If doctoral education is to remain viable in the twenty-first century, universities must tear down the walls that separate fields, and establish programmes that nourish cross-disciplinary investigation and communication. They must design curricula that focus on solving practical problems, such as providing clean water to a growing population. Unfortunately, significant change is unlikely to come from faculty members, who all too often remain committed to traditional approaches. Students, administrators, trustees and even people from the public and private sectors must create pressure for reform. It is important to realize that problems will never be solved as long as each institution continues to act independently. The difficulties are systemic and must be addressed comprehensively and cooperatively. Prestige is measured both within and beyond institutions by the number and purported strength of a department’s doctoral programmes, so, seeking competitive advantage and financial gain from alliances with the private sector, universities continue to create them.

via Reform the PhD system or close it down : Nature News.

from Silver Keys album. Listen closely to the lyrics…

via YouTube – IKIPR – Profession – Esoterrorist.

The starting premise was that progressives should, in principle, have had two strengths going for them. First, we argued that modernizing trends were shifting the demographic terrain in their political favor. Second, we asserted that the crisis had illustrated the intellectual and policy bankruptcy of conservatism, which had now proven itself devoid of creative ideas of how to shape the global economic system for the common good.

Despite these latent advantages, we surmised that progressives in Europe were struggling for three primary reasons. First, it was increasingly hard to differentiate themselves from conservative opponents who seemed to be wholeheartedly adopting social democratic policies and language in response to the economic crisis. Second, the nominally progressive majority within their electorate was being split between competing progressive movements. Third, their traditional working class base of support was both shrinking and increasingly being seduced by a new politics of identity driven by cultural insecurities rather than by economic arguments.

via The Demographic Change and Progressive Political Strategy Series.

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“Fuck the exposition,” he says gleefully, as we go back into the bar. “Just *be*. The exposition can come later.” He describes a theory of television narrative. “If I can make you curious enough, there’s this thing called Google. If you’re curious about the New Orleans Indians, or ‘second-line’ musicians–you can look it up.” The Internet, he suggests, can provide its own creative freedom, releasing writers from having to overexplain, allowing history to light the charaqcters from within

via William Gibson.

Agreed – there’s a huge pool of cultural consensus that can be structured in as hooks for deeper readings – infictive text is becoming a cascading experience.

We got it good. With our 1950′s nuclear power plants now popping one after another on the edge of the ocean. That’s nothing, a tsunami wiped out atlantis – lybia is detonating, the middle east is tinkering with rhizomatic networking and it’s freaking the mundanes. But this was supposed to be about SEO. Let me tell you why SEO is shit – it’s a rigged game and the players hold the cards already.. although you can create your own cards from scratch. Getting in means getting someone to begin dealing you some cards, but the cards themselves ain’t worth shit unless they’re already in the deck and are getting dealt out – so you gotta trade in some of your cards you created until they’re mixed into the common pool. That’s SEO today – a huge game of go fish and everyone’s already chipped in to the max. Real-Time SEO? Well, today it’s about Japan – is it radioactive? Are we? Tomorrow it will be something else; I know exactly what James means when he talks about scanning for what stands out… and today SEO is goddamn depressing – perhaps next Friday we will meet the next Rebecca Black and jump towards another polarizing Sheen-ish Swan event, SEO’s enmass following culture like so much hanger’s on trailing a conquoring army sweeping through a heathen land.

via Modern Mythology: Dystopian Fallout Tunes in the Wake of the 1950′s Nuclear Family; (Or, Why Purim, Elin Nordegren, the Supermoon, and Forever 21 are in this Title).

Every morning, I scan through a twitter stream created by thousands of people, and mirror that activity on several other services. I ask myself, after a minute or two of that, “What stuck out?”

If something really stuck out, you can best believe that thing is a high priority on the cultural mind right now, within the core demographic that you’ve selected to follow. This is, by the way, a reason why it is important to create lists of people to follow that represent different markets, if you want to keep your fingers on the thoughts that exist within the domain of several different egregores.

