth of science in a particular time and place.
Very interesting summary of debates on SSK and Mertonian science studies during the mid-20c. Describes the move away from functional, ideal-type, descriptions a la Merton to more historically specific microhistories a la Daston.
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However, at the same time, another critique questioned the basic validity of that framework. This critique shared the SSK critique’s interest in describing actual scientific work, but, like Mertonian sociology, it focused on scientists’ and others’ sense of the essence of scientific culture without directly addressing knowledge-production processes. This critique held that, because “functionalist” ideal-type systems of scientific behavior could not actually be found in their pure form, such systems did not meaningfully exist. Legitimate sociology had to be obtained inductively from the empirical record, as studied by historians and ethnologists.
"In one of our workshops, participants hit upon the idea of colonization as a way to describe how we became separated from the commons. Our culture is saturated in the market paradigm. The concepts of consumer, ownership, private, worth, and profit define how we think about ourselves, our relationship to each other and everything we encounter. It displaces all other ways of making connections and finding meaning. "
"Not everything is included. It's politically imperative not to let Occupy Wall Street become an omnibus container for any and all political sentiments. Not every position should be welcomed, encouraged, or tolerated. How this plays out in the General Assemblies is an effect of the local cultures, the activists involved, the patterns of interaction. In NY, the power dynamics are already reflected upon in discussions and working groups. I expect this is also the case already in the other sites. In the same way that racism, sexism, and homophobia have no place in the movement, it should also be the case that libertarian, capitalist, and financialist attempts to interpret and guide the movement are rejected"
"One of the major victories of neoliberalism is the eradication of the working-class from the popular consciousness. One of the results of this is the prevalence of the idea among certain sections of the left that the working-class is no longer relevant to understanding power in the modern world - an outdated idea clung to by old-left dinosaurs. This is reflected in the idea of 'the 99%' which has become the slogan of the 'Occupy X' movement, which expresses a very crude understanding of class, where the ruling class are an arbitrarily defined proportion of the wealthiest people in society."
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Properly understood, class is not a classification system of individuals based on how much money they have, it's a social relation between people that derives from the organisation of labour under capitalism. In other words, it's the way people are forced to relate to one another in order to participate in capitalist society. Class oppression is not a small cabal of the ultra-rich in Wall Street or Washington or Leinster House, it's in every workplace, every police station, every dole queue, every courtroom, every prison and every territory occupied by Western militaries, and can only be sensibly understood as such.
"The "Nobel prize for economics" is a fascinating story of how - as the global public was looking the other way - strategy and snobbery brought a symbolic currency to life. "
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