Crowdsourcing Your Summer Reading List(s)

I have an ambitious pile of “beach” books to read through this summer. A few summers ago, I decided to plow through the entire Harry Potter series at long last (although I started kind of early — March, I think). This year, I’m aiming slightly higher. Here’s a small sampling: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, The Blacker the Berry, First Family: Abigail and John Adams, and Homer’s Odyssey (about a blind cat). Quite a wide-ranging list, I must say.

I’d like to give a shoutout to GoodReads for the best crowdsourcing of books. This is a webbased social network that also has smartphone apps. I try to have connections there that offer diverse readers, although since my recent participation in the twitter hashtag effort #bookaday over the December holidays has me slightly skewed towards folks who generally read a lot of Young Adult Lit. I hadn’t given much thought to YA lit, but there are some really amazing books coming out of that genre that having nothing to do with wizards or vampires. For the best titles, it is good to know some Middle School teachers/media specialists. GoodReads allows you to see what your friends are reading and then add those books to a” to-read” shelf. That will be my list for whenever it is I can squeeze in some pleasure reading. Top of my list now: Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout by Redniss.

Indeed, I treat recommending Snow Crash the same way I do The Wire or The Pogues: Catching up on that is probably more important than whatever else you had planned.

You misunderstand: I in fact say just this: That it’s more important than anything else they had planned, and they should grab Snow Crash with two hands!

A great, great book.

(I don’t think I’m allowed to post sarcastically in PH comments, fwiw.)

I’ll be reading books on social media to get ready for a new class I’m teaching this fall. Anyone have suggestions?

Don’t feel bad: my daughter is a very discriminating fiction reader, and she loves the Hunger Games series, too.

The term hack comes from the MIT “Tech Hackers”. which date to early in last century. Their early exploit had no necessary connection to electronic or digital devices. Thus hack cannot be limited to computers. A recent hack, documented in the Chronicle, was the relocation of the CAL tech mascot to the East coast. Pure deception and no digital media. This traditional form of hacking is consistent with the news usage for the News of the World scandal.

Many of the most notorious hackers used so-called “social engineering” than technical solutions.  Er, although this appears to have been moved over to the term “computer criminal” now, so…  What do I know?

Um, I expected the “brief history” link to show me the evolution of the word “hacker,” explaining when it was first used, how it has been used in context by the press and by various computer-related organizations/individuals. The discussions about the use of “hacker” are as Ms. French points out, endless. For example, see the Discussion tab on the Hacker page in Wikipedia. 

Terminology in the computer industry is imprecise, due in part to marketers who dream up catchy, but technically garbled names for products. The press also massacres terms (like hacker), in its pursuit of sensational stories. Putting the genie back in the box (changing the common usage of “hacker”) is unlikely to happen.

For most software developers a hack is a quick fix or a clever patch.  The jargon file probably has the most exhaustive listing: http://magic-cookie.co.uk/jargon/mit_jargon.htm#x341

See my comment at http://chronicle.com/article/Complaints-Soar-Over/131781/#comment-525441638.  It turns out to have been wise that my boyfriend and I never married, or I might have been considered responsible for his supposed debt, after his death.

“In other cases of student loan debt, I have to wonder what contribution the general decline in personal responsibility has made to the $1 trillion figure.  Students (and their parents with PLUS loans) are consumers; apparently many of them are making poor decisions regarding what they can repay”

The problem cannot be handed down in total to the student borrowers, because these loans are noted for extravagant ‘fee enhancements’ such as was noted by one CEO who bragged of increasing these fees some 220%. Additionally the consumer protections on these loans were stripped years ago, largely by faux crises production and by shills in congress working for the lending industry. As such meaningful reduction of debt or renegotiation is virtually impossible because the lending cabal holds the cards, noose and gateway to hell. Student debt cannot be compared to other forms of consumer debt because of the special laws passed under crony congressional influence. If we are to pull out the personal responsibility card there needs to be a hue and cry about the rampant abuses, corruption and cronyism which has marked a generation of student lending. Chronicle is one of the few entities which has covered these abuses & scandals. If more people knew the grave nature of the student debt problems and the unique abuses of that industry there’d be much more public outrage.
And for Obama and Duncan to allow some of these same people to work as the collections wing of the USDOE undermined the intent of their reforms with the Direct Loan programs.
As far as the geriatric student debt problem that shows how economically and personally destructive the US system of student funding has become; many within the 40+ crew will die still being hounded by student debt. Which may have made a few more private golf courses available for a few CEO’s but it also wrecked a large portion of the US economy and ruined millions of lives.
Student debt is likely the most toxic example of extractive wealth and ‘trickle down’ that has existed in recent US history-and there is a clear reason that many other countries have avoided the US model as much as one would avoid a rabid rat. Everyone gets bitten but no one comes out well.  

