Ideology and Blame

Allow me to quote from a press release on a recent article:

Financial Literary Bailout for the Younger Generation

Hanover, NH-June 2, 2010-In the aftermath of the global financial crisis,
financial literacy is still low among young adults. According to a new study
published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs, only twenty-seven percent of people aged 23-28 can answer three basic questions about interest rates, inflation, and risk diversification, and other basic financial concepts. Furthermore, this result was amplified when studying the answers of young women, African-Americans, and Hispanics, and those with low educational attainment.
...
The research, headed by Dr. Annamaria Lusardi, shows that financial literacy
is largely influenced by parental education levels and financial habits.
...
Lusardi says, "If we do not address financial illiteracy among young people
through high school literacy classes, we will fail to equip young people
with the tools they need to make financial decisions, and we may pay the
cost down the road. Not everybody has an opportunity to learn from their
parents or their friends. Young people at the start of their career, or who
are in the process of buying their first home need to be financially
knowledgeable before they engage in financial contracts."

It is the final paragraph that is most interesting. It is a fascinating example of the sort of thing I teach in my sociology of education course: the ideology of individualism focuses our attention on the individual and blinds us (well, average Americans, anyway) to the true structural problems. What we see here is the structural problems of capitalist economy, and specifically the recent economic collapse due to unregulated sub-prime market etc, translated into the individual consumer's fault! If only consumers were better educated, there would not have been the problem! It is a wonderful example of 'blaming the victim'!

And the solutions to economic problems -- education! Great how problems in the economy caused by bad (unethical) business decisions suddenly become the fault of consumers and the 'failed' education system.....

Future of Publishing

Publishing: The Revolutionary Future by Jason Epstein provides an interesting take on cultural implications of digital publishing in current issue of New York Review of Books.

Gift Registry

Okay, going through my computer throwing out old files, came across this notice of a great lamp. I would sooo buy this!

CodeOrgan Review

Okay, this is an immensely entertaining time waster... Heard about it this morning on Q so tried it out and it is hilariously intriguing. Basically analyzes any website to produce that page's theme music. I know the algorithm is strictly mathematical analysis of number of letters etc, but it somehow seems to come up with music that fits. My desktop page (just a series of job related links etc that I use daily) gives a horribly boring and mechanical tune; my curricular websites gave appropriately lively and intriguing music; Five River Publishing page gave great book theme music, again entirely appropriate to the tone of the place. Great fun. Try it yourself:CodeOrgan

Poetry

This poem has been doing the rounds of writer's blogs/Facebook/Twitter this week, and is now my favorite new poem:

http://torch.cs.dal.ca/~johnston/poetry/bookofmyenemy.html

Works for academics as much as writers.

Treadmill

Okay, this is pretty cool.

Arthur Slade's article on writing novels while on a treadmill.

I'm very tempted to try this....

Private Library

This cool article from Wired Magazine brought to my attention by Randy Reichardt:

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/16-10/ff_walker?currentPage=all

My number 1 question on seeing this library is, "Do they have a writers-in- residence program?

Bad Christmas Gift Ideas

Stolen from Derryl Murphy's blog: Star Trek Putter I'm not sure whether this shows that the ST generation is aging, or if it means golf has become too mass market to remain a sport of the elite...but either way, it can't be a good sign.

He has an axe

Great TV commercial (forwarded from Karl Johansono):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5uxs4wQAhI

A different approach to politics

Not your typical campaign speech -- I really love the last two lines especially. (Forwarded from Charlton Barreto).

Literature meets technology

Not sure how I react to this one...

Twitter is a website that updates one on what one's friends are doing at any particular second (Twitter describes itself as "A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?") That's already an awesomely "we have the technology so we're going to do it whether it is socially reasonable or not", but someone decided to use a twitter feed to read James Joyce's Ulysses, one line every 15 minutes. To quote the original mandate:


Booktwo is currently using Swotter to read James Joyce’s Ulysses to the world. Aside from it being one of our favourite books, it also contains enough strangeness to make anyone coming across it at random pay attention. Possibly.

You can see how it’s getting on at http://twitter.com/booktwo. If you’d like to subscribe, get a twitter account if you don’t have one, and make friends with booktwo.

Ulysses, in the Gutenberg plain text edition, has 24765 lines. Reading one every fifteen minutes, it is going to take 257 days (about eight months) to read Ulysses to Twitter. Swotter started reading on the 28th of February, 2007, so should finish around the middle of November.

The Social Uses of Photographs

I'm still struggling to complete my article on blogs as a research methodology, but one of the side benefits is my looking around for examples to include, and coming across some really nifty studies. Here is a pretty nifty site: Professor Nancy Van House, School of information Management Systems, University of California, Berkeley is working on The Social Uses of Photographs and trust, credibility, and the internet. Here is her paper on Weblogs: Credibility and Collaboration in an Online World

Hilarious Satire

Okay, this satire, forwarded to me by Thomas Phinney, destroys PBS documentries and NASA. I particularly loved the white academic who has to rephrase/qualify every word as he goes....

As Phinney notes: it's video, requires broadband, and the audio content may not be completely work-appropriate.

Halloween

Dark humour at http://www.extremepumpkins.com. I like the gunshot wound and puking pumpkins best.