more than 95 theses

“Finally, we must always give control to the user. If we have information about a user, as with IBA, it should be easy for the user to delete that information and opt-out. If they use our products and store content with us, it’s their content, not ours. They should be able to export it or delete it at any time, at no cost, and as easily as possible. Gmail is a great example of this since we offer free forwarding to any address. The ability to switch is critical, so instead of building walls around your product, build bridges. Give users real options.”

— Official Google Blog: The meaning of open. So Google is saying all the right things. How reassured should I be?

“But before we cede the entire moral penthouse to ‘committed vegetarians’ and ‘strong ethical vegans,’ we might consider that plants no more aspire to being stir-fried in a wok than a hog aspires to being peppercorn-studded in my Christmas clay pot. This is not meant as a trite argument or a chuckled aside. Plants are lively and seek to keep it that way. The more that scientists learn about the complexity of plants — their keen sensitivity to the environment, the speed with which they react to changes in the environment, and the extraordinary number of tricks that plants will rally to fight off attackers and solicit help from afar — the more impressed researchers become, and the less easily we can dismiss plants as so much fiberfill backdrop, passive sunlight collectors on which deer, antelope and vegans can conveniently graze. It’s time for a green revolution, a reseeding of our stubborn animal minds.”

— Basics - Another Challenge for Ethical Eating - Plants Want to Live, Too - NYTimes.com

“So what seems to be happening is that formal politeness, at least in spoken and written exchanges, is on the decline, thanks to globalisation (meaning the rise of flat, nuance-less English as a means of international communication), to social changes and to technology. Replacing it is a kind of neutral friendliness, where human encounters take place devoid of the signifiers of emotional and status differences that past generations found so essential. That may lubricate business meetings. But it makes life outside the workplace less interesting. If you use first names everywhere at work, how do you signify to a colleague that you want to be a real friend? If you sign all e-mails ‘love and vibes’, how do you show intimacy? Much of the world has an answer to that, at least in their own languages and cultures. English-speakers may have triumphed on one front, but they are struggling on another.”

— Politeness: Hi there | The Economist

“The widespread support for Polanski shows the liberal cultural elite at its preening, fatuous worst. They may make great movies, write great books, and design beautiful things, they may have lots of noble humanitarian ideas and care, in the abstract, about all the right principles: equality under the law, for example. But in this case, they’re just the white culture-class counterpart of hip-hop fans who stood by R. Kelly and Chris Brown and of sports fans who automatically support their favorite athletes when they’re accused of beating their wives and raping hotel workers. No wonder Middle America hates them.”

— Roman Polanski Has a Lot of Friends. Like Andrew Sullivan, I missed this when it came out.

“Although there’s no hard statistical evidence on most-stolen titles, The Telegraph of London reported last year that Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel ‘The Virgin Suicides’ was said to be ‘the most shoplifted book of modern times.’ Eugenides had heard this for many years. ‘I just assumed that the book appealed to the young and sticky-fingered to a certain extent,’ he told me, with some amusement. Years ago, Eugenides was at a literary conference with Paul Auster, another top choice among literary thieves. ‘Paul and I argued about whose book was stolen more,’ Eugenides said. ‘He claimed he was stolen a lot, I claimed I was stolen a lot. Back and forth. It was one of those deep intellectual conversations.’”

— Steal These Books

“If you’ve ever sat through a teaching seminar, you’ve probably heard a lecture about ‘learning styles.’ Perhaps you were told that some students are visual learners, some are auditory learners, and others are kinesthetic learners. Or maybe you were given one of the dozens of other learning-style taxonomies that scholars and consultants have developed. Almost certainly, you were told that your instruction should match your students’ styles. For example, kinesthetic learners—students who learn best through hands-on activities—are said to do better in classes that feature plenty of experiments, while verbal learners are said to do worse. Now four psychologists argue that you were told wrong. There is no strong scientific evidence to support the ‘matching’ idea, they contend in a paper published this week in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. And there is absolutely no reason for professors to adopt it in the classroom.”

— Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students - Teaching - The Chronicle of Higher Education. I’m so glad someone is finally saying this. Many a teacher has been ruined by frantic attempts to change his or her teaching to match (largely imaginary) students’ “learning styles.”

“Pantheism has been Hollywood’s religion of choice for a generation now. It’s the truth that Kevin Costner discovered when he went dancing with wolves. It’s the metaphysic woven through Disney cartoons like ‘The Lion King’ and ‘Pocahontas.’ And it’s the dogma of George Lucas’s Jedi, whose mystical Force ‘surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.’ Hollywood keeps returning to these themes because millions of Americans respond favorably to them. From Deepak Chopra to Eckhart Tolle, the ‘religion and inspiration’ section in your local bookstore is crowded with titles pushing a pantheistic message. A recent Pew Forum report on how Americans mix and match theology found that many self-professed Christians hold beliefs about the ‘spiritual energy’ of trees and mountains that would fit right in among the indigo-tinted Na’Vi.”

— Ross Douthat on James Cameron and the long history of American pantheism

“Perelman has a mind that is capable of taking in more information than any mathematical mind that has come before. His brain is like a universal math compactor. He grasps complex problems and reduces them to their solvable essence. The problem is that he expects human beings to be similarly subject to reduction. He expects the world to function in accordance with a set of strictly laid out rules, and he cannot take in anything that does not conform to those rules. And because the world is so unruly, Perelman has had to cut off successive chunks of it. All that is left for him now is the apartment he shares with his mother.”

— Masha Gessen on Grigory Perelman