Timing. Different stories have different lifespans. Especially on the Internet, the thing that is hot today might be boring tomorrow. If you scoop a story moments before it hits, you can expect to see tens or hundreds of thousands of visits. If you run it a day later, you will be lost in the noise.

via Modern Mythology: How To Do SEO Write: And Not Be A Total Douchebag.

I don’t care what side or channel you’re in or on, what matters is that you can appeal to the best and the most curious in human behavior, and that you can use technology and media for what they can be… Platforms that can help us transcend our more traditional thinking.

Furthermore, whatever we choose to call “it”, “it” should not only influence behavior, but endeavor to change behavior.A good number of folks who have helped pioneer or develop “transmedia” in various ways – people like Jeff Gomez, Stephen Dinehart, Christy Dena, Lina Srivastava, Mike Monello, Nedra Weinrich, Scott Walker, Robert Pratten and Ivan Askwith – will all tell you that “it” has this power. And power, of course, is something that we already possess, it just needs to be cultivated in ways that are meaningful.

via Modern Mythology: What Exactly is Transmedia Storytelling? And Does it Even Matter?.

First, .. I find certain aspects of this idea of relentless optimism in the face of counter-public opinion about the conceit of a ‘New World Order’ to be entirely warranted. To begin, I feel most strongly that globalist pressure will lead, clearly, to a balance of power necessary to establish long-range strategic goals vital to the interest of the biosphere and those within it. Secondly, the semantic weight of the term New World Order deepens the consequence of discourse into a space of interpellation across counter-public spheres, where alterity is traded as an occult currency: ignotium per ignotius, as it were.

via We are the new world order and it’s a damn bright future » Wes Unruh.

Hey artists, got your own tarot deck you want to publish?

As the tarot world evolves towards digital distribution new challenges and constraints emerge, some making publishing and distribution easier for artists and some making things more difficult.The cost of distribution is much lower in digital form, but packaging a tarot deck in software prior to distribution can get quite expensive. Hundreds of development hours have gone into producing the TarotBot code, and programmers are not cheap.Liberus offers three models of Android tarot distribution. They vary in the technical skill required and in the amount of involvement on the part of the artist.The first model requires very little technical skill or additional effort on the part of the artist. Simply provide Liberus with images and optionally text and we will publish your deck under the Liberus brand with a percentage of each sale going to you.The second model also requires little technical skill but much more effort on the part of the artist. Here you essentially commission software which is then custom designed to your specifications and published either through Liberus or through your own brand.The third model requires a lot of time and technical skill on the part of the artist. Here Liberus provides you with a tutorial to use the open source code to develop your own TarotBot customized however you like. You are then free to publish it as you see fit.For more information please contact aron23 through gmail

via « Tarotbot | Tarot distribution | http://liber.us : Android tarot reader.

For example, Roy was able to track the length of every sentence spoken to the child in which a particular word–like “water”–was included. Right around the time the child started to say the word, what Roy calls the “word birth,” something remarkable happened.“Caregiver speech dipped to a minimum and slowly ascended back out in complexity.” In other words, when mom and dad and nanny first hear a child speaking a word, they unconsciously stress it by repeating it back to him all by itself or in very short sentences. Then as he gets the word, the sentences lengthen again. The infant shapes the caregivers’ behavior, the better to learn.Roy is now taking the amazing research capability and team he’s developed and applying it to commerce.

via MIT Scientist Captures 90,000 Hours of Video of His Son’s First Words, Graphs It | Fast Company.

At CES this year, a huge consortium of media and technology companies called the DECE announced that this year they plan to start releasing movies in downloadable form that will play on any “UltraViolet compatible” device regardless of where you buy it. So you can buy a movie from Amazon or BestBuy or direct from an Indy film company, and it will play on your computer, your tablet, your smart DVR, your cable box, whatever. Yes, it’s got a DRM system, but they are trying to make it like the DRM experience on Netflix – it’s there but it does not really geting your way. I am close enough to that organization to know more than the average guy about what they are trying to do, and I personally think it might work. IF the studios get serious and start pricing media better. I’ve seen the studies that the studios don’t like, it says that piracy would basically go away if movies were prices $4.99 to $6.99 to buy outright, and TV shows were $12.99 a season and volume would go up, balancing out the lower per-unit revenue with higher volume of sales. The challenge they face right now in rolling out that model is that the physical is a “universal” distribution format and downloadable media is a clusterfuck of incompatible formats.

via I’ve never pirated a movie, but after sitting through THIRTEEN MINUTES of commercials in order to get to the main menu of the DVD I just rented, I’m about to start . . . : reddit.com.

