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Online Fandom
The internet is enabling massive changes in the relationships amongst fans, artists, and industries. On this site, Nancy Baym keeps an eye on trends and provides a space to discuss what works, what doesn’t, and what to make of it all. Sometimes she writes about other social internet issues too.
Gregory Clark -- As Economic Disparity Grows, Higher Taxes May Be Only Solution
..the economic problems of the future will not be about growth but about something more nettlesome: the ineluctable increase in the number of people with no marketable skills, and technology's role not as the antidote to social conflict, but as its instigator.
A Fading Field :The Scientist [2009-06-01]
However, there are fewer and fewer biologists who practice traditional taxonomy, or the collection, description, naming and categorization of organisms through intense study of their physical attributes. In general, the field of taxonomy, or systematics as it is often called, has been leaning towards the molecular end of the spectrum since genetic technology matured in the late 1970s and 1980s, and traditional taxonomic skills have been dwindling as older taxonomic experts retire. Many taxonomists blend traditional methods, such as morphological and behavioral study, with modern molecular techniques, such as DNA sequencing, to fully characterize their pet taxa. But taxonomists like Cognato and Hulcr, who rely on fieldwork and morphological study as core aspects of their taxonomic work, appear to be slowly going extinct.
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ames Rodman, a botanist and former NSF program director who was instrumental
in creating the PEET program in the mid-1990s, says that the disappearance of
traditional taxonomy is only part of a larger problem. "More broadly speaking,
organismal biology is dying out," Rodman says, now in semi-retirement as museum
research associate at the University of Washington's Burke Museum. He says that
colleagues tell him all the time that even in high schools, biology field trips are
seldom, if ever, taken—a trend that ripples up through the university
level as survey courses in entomology, mycology, and other organismal disciplines
cease to exist. "We're no longer interested in knowing about the organisms of the
world. That's the sadder tragedy." -
Quentin Wheeler, the Arizona State University entomologist
who is also director of the newly-created International Institute for Species
Exploration, says that he hopes to create a "cyber-infrastructure," including
digital images and virtual networks, that will give researchers around the world
access to all of the nearly 3 billion biological specimens currently housed at
natural history museums. He says that if modern technologies and more funding are
successfully combined with continued taxonomic work, taxonomists have a good chance
of describing and naming 8 million new species in the next 50 years.
FT.com / Arts / Theatre & Dance - The author as performer
Recently, however, I have seen a shift away from the traditional model of book readings and for-and-against Oxford Union-style debates and towards a showier kind of speaking event, in which bookish ideas and themes are lifted off the page and into the stuff of rhetoric and performance.
Americans Are Now More Closely Aligned With Progressive Ideas Than at Any Time in Memory [Voltaire]
The media still calls America a “center-right” nation, but “center-left” is closer to the truth. On issues ranging from health care to energy, the public is more progressive than people think. Demographic groups from youth to Hispanics are voting farther left and in larger numbers than ever before. The new report the Campaign for America’s Future is publishing with Media Matters for America— "America: A Center-Left Nation" —documents the trends and challenges the mainstream media to recognize reality
America’s Corporate Shell Game « Jon Taplin’s Blog
They make no attempt to hide the bad news for the U.S. Economy–“return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity.” The meaning of this is staggering–any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt.
Michael Bérubé - The futility of the humanities
Interesting, is it not, when you adopt a wider disciplinary perspective than that provided by Deresiewicz? Suddenly it looks like philosophy might have been isolated from the rest of the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences, and “theory” might have been the means by which scholars conversed across the disciplines of English and comparative literature, art history, architecture, musicology, anthropology, etc.
Twin Cities Compass - Home
Twin Cities Compass promotes our region's well-being by measuring progress, reporting findings and providing strategies for action.
It is led by Wilder Research in partnership with community-serving organizations, funders and volunteers.
Groundswell (Incorporating Charlene Li's Blog):
The future of social networks: Social networks will be like air
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