Bookmarks from Saturday June 19th-Friday June 26th
“Riches can be lost, fame can flee, but music — ephemeral as it is, just molecules of air being pushed about — stays with you. It really doesn’t get any better than this.”
link: Renewable Music: No greater pleasure
“You might have thought that with the chief of police and all those command officers present that the operation would have been run more smoothly. If that was indeed your expectation you are not a police officer, certainly not one with the LAPD. Police officers everywhere know, and LAPD officers might know best of all, that the degree of success in any tactical operation is in inverse proportion to the number of command officers present. Seldom has this proven more true than in downtown Los Angeles Thursday evening. I even saw, while running to one trouble spot with my colleagues, an assistant chief who was also running, but in the opposite direction. (It was just as well; he only would have been in the way.)”
link: Pajamas Media » What I Saw at the Lakers Riots
“In my second year I worked as his teaching assistant. CalArts had no grades, but we did have pass, high pass or fail. John’s system was if we went down the roster and could remember the person, we passed them. If we could remember the person and the work, it was a high pass. If we couldn’t remember them, we failed them, but if they came back and argued for another grade, they would pass. It was a brilliant system that could never work today.”
link: John Baldessari’s former students share memories – latimes.com
“I don’t want to be like Henry Moore,” he said, “just making big monuments for public spaces, like the one beside the Met on the piazza over there. Yet I’m currently involved in a piece I didn’t want to do, for a major American orchestra I have a long history with. I wanted to write a string quartet, but this orchestra is having its centenary and they really pleaded. Eventually I had to give in.”
“I have yet to eat at the Kogi truck or any of the “new” catering trucks. I will not dare turn my back on my beloved loncheras, so I haven’t had the opportunity to taste their food, a fusion of Asian and Mexican, enter The Red Hot Kitchen. I never thought that eating a tofu burrito would be so delicious. And the salsa ? Mathematical.”
link: LA Eastside » Red Hot Kitchen
“The main problem is that most of the places in 90042 that are good to watch the deportes, are not the places that are open this early morning. (Oh, the days when Mr. T’s Bowl opened at 6AM and the drinks were correctly priced.) That being said, there are a couple of good places to catch the games with people here.”
Highland Park World Cup Fever « 90042
“One particularly interesting suggestion is to have journals publish lists of rejected papers along with the accepted research. This would act as a sort of public punishment and might encourage scientists to submit their research to appropriate journals on the first try. Another method to decrease the science community’s focus on metrics would be to allow tenure candidates to submit just their top few papers for evaluation. One commentator notes that, unlike in most fields, science output is not directly proportional to effort. Instead of ranking scientists purely on their publication records, credit should be given for all sorts of activities that don’t necessarily come across in traditional metrics. Establishing publicly available datasets, serving on committees, and developing new experimental set-ups should all be taken into account in hiring and tenure decisions. More journals should follow the leads of PLoS ONE and The Journal of Negative Results and begin publishing negative or inconclusive findings.”
link:School Is Turned Around, but Cost Gives Pause – NYTimes.com
“Locke High represents both the opportunities and challenges of the Obama administration’s $3.5 billion effort, financed largely by the economic stimulus bill, to overhaul thousands of the nation’s failing schools.The school has become a mecca for reformers, partly because the Department of Education Web site hails it as an exemplary turnaround effort.But progress is coming at considerable cost: an estimated $15 million over the planned four-year turnaround, largely financed by private foundations. That is more than twice the $6 million in federal turnaround money that the Department of Education has set as a cap for any single school. Skeptics say the Locke experience may be too costly to replicate.”“When people hear we spent $15 million, they say, ‘You’re insane,’ ” said Marco Petruzzi, chief executive of Green Dot Public Schools, the nonprofit charter school group that has remade Locke. “But when you look closely, you see it’s not crazy.”
Quality, not quantity: ending science’s “academic prostitution”
“Then I read it and responded,” said Mrs. Holzer. “Although it had no plot line. That worried me a little. I see now it should have worried me more. Basically ‘Dude’ was everyman. Everyman who loses his innocence and fights to regain it. But ‘Dude’ was also Gerry Ragni’s own life. His memories. Temptations. His fears. His struggle to create. He’s one of 10 children from a poor Italian family in Pittsburgh, you know. When he was 5 years old, he began painting crazy beautiful pictures all over the walls of his family’s house and his parents couldn’t stop him. Even then he believed he was a genius. That belief has made him tireless.“
“The Dude” New York Times Review 10-22-72
Bookmarks from Saturday June 13th-Friday June 18th 2010
The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries | A Hamburger Today
this looks awesome. DIY + nerd science!
It’s Complicated David Souter finally tells Americans to grow up.