How to Hack the Dictatorship. “Gene Sharp is an American intellectual whose ideas can be fatal to the world’s despots. For decades, Mr. Sharp’s practical writings on nonviolent revolution — most notably “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” a 93-page guide to toppling autocrats, available for download in 24 languages — have inspired dissidents around the world, including in Burma, Bosnia, Estonia and Zimbabwe, and now Tunisia and Egypt.” His fame is spreading.

via How to Hack the Dictatorship. | MetaFilter.

As a news consumer halfway around the globe, my conclusion was that these news sources were interpreting the statement that “all their demands” would be met included Mubarack stepping down.

Again, it’s hard to determine who was first and the particular order, but the echo chamber, I believe, had begun here.

via The Egyptian revolution, and how a premature report of Mubarak’s departure spread.

A national survey by MediaBugs found only 60 percent of the daily newspaper sites it examined had any explicit way for users to report errors.

via Washington Post corrects its online corrections process | Knight Digital Media Center.

Any journalist whose reporting threatens that belief system gets sliced and diced by its apologists and polemicists say, the fabulists at Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and the yahoos of talk radio. Remember when Limbaugh, for one, took journalists on for their reporting about torture at Abu Ghraib? He attempted to dismiss the cruelty inflicted on their captives by American soldiers as a little necessary “sport” for soldiers under stress, saying on air: “This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation … you [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?” As so often happens, the Limbaugh line became a drumbeat in the nether reaches of the right-wing echo chamber. So, it was not surprising that in a nationwide survey conducted by The Chicago Tribune on First Amendment issues, half of the respondents said there should be some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse. According to Charles Madigan, the editor of the Tribune’s Perspective section, 50 or 60 percent of the respondents said they “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, particularly when it has sexual content or is heard as unpatriotic.

”No wonder many people still believe Obama was born in Kenya, not Hawaii, as his birth certificate shows; or that he is a Muslim, when in fact he is a Christian; or that he is a socialist when day by day he shows an eager solicitude for corporate capitalism. Partisans in particular – and the audiences for Murdoch’s Fox News and talk radio – are particularly susceptible to such scurrilous disinformation. In a Harris survey last spring, 67 percent of Republicans said Obama is a socialist; 57 percent believed him to be a Muslim; 45 percent refused to believe he was born in America; and 24 percent said he “may be the antichrist.”

via Dangerous Minds | Facts? We don’t need your stinking facts! Why right-wing Americans are so stubbornly ignorant.

A reminder that there’s always more to know about how the mind works:

When he was 1 year old, doctors did an MRI, expecting to find he had a mild case of cerebral palsy. Instead, they discovered he was completely missing his cerebellum — the part of the brain that controls motor skills, balance and emotions.

“That’s when the doctor called and didn’t know what to say to us,” Britton said in a telephone interview. “No one had ever seen it before. And then we’d go to the neurologists and they’d say, ‘That’s impossible.’ ‘He has the MRI of a vegetable,’ one of the doctors said to us.”

Chase is not a vegetable, leaving doctors bewildered and experts rethinking what they thought they knew about the human brain.

“There are some very bright, specialized people across the country and in Europe that have put their minds to this dilemma and are continuing to do so, and we haven’t come up with an answer,” Dr. Adre du Plessis, chief of Fetal and Transitional Medicine at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., told Fox News affiliate WGRZ.

“So it is a mystery.”

Chase also is missing his pons, the part of the brain stem that controls basic functions, such as sleeping and breathing. There is only fluid where the cerebellum and pons should be, Britton said.

via Chase Britton, Boy Without a Cerebellum, Baffles Doctors.