Mr. Kahlenberg makes a good start, but there are many other costs with affirmative action as well.  Here’s my list:   It is personally unfair, passes over better qualified individuals, and sets a disturbing legal, political, and moral precedent in allowing racial discrimination; it creates resentment; it stigmatizes the so-called beneficiaries in the eyes of their colleagues, students, and themselves; it fosters a victim mindset, removes the incentive for academic excellence, and encourages separatism; it compromises the academic mission of the university (for example, for research and teaching) and lowers the overall academic quality of the faculty; it creates pressure to discriminate in evaluations and promotions; it breeds hypocrisy within the school; it encourages a scofflaw attitude among college officials (racial discrimination in faculty hiring is much harder — probably impossible — to justify as a legal matter than in student admissions , as discussed here: http://209.123.244.94/polArticles.cfm?doctype_code=Article&doc_id=1872&Keyword_Desc=Best%20of%20NAS ) ; it mismatches individuals with jobs and institutions, guaranteeing failure for many of the former; it papers over the real social problem of why so many Native Americans, African Americans, and Latinos are academically uncompetitive; and it gets states and schools involved in unsavory activities like deciding which racial and ethnic minorities will be favored and which ones not, and — grand finale – how much blood is needed to establish group membership. Q.E.D.: Racial preferences ought not to be used.

The US might want to consider Canada’s concept of “visible minority”. It has its own problems, but it would address concerns like the Warren case, since she is clearly not a visible minority.

I completely agree that affirmative action is an imperfect way of tackling issues of unfair and unequal advantage in our country. I also concur that no one should falsely claim membership in a group in which they do not belong. But that’s where the black and white (no pun intended) boundaries of this issue end. Richard’s solution seems interesting – affirmative action based on economic opportunity, not race. My comment is in support of that solution but also to highlight the messy nature of racial and ethnic classifications in response to many of the comments made.

First of all, to even hint that people shouldn’t be able to say they belong to a group because they don’t ‘look’ like they do, completely negates the progress that this country has made toward not discriminating people based on how they look. The fact is, you cannot accurately describe a person’s racial background by merely looking them (which, by the way, is what Canada’s “visible minorities” policies are all about). It would be a mere guess. As much as many like to oversimplify cultures into ‘black’ and ‘white’, or color-based dichotomies, color is an extremely poor way of describing people because no one is purely black, white, or even brown. That sounds ridiculous if you just say it out loud, so to raise debates based on that flawed logic is just ridiculous.

Moreover, another weakness of this discussion is the failure to understand that those who create the labels are not usually those who use them. For example, for people of South American heritage in this country (I am one), particularly those who are first generation immigrants, face a true difficulty in selecting to be identified as Latino, Hispanic, or as the debate increasingly suggests, Brown. Amalgamating a group of people (about 16% of the population in this country) into a single one would be the equivalent of grouping American, English-speaking individuals as the same as English people from the United Kingdom. It is just silly.The race category complicates this further. Being Hispanic or Latino denotes an ethnicity, not a race, and in most South American countries, race as a categorization of self does not exist. In fact, the equivalent term (transliterated) is ‘raza’ which is a politically-used term to connote ‘the people’. Therefore, it’s difficult to identify oneself many times as ‘White’ or ‘Black’ because that just doesn’t exist in many countries and many may just not know what to respond.

Finally, in response to Richard’s use of the phrase ‘weak minority membership’, who decides who belongs to a group and who doesn’t? How Native American do you have to be to consider yourself Native American? Is President Obama White enough to be considered White? Or Black enough to be considered Black? This also alludes to a point Richard made about inter-racial marriage. It is just difficult to categorize people in these ways, period end of sentence. Had Elizabeth Warren been active in a Native American group, why shouldn’t she be able to identify herself as such? Granted that is not the case, but it serves as an interesting thought experiment because self-identification is for the self to decide, not the collective.

No one should be allowed to exploit the system, especially when affirmative action may benefit people who would not otherwise have equal opportunities, not to mention the disrespect it entails to members of the group in question. But, let’s not ignore the messy and imperfect nature of self-identification, and through it, of racial and ethnic classifications.

