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Thursday, June 19, 2014
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
Monday, May 19, 2014
Sunday, May 18, 2014
Classic Literature May Upset Today's Fragile Students
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Warning: The Literary Canon Could Make Students Squirm
By JENNIFER MEDINA MAY 17, 2014
SANTA
BARBARA, Calif.
— Should students about to read “The Great Gatsby” be forewarned about “a
variety of scenes that reference gory, abusive and misogynistic violence,” as
one Rutgers student proposed?
Would any book that addresses racism — like “The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn” or “Things Fall Apart” — have to be preceded by a note of caution? Do
sexual images from Greek mythology need to come with a viewer-beware label?
Colleges across the country
this spring have been wrestling with student requests for what are known as
“trigger warnings,” explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or
see in a classroom might upset them or, as some students assert, cause symptoms
of post-traumatic stress disorder in victims of rape or in war veterans.
The warnings, which have
their ideological roots in feminist thought, have gained the most traction at
the University of California, Santa
Barbara, where the student government formally called for them.
But there have been similar requests from students at Oberlin College, Rutgers University, the University
of Michigan, George Washington University and other
schools.
The debate has left many
academics fuming, saying that professors should be trusted to use common sense
and that being provocative is part of their mandate. Trigger warnings, they
say, suggest a certain fragility of mind that higher learning is meant to
challenge, not embrace. The warnings have been widely debated in intellectual
circles and largely criticized in opinion magazines, newspaper editorials and
academic email lists.
“Any kind of blanket trigger
policy is inimical to academic freedom,” said Lisa Hajjar, a sociology
professor at the university here, who often uses graphic depictions of torture
in her courses about war. “Any student can request some sort of individual
accommodation, but to say we need some kind of one-size-fits-all approach is
totally wrong. The presumption there is that students should not be forced to
deal with something that makes them uncomfortable is absurd or even dangerous.”
Bailey Loverin, a sophomore
at Santa Barbara,
said the idea for campus wide trigger warnings came to her in February after a
professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had
been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by
the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have
been warned.
Ms. Loverin draws a
distinction between alerting students to material that might truly tap into
memories of trauma — such as war and torture, since many students at Santa
Barbara are veterans — and slapping warning labels on famous literary works, as
other advocates of trigger warnings have proposed.
“We’re not talking about
someone turning away from something they don’t want to see,” Ms. Loverin said
in a recent interview. “People suddenly feel a very real threat to their safety
— even if it is perceived. They are stuck in a classroom where they can’t get
out, or if they do try to leave, it is suddenly going to be very public.”
The most vociferous criticism
has focused on trigger warnings for materials that have an established place on
syllabuses across the country. Among the suggestions for books that would
benefit from trigger warnings are Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”
(contains anti-Semitism) and Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” (addresses
suicide).
“Frankly it seems this is
sort of an inevitable movement toward people increasingly expecting physical
comfort and intellectual comfort in their lives,” said Greg Lukianoff,
president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a nonprofit
group that advocates free speech. “It is only going to get harder to teach
people that there is a real important and serious value to being offended. Part
of that is talking about deadly serious and uncomfortable subjects.”
The term “trigger warning”
has its genesis on the Internet. Feminist blogs and forums have used the term
for more than a decade to signal that readers, particularly victims of sexual
abuse, might want to avoid certain articles or pictures online.
An excerpt from a draft guide on
"trigger warnings" from Oberlin
College in Ohio.
On college campuses,
proponents say similar language should be used in class syllabuses or before
lectures. The issue arose at Wellesley
College this year after
the school installed a lifelike statue of a man in his underwear, and hundreds
of students signed a petition to have it removed. Writing in The Huffington Post, one Wellesley student called
it a “potentially triggering sculpture,” and petition signers cited “concerns
that it has triggered memories of sexual assault amongst some students.”
Here at the University of California,
Santa Barbara,
in March there was a confrontation when a group of anti-abortion protesters
held up graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and a pregnant professor of
feminist studies tried to destroy the posters, saying they triggered a sense of
fear in her. After she was arrested on vandalism, battery and robbery
charges, more than 1,000 students signed a petition of support for her,
saying the university should impose greater restrictions on potentially
trigger-inducing content. (So far, the faculty senate has promised to address
the concerns raised by the petition and the student government but has not made
any policy changes.)
At Oberlin
College in Ohio, a draft guide was circulated that
would have asked professors to put trigger warnings in their syllabuses. The
guide said they should flag anything that might “disrupt a student’s learning”
and “cause trauma,” including anything that would suggest the inferiority of
anyone who is transgender (a form of discrimination known as cissexism) or who
uses a wheelchair (or ableism).
“Be aware of racism,
classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of
privilege and oppression,” the guide said. “Realize that all forms of violence
are traumatic, and that your students have lives before and outside your
classroom, experiences you may not expect or understand.” For example, it said,
while “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe — a novel set in colonial-era
Nigeria — is a “triumph of literature that everyone in the world should read,”
it could “trigger readers who have experienced racism, colonialism, religious
persecution, violence, suicide and more.”
After several professors complained, the draft was
removed from a campus website, pending a more thorough review by a
faculty-and-student task force. Professors and campus administrators are
expected to meet with students next fall to come up with a more comprehensive
guide.
Meredith Raimondo, Oberlin’s
associate dean of the College
of Arts and Sciences,
said the guide was meant to
provide suggestions, not to dictate to professors. An associate professor of
comparative American studies and a co-chairwoman of the task force, Ms.
Raimondo said providing students with warnings would simply be “responsible
pedagogical practice.”
“I quite object to the
argument of ‘Kids today need to toughen up,’ ” she said. “That absolutely
misses the reality that we’re dealing with. We have students coming to us with
serious issues, and we need to deal with that respectfully and seriously.”
