… as she scanned the program for this year’s graduation events at George Washington University (La Kid is graduating): Carlos Slim, The Richest Man in the World, is going to be honored, which is great large-giftwise, but he’s rather controversial.
And now a group called Two Countries One Voice is asking GW to reconsider.
… MOOCs.
The best American colleges should be able to establish a magnetic authoritative presence online.
Farewell! my dear Psychosis Risk!
My Anxious, Mixed, Despair!
A cruel and barbèd whisk
Consigns you to the air.
Farewell! my Hyperactive love!
From now, mere asterisk!
What’s next, oh Lord above?
Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. Tsk.
Other law enforcement officials who have received ethics training through Hopkins described it as largely classroom-based — and intense. The classes begin with a foundation in ethics, including a primer on Aristotle, then move on to modern applications of those ancient lessons.
Johns Hopkins University is teaching Secret Service guys not to fuck prostitutes.
—————–
UD thanks David.
I disturbed, while gardening,
a fucking big snake.
My foot was right on the fucker.
Looked like this:
I’m still trembling a bit.
**************************
Went back out there.
To face my fears, baby!
And there it was, just
like that picture up there.
So I looked at it for awhile.
It didn’t move.
Then I came back in.
**********************
8:09 PM.
I’m in the front garden – it’s still light out, and the birds are making an absolutely insane racket. (I’m here for the wood thrushes.)
Suddenly one of our orange foxes races across the lawn right in front of me – frightened, maybe, by a train.
The fox was a bright slender flash against the dark green.
Students at Syria’s Aleppo University are being killed for protesting against the government.
Judith Warner maps a comeback strategy for Dominique Strauss-Kahn which includes writing a memoir:
Possible title: “From J’Accuse to J’Accepte.”
Donna Shalala’s University of Miami certainly knows how to keep it coming. They know if you want your sports program to be number one on the disgust parade, things have to keep happening. We all know the history:
In 1994 there were allegations that Miami-based rapper Luther Campbell and former Miami players performing in the NFL were offering cash for big hits—50 bucks a fumble, 200 bucks an interception.
In May 1995 an NCAA investigation found that positive drug tests of various Hurricane players had been withheld by the football program a week before the January Orange Bowl. Later in 1995, the NCAA found Miami guilty of eight different categories of rules violations. Among them: excessive financial awards, Pell Grant fraud, pay-for-play payouts, and failure to follow its own drug-testing policy. In 2006 Miami football players were involved in two brawls, one with LSU in the Peach Bowl and the other during the regular season with Florida International, in which safety Anthony Reddick was said to have used his helmet as a weapon.
More recently, the Nevin Shapiro scandal wiped all other sports stories off the pages for weeks. And just yesterday some ex-football coach sued the school for mucho money.
Can you imagine how much all this shit is costing the school? I’m not talking reputation costs. UM went into the reputation toilet long ago. I’m talking dollars. How much of this university’s budget goes for sports pay-offs?
I suppose it’s all, at bottom, a category error; but UD is enjoying following the Krauss/Albert fulminating dust-up about science and philosophy.
I’ll admit I’ve never gotten far beyond scaring myself when thinking with any depth about why there’s something rather than nothing…
Not really scaring myself… Feeling very sharply the impossibility of moving my mind to the cosmological back-of-beyond.
As a literary type, though, I’ve loved nothingness poems and prose all my life. I’ve loved writing that captures the conviction and the feeling all thoughtful people occasionally have, that – in the words of Leopold Bloom, struck down for a moment in a Dublin pub by absolute nihilism – no one is anything. Everything depends on the nothing you are talking about, and I’m not talking about the nothingness that a field without particles might represent; I’m talking about the “death in the soul” Albert Camus felt in Prague. What Don DeLillo in Libra imagines Lee Harvey Oswald feeling in Texas:
He walked through empty downtown Dallas, empty Sunday in the heat and light. He felt the loneliness he always hated to admit to, a vaster isolation than Russia, stranger dreams, a dead white glare burning down.
What James Agee, in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, felt, also on a Sunday, in Alabama:
… the subdual of this sunday deathliness in whose power was held the whole of the south… nothing but the sun was left, faithfully blasting away upon the dead earth…
In my next Faculty Project Lecture, I’m talking about three great nothingness poems – Auden’s Brussels in Winter, and Larkin’s Absences, as well as his Friday Night in the Royal Station Hotel. And of course there’s Elizabeth Bishop’s Cape Breton.
I find a curious reassurance in these evocations of … psychic vastation? What to call it without sounding pretentious, ponderous? Everyone laughs when people say things like If you remember the ‘sixties, you weren’t there. But, you know, the business of not being there… that sense of suspension from yourself, the world, everything… It feels like a serious business, one with insights in it that might compete with quantum field theory.
… about the new Harvard/MIT MOOC venture:
Online courses with thousands of students give researchers the ability to monitor students’ progress, they said, identifying what they click on and where they have trouble. Already, a researcher from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, using the M.I.T. Circuits course, found that students overwhelmingly preferred to read the handwritten notes of [MIT MOOC lecturer] Professor [Anant] Agarwal rather than the same notes presented on PowerPoint.
… was swept up in a drug raid. Innocent of any charges, he was nonetheless held in a DEA cell for five days with no food or water; for two days, he was in total darkness.
The UCSD engineering student said he missed several midterm exams last week. Attorney Eugene Iredale said he hoped university officials would allow his client time to make up the missed school work.
I think UCSD will find this an acceptable excuse.
Via Inside Higher Education: Harvard has just announced it’s collaborating with MIT to offer its own MOOCs.
UD‘s MOOC now has four hundred and thirty students. So it’s not “massive” (Massive Open Online Courses) yet – as in some MOOCs that have tens of thousands of students. Maybe she should call her poetry course a BOOC (Big Open Online Course) until it’s truly massive.
… with the joke I’ve been holding on to about joint appointments?
… fox barking just outside our bedroom window this morning.