Word of the Day: “glisk"––sunlight glimpsed through a break in the clouds; a fleeting glance at a glittering sight; a brief glow of warmth from a fire that’s burned low; a sudden flash of hope in the heart. (Scots)
Photograph by Michael Held pic.twitter.com/0w6Jl7YFCz
Late last year, Propublica published a deep, blockbuster investigation into the use of brutal “discipline” techniques in Illinois’s special ed classes, some of them so extreme as to qualify as torture.
These techniques, including physically restraining children and locking them in small isolation rooms, sometimes for whole days, or even for whole consecutive days, had been strictly limited or eliminated altogether in the rest of the US, but not in Illinois.
Instead, Illinois had passed a rule requiring schools to document the use of force against children with learning disabilities. As a result, Propublica was able to FOIA thick sheaves of handwritten notes documenting children’s pleas for release at mandated 15-min intervals.
It was real Banality of Evil stuff, and it shed light on mysterious broken bones and bruises that parents had been told were self-inflicted. In the ensuing scandal, the state banned the use of these techniques, finally catching up with the rest of the nation, 20 years on.
Thanks to intense lobbying from Illinois private schools, notably Giant Steps and Markland Day School, and the public A.E.R.O Special Education Cooperative, some of the physical restraint tactics were reinstated.
Notably, face-down restraint - a tactic banned in 30+ states due to the high risk of asphyxiation - is once again permitted in special ed programs.
We can thank Rep Jim Durkin [R-82] for this. He sits on Giant Steps’s board along with 5 former colleagues from state government.
His chief of staff was an ardent advocate for reinstating face-down restraint in Illinois schools. He declined to comment to Propublica.
“… like a modern lab technician ensconced within a biohazard suit, the basilisk maker should never undertake this experiment without first donning a protective suit of mirrors.”
Arundhati Roy: “The pandemic is a portal … we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”
This pandemic rly highlights how we’re globally dependent but locally loyal. Whereas I’d prefer if we were locally dependent & globally loyal. Now, more urgently than ever, we need to act as a planet, as a whole.
— MΞMO (isolated. as usual. but washing hands more) (@memotv) April 4, 2020
“Your problem is not as unique as you think. You have more data than you think. You need less data than you think. An adequate amount of new data is more accessible than you think.”
I’ve hardly left the flat for weeks but days are a series of staggered, overlapping meetings. like being haunted by a large cohort of polite, well-organised ghosts.
The purpose of crisis prep is not to see you through any imaginable crisis but to buy you time. Applies to both resources (financial and non) and intellectual (scenarios, contingency plans). The stockpile running out is fine. Wasting the time it bought you is not.
Shout out to all the partners of lab researchers who have endured the recent exasperated crash course on antiviral biosecurity! Thread with pointers follows if you haven’t been so lucky. 1/12
— Dave Griffiths (FoAM Kernow) (@nebogeo) April 2, 2020
Taiwan did not beat coronavirus because of Confucianism. Full stop. They are doing well because their Vice President is an epidemiologist with previous experience with SARS and they have a strong public health sector with an emergency command centre.
“To keep things organized, Mr. Cavalcanti established a subgroup of 130 people who operate on Slack and filter through the information that amasses by the minute, building a catalog of open-source solutions for medical supplies as they go. (Version 1.1 of the guide was released on March 20.)According to Mr. Cavalcanti, moderators flag designs that are posted in the main group. A team of medical professionals evaluates the flagged content. Then, a documentation group puts the approved information together in read-only Google documents, creating a virtual library that details equipment including exam gloves, face masks, negative pressure rooms and oxygen masks.”
I got my paper “Algorithmic Pattern” accepted for the mighty @NIME2020! The conference will be online only, which is great - hopefully that’ll set a trend beyond pandemic. Here’s the submitted draft, feedback welcome. https://t.co/O9elX1Lu74
Speechless every time someone says that this was totally unexpected & nobody saw this coming. See chapter 3: ‘Preparing for the Worst: A Rapidly Spreading, Lethal Respiratory Pathogen’ published by the @WHO Sept 2019. https://t.co/23qTrz7dN9
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki passed away today at the age of 86. His ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ was used in Part 8 of Twin Peaks. pic.twitter.com/UwKOPko9lc
“La crisi consiste appunto nel fatto che il vecchio muore e il nuovo non può nascere: in questo interregno si verificano i fenomeni morbosi piú svariati.”
–
Antonio Gramsci (1930)
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” A loose translation, commonly attributed to Gramsci by Slavoj Žižek. Presumably formulation by Žižek. Presumably a translation from a loose French translation by Gustave Massiah, strict English with cognate terms and glosses:
"Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”
“The old world is dying, the new world tardy (slow) to appear and in this chiaroscuro (light-dark) surge (emerge) monsters.”
“…I became conscious that in all acousmatic musics, at each level of the composition there are four basic types of articulation: montage or collage, mixing, the transformation of one sonic characteristic into another, which, in order to be perceptible, also needs the temporal factor; and silence. The indispensable empty time.”
— Ferreyra, Beatriz. “Perceive, Feel, Hear.” In Composer L’écoute / Composing Listening, edited by François Bonnet and Bartolomé Sanson. 33-38. Rennes: Shelter Press, 2019.
The best Zoom alternative is fewer virtual meetings and more considered, long-form write-ups. It won’t replace them all, but if your remote day is nothing but a long series of Zoom meetings with small breaks in between, you’re probably doing it wrong.
All this and no in-home quarantine units. No pandemic isolation shed. More desks just means packing more potentially ill people into a house, working to exhaustion. https://t.co/appzAwlsn0
“It is when the machine begins to break down that you begin to see how it works. Likewise it is when authority is challenged that you begin to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure. This we could call… *preemptively apocalyptic knowledge*…” -Mick Taussig
“It is time to acknowledge the limits of anthropocentric capitalism and embrace the burden of a world that is precarious and challenging. To use our deep resourcefulness and imagination to stay with the trouble, and keep the revolt alive.” @anabjainhttps://t.co/UBUc2177WPpic.twitter.com/GiVoy5zNBD
great! and yes very good question, didn’t quite expect the response… thinking maybe bunch of calls in smaller groups rather than one big one - feral futuring as a public service😬
Three centuries earlier Zhao Rukuo tells us of a Javanese vassal called “Dānróngwǔluō” (丹戎武囉), presumably a Chinese phonetic transliteration of Tanjungpura (Middle Chinese: “tan-nyuwng-mjuX-la”, ’Phags-pa [tan-ryuŋ-ʋu-lɔ]). He says the people there prefer piracy to trade.
A patrician describing the arguments against Florence’s general quarantine in 1630: “It was thought it would give the poor the opportunity to be lazy … others were astonished that it would be possible to feed an entire city daily” pic.twitter.com/vT0zQb8Bxr