But Marc Blecher, a professor
of politics and East Asian studies at Oberlin and a major critic of trigger
warnings at Oberlin, said such a policy would have a chilling effect on faculty
members, particularly those without the job security of tenure.
“If I were a junior faculty
member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified,”
Mr. Blecher said. “Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in
class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards,
and create a very tortuous process for anyone.”
***
Saturday, May 17, 2014
How Amazon Works
***
Inside Amazon’s ‘Chaotic Storage’ Warehouses
[video
at bottom shows robots running Chaotic Storage]
.jpg)
As
the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon needs somewhere to put all of those products. The
solution? Giant warehouses. Eighty to be exact. Strategically located
near key shipping hubs around the world. The warehouses themselves are massive,
with some over 1.2 million square feet in size (111,484 sq m). And at the
heart of this global operation are people (over 65,000 of them), and a
logistics system known as chaotic storage.
.jpg)
Chaotic storage is like organized confusion. It’s
an organic shelving system without permanent areas or sections. That means there is no area just for
books, or a place just for televisions (like you might expect in a retail store
layout). The product’s
characteristics and attributes are irrelevant. What’s important is the unique
barcode associated with every
product that enters the warehouse.
.jpg)
Every
single shelf space inside an Amazon warehouse has a barcode. And every incoming
product that requires storage is assigned a specific barcode that matches
the shelf space in which it will be stored. This allows free space to be
filled quickly and efficiently.
.jpg)
At
the heart of the operation is a sophisticated database that tracks and monitors
every single product that enters/leaves the warehouse and keeps a tally on
every single shelf space and whether it’s empty or contains a product.
There are several key advantages to the chaotic storage
system. First is flexibility with chaotic storage, freed-up space can be refilled immediately. Second is
simplicity. New employees don’t need to learn where types of products are
located. They simply need to find
the storage shelf within the warehouse. You don’t need to know what the product
is, just where it is. Lastly is
optimization.
.jpg)
Amazon
must handle millions and millions of orders. That means that at any given
moment there is a long list of products that need to be ‘picked’ from the
shelves and prepared for shipment. Since there is a database that knows every
product required for shipment and the location of each product inside the
warehouse, an optimized route can be provided to employees responsible for
fulfilment.
.jpg)
Since Amazon deals
with such a wide variety of products there are a few exceptions to the rule. Really fast-moving articles do not
adhere to the same storage system since they enter and leave the warehouse so
quickly. Really bulky and heavy
products still require separate storage areas and perishable goods are not
ideal for obvious reasons.
.jpg)
In this storage system a wide variety of products
can be found located next to each other, a
necklace could be located beside a DVD and underneath a set of power tools. This arbitrary placement can even help
with accuracy as it makes mix-ups less likely when picking orders for shipment.
Overall it’s a fascinating system that at its
core is powered by a complex database yet run by a simple philosophy. It’s Chaotic Storage. There’s no
better way to put it.
Now that you have a basic idea of
what they do and how they do it – here’s a video of the system working:
***
Sunday, May 11, 2014
Miley Cyrus Wrecking Ball (Goats Edition)
***
Stay with it – goats throughout with the multi-goat
climax at approx 2’50”
***
Openly Gay All-American Defensive End Michael Sam Drafted by NFL’s St. Louis Rams
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Watch as Michael Sam Gets
Drafted, Kisses His Partner on ESPN
by Josh Levin
May 10, 2014
It took until the final
moments of the final day of the 2014 draft, but Michael
Sam has become the first openly gay player drafted by an NFL team.
Moments after he got the call from the St. Louis Rams, who took Sam with the
draft’s 249th overall pick, the Missouri
star also became the first NFL draftee to celebrate by kissing his same-sex
partner on national television. Later, the network showed Sam and his partner —
who Outsports’ Cyd Zeigler identifies by his first name, Vito —
shoving a celebratory slice of cake in each other’s faces and kissing again.*
You can watch the initial kiss in the video below.
In the hour since ESPN aired
this amazing, emotional footage, it has not shown the kisses again. Instead,
the Worldwide Leader has opted to replay a shorter clip of Sam crying and
embracing his partner. ESPN.com's online video, billed on the site's front page
as "Sam
gets call from Rams," has also been bowdlerized, cutting out both of
the kisses.
For most of the day, it
didn’t seem like Sam would have any reason to rejoice. The SEC’s defensive
player of the year went undrafted through the fourth, fifth, and sixth rounds.
As the draft neared its conclusion, ESPN analysts Mel Kiper Jr., Todd McShay,
and Bill Polian argued that the NFL's lack of interest in Sam had nothing to do
with his sexual orientation. They explained, using an impressive 1000 clichés
per minute, that Sam was a “tweener” who didn’t have a natural position in the
NFL, and that he would have a good chance to make a roster as an undrafted free
agent because of his great attitude and strong "motor."
The Rams, though, finally
called Sam with the draft’s eighth-to-last selection. He will now compete for a
spot on one of the league’s strongest defensive lines, one featuring star
defensive ends Chris Long and Robert Quinn, the latter of whom has
already tweeted his support for Sam. Sam will be mentored in St. Louis by Rams
defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, who was suspended in 2012 (and reinstated
a year later) due to his role in the New Orleans Saints’ bounty scandal. Among
the lessons that Williams will likely impart to his rookie defender: “Kill
the head, the body will die.”
In a post-draft interview
with ESPN’s Suzy Kolber, St. Louis
head coach Jeff Fisher noted that it was appropriate that the Rams had drafted
Sam. The Rams franchise, then in Los
Angeles, made history by signing
Kenny Washington in 1946, making him the first black player to ink a
contract with an NFL team in the league’s modern era.
***
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