“Souter’s speech thus represents much more than an ode to a changing Constitution or a forceful admission that something that sounds suspiciously like “empathy” means that “judicial perception turns on the experience of the judges, and on their ability to think from a point of view different from their own.” Souter’s words even transcend his own high-minded call to “keep the constitutional promises the nation has made.” What Souter asked Americans to do in his Harvard speech is to live with ambiguity. To, in his words, acknowledge that there is a “basic human hunger for the certainty and control that the fair-reading model seems to promise,” while recognizing, in Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes‘ formulation, that “certainty generally is illusion and repose is not our destiny.” He is telling us to stop dreaming of oracular judges with perfect answers to simple constitutional questions. He is telling us, in other words, to grow up.”
Does Professor Quality Matter? Evidence from Random Assignment of Students to Professors
“interestingly, they also find students whose professor had higher student evaluations typically did worse in subsequent courses. They attribute this to the “teaching to the test” that they think may go on in classes where professors have high student evaluations. Secondly, they find that students who took Calculus I from professors with lower student evaluations did better on subsequent courses. ”
The Civil War as Revenge of the Nerds – Personal – The Atlantic
“There’s a way of looking at the ugliness after Reconstruction–the rise of the Lost Cause, the Klan, the lynchings–as a tragic search for Southern white male identity. First the old slave patrols go. Then the Confederate Army is subdued and humiliated. Then blacks began to dominate “manly” athletic pursuits. Then Martin Luther King exposes the immorality of the Southern system. Reeling from “each successive volley, the Southern racist–and really any white racist–is left with a question: If the Southern white man is proven inferior physically, mentally, and even morally, than what is he?
HEY STOUFFERS! F$$K YOU IN YOUR F$$KING TOASTED A$$HOLE.
via . « Grocery Eats groceryeats.com post very NSFW (but very funny)
Almost All Is Vanity – PostClassic
“We have three markets. There’s a commercial market, entirely determined by huge corporations whose sole interest is money. We’re never going to make a dent in that one. There’s an orchestra-music circuit that you have to enter young, and it’s all about who you know, and the music sucks. And there’s an academic market, which demands a healthy respect for the Schoenberg line and a suspicion against anything populist. I and my 400 closest friends don’t fit any of these markets.”
“Success Is Just Another Form of Failure” – PostClassic
“The artists, on the other hand, are at a permanent disadvantage. The most creative of them cannot present their work with the kind of empirical verifiability that translates as prestige going up the ladder – except by winning awards administrated by other universities. And those who aim for and achieve any kind of popular or commercial success virtually negate the explicit aims of the institution.”
Bookmarks for the week: June 22nd through June 26th [del.icio.us];
Bookmarks from June 22nd through June 26th:[del.icio.us]
- The history behind Ricci v. DeStafano, the Supreme Court case that will decide who gets the good jobs in cities across America. (1) – By Nicole Allan and Emily Bazelon – Slate Magazine – “The story behind Ricci is just one example of an entrenched conflict over municipal hiring that extends back in time and across the country. For at least two generations, competition for jobs in many cities has been framed as a battle between one ethnic or racial group and another over who is an insider and who is an outsider”
- The Soulvine: Kobe and Antonio on the bus | LA Wave Newspaper | The Soulvine – the mayor is so unpopular kobe doesn’t even want to be on the victory bus with him.
- L.A’s mayor getting schooled – Los Angeles Times -
Teachers at eight of the 10 L.A. Unified schools run by Villaraigosa’s team give him a resounding thumbs down.
- Charter’s upheaval provides some progress for Locke High – Los Angeles Times “A year ago, Green Dot Public Schools, which runs 12 charters serving the city’s urban poor, took over the school. The effort to transform Locke has been a nationally watched test of whether such a large, deeply impoverished urban high school could be transformed by a charter operator. Charter schools are publicly-funded but operate beyond the direct control of school districts, exempt from many regulations and union contracts.”
- In C and Me: listen – Steve Hicken talks about In C and its impact on academia and tonal music.
- Consumerist – How To Launch An Executive Email Carpet Bomb – Customer Service -Here’s a classic tactic for rattling the corporate monkey tree to make sure your complaint gets shoved under the nose of someone with decision-making powers. Let’s call it the “EECB,” or Executive Email Carpet Bomb…
- Wooster Collective: Shit We’re Diggin’: Improv Everywhere’s MP3 Experiment 6 -an interesting flashmob in nyc
- Driving on L.A.’s Westside: 10 miles in 60 minutes – Los Angeles Times what it’s like to drive on the westside of LA (i live on the eastside and commute to CSUF by train)
- Daring Fireball: Regarding the WSJ’s Report That Steve Jobs Had a Liver Transplant john gruber has an interesting theory (really 3) about who and why the Wall Street Journal would print an unsourced article about steve job’s liver transplant.
- Buying A Book For The Kindle Is Digital Russian Roulette – Podcasting News – “According to Gear Diary’s Dan Cohen, DRM is the Kindle’s Achilles heal. Cohen upgraded his iPod touch and bought a new iPhone 3GS recently, and found that he couldn’t download much of his substantial Kindle library to the supported devices”
- RIP: A Remix Manifesto -In RiP: A remix manifesto, Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor explores issues of copyright in the information age, mashing up the media landscape of the 20th century and shattering the wall between users and producers.