Dude!  Half the blond, blue-eyed necks in the former Indian Territory (and continuing Fourth World hole inside the fabric of the US of A) still claim to be part Native American something, in the right context.  The racism that once caused many to hide that ancestry began to fade in the 80s–one could track this on Oklahoma license tags (that is, plates):  What used to be “Oklahoma is OK” (an honest if perhaps overly enthusiastic appraisal) is today “Oklahoma, Native America”.  Huge flushes of casino money haven’t hurt, either…
 

(From Roger Clegg):  Thanks for your comment, Rick.  It is true that there is a high correlation between race and disadvantage, but that is no reason to use race as a proxy for disadvantage.  There are plenty of disadvantaged whites (and Asians, who are frequently the victims of politically correct discrimination), and plenty of nondisadvantaged URMs (indeed, the overwhelming majority — 86 percent, according to The Shape of the River — of blacks admitted to selective schools come from middle or upper class backgrounds, and only 14 percent from disadvantaged backgrounds).

BTW, the racial disparities we see will continue so long as more than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock, along with more than 6 out of 10 American Indians and Alaska Natives (65.6 percent), and more than 5 out of 10 Hispanics (53.3 percent) — versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites (29.0 percent) and fewer than 2 out of 10 Asians and Pacific Islanders (17.0 percent). Disturbingly high for all groups (the composite figure is 40.8 percent), but there is an obvious connection between these demographic-by-demographic numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally, etc.

 Whatever the tribe’s requirements, to claim you are a member you should at least appear on the tribal roles.

Whites still get more than eighty percent of management level jobs in the private sector, are still half as likely to be laid off, have more than ninety percent of gov’t contracts, and more than eighty five percent of tenured faculty positions with Affirmative Action in place. Not only is your comparison off, but horribly so. Only fifteen percent of the tribes in indian country are wealthy, and I’d recommend you take that nonsense you’re peddling to Pine Ridge. For many lives, life on the reservation is far from the paradise America’s uninformed media portrays.The people of Appalachia do present a class problem in this country that perhaps best reflects the glaring gap in wealth and social inequality furthered by the failed economic policies of the past, but it is far from a racial issue as you try to assert.

The federal government has done a lot more for the people of Appalachia than “a brief effort by Eleanor Roosevelt back in the 1940s”

The Appalachian Regional Commission was created by Congressional act in 1965 as part of LBJ’s “War on Poverty”.  It continues to receive a healthy appropriation.  The ARC region includes 420 counties in 13 states extending from southern New York and Pennsylvania through northern Mississippi, Georgia and Alabama.  Millions of dollars have been spent through both the ARC and special appropriations in areas of transporation (I-26 in NC and TN, the Cumberland Gap Parkway, etc.), education (WV with fewer tha 2 million inhabitants received its 3rd medical school in the 1970s when Marshall Med School was built with federal funds and Tennessee received its second at East Tennessee State from the same act, known as the Teague-Cranston Act.  SC got its second medical school from this act.  It is located in Columbia in the Piedmont at the edge of the Appalachians), cultural heritage expenditures supporting several projects and programs at universities such as WVU, Appalachian State, Western Carolina and East Tennessee State, as well as direct economic development aid such as loans to entrepreneurs and grants to business incubators in the region.

The assistance given to development of transportation, educational and economic infrastructure to Appalachia has been extensive over the last 45 years must be acknowledged.  As someone born in 1947 in Damascus Virginia at the lower end of the Blue Ridge and having worked in northeast Tennessee from the late 1970s until 3 years ago I believe that this money has been well spent.  In 1965 33% of the citizens of Appalachia lived in poverty.  In 2008 the poverty rate was 18%.  In 1965 223 of the counties in the ARC area were economically distressed.  In 2008 only 96 were in this category

I find the Appalachian people put to interesting political use.  The dominant ethnicity is white Scotch-Irish or Anglo Saxon.  The common perception is that we are, or were, mostly hillbillies (whatever that means – I admit to playing and singing in a Bluegrass band so I guess I fit part of the definition).  It is still thought by some that there is extensive poverty throughout Appalachia and there is very severe poverty in certain parts of the region – e.g. eastern Kentucky, northern Mississippi, too much of West Virginia) and that is sometime used as an example to support two political concepts – federal money can’t help people out of poverty (see figures above) and poor white folks don’t get any of the help afforded to other ethnicities, particularly poor black folks. 

where’s your proof?

was he on the tribe’s membership roll?

what are the rules for claiming affirmative action advantage?

This is just another example of “Michael Moore” d.a. thinking. And why academia ought to be defunded — so much d.a. thinking.

I don’t understand your comment.

Rick, the short answer to your second post is that the Supreme Court has rejected it — that is, it has rejected as a justification for racial preferences the existence of general, societal discrimination, as opposed to specific acts of discrimination by, in this instance, Harvard Law School.

Have a look at the creep that is her opponent, Cmdr, before issuing opinions. Yes, I just did but I have looked at his track record. Too bad I don’t live in MA but my son and his lady do and, like me, they never miss a major vote and few minor ones.

 So “Commander Casey.” You’re living off Defense Department handouts and government pensions. And now you’re whining about affirmative action. You da man!

M, you do not have “facts.” Your “facts” have been disputed by many authorities.

I know this, first-hand. I know that those who complain constantly about “fairness” often GRAB the EARNED property of others. And will never be satisfied in their demands. They have a choice — fix their own problems or try another country.

And S, try reading the Constitution. Look up “common defense.” Try to think. Good luck — you may have a brain that works.

How about we just institute a South African style passbook system, complete with DNA data?  Then the liberal elite can decide who gets a job or seat in college based on a weighted point total of what their ancestors suffered over the past millenium.

Priceless….”I am a famous, or at least well-known, World Class Professor”!  Sure you are….and why do you then hide behind a a pseudonym?

Chuck Kleinhans

 Roger – again, fair point and bravo to your side for citing Harlan’s dissent.  However, I have to believe that your side does fully subscribe to Harlan’s dissent given his clear and direct expression of racial prejudice against the Chinese in his written opinion.

Let me be clear – I don’t endorse racial discrimination against individuals, nor do I suspect you do.  What I do struggle with is the challenge of addressing the structural discrimination that exists in our society that too often links both race and socioeconomic status.  Have you read Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow?  It seems we cannot separate easily race and class.  Addressing one without addressing the other seems to me to fail to get to the heart of the matter.  Any suggestions beyond saying we should not engage in affirmative action?

You obviously did not go to an Ivy-level college. It shows. Congrats.

Yeah, ARC’s positive effect. Even if it hired DEADWOOD and helped financially cripple the USA. Duh.

FYI, Scotch is a potent drink, Scots are a potent people!

Back in the 1970s, I was working in a district office of the Social Security Administration in an urban downtown location. We had two young women named “Fernandes” (or a variation). It is the difference made by the variation that is the point of this story.
 
The first young woman was named “Fernandes.” Our affirmative action office had not noticed the “s.” Although she had not applied to Social Security through affirmative action, Miss Fernandes was showered with informational material telling her how affirmative action was going benefit her. She had to write back to the affirmative action office and explain to them what the “s” meant. The “s” meant that she was Portuguese-American, not Hispanic-American and, therefore, she did not qualify for affirmative action advantages.
 
I never knew what was this woman’s own socio-economic class or whether she had suffered discrimination. However, she was from an area where Portuguese-Americans had suffered a great deal of discrimination. I had previously heard that community organizations in that area had once tried to get legal affirmative action status for Portuguese-Americans, but had failed.The second young woman was named “Fernandez,” with the protected “z.” We all knew what her class was, because she let us know it. She had grown up in an elegant apartment in Manhattan. She was of medium-height and was very slim and graceful. She had long, curly, light-brown hair and a pale complexion. She was the first in our office to wear designer jeans. Miss Fernandez did profit from affirmative action.
 
Affirmative action was not intended to benefit merely the minority employees. Affirmative action was also intended to benefit the minorities among our clientele. Affirmative action would give them interviewers from their own groups, who would be more sympathetic to them and, in case of Hispanics and Orientals, might speak their language. By extending advantages to the “wrong” member of a minority (in the person of Miss Fernandez),  affirmative action failed badly in the second purpose. (This is not to say Miss Fernandez would not have been hired without affirmative action. She was an intelligent, well-educated employee.)
 
The Administration did indeed gain a public benefit in considering Miss Fernandez status as an “Hispanic.” Because of our growing Hispanic clientele, we needed a Spanish translator very much, and she was our first. (However, just as there are non-Hispanics who speak excellent Spanish, nothing in affirmative action says that a person who benefits from affirmative action as an Hispanic has to speak Spanish.)
 
However, Miss Fernandez was not quite the translator the Administration had in mind. If Miss Fernandez had an attitude with fellow staff members, this was nothing compared with her attitude toward the mostly Puerto Rican Hispanics who came to our office. They would be pleased when the receptionist would get across to them that we had someone who spoke Spanish. Then, you could see the change in the faces of these mostly short, swarthy, and poor people when they saw the elegant Miss Fernandez. When they heard her Castilian Spanish (which they were hearing for the first time), they knew that they were in for a hard time. When Miss Fernandez barked at the interviewees, we other staff members who did not speak Spanish assumed that she was taking advantage of our ignorance (and that of her supervisors) to tell her Hispanic clients what she thought of them.

When we hear that someone is categorized X because  they are 1/32 X, is anyone reminded of how Nazis categorized someone as a Jew: one great grandparent?  Surely there is some irony here.

OweBama’s buddies say it best: “G.D. AMERICA!!”

President Romney, you’re inheriting a huge mess. Good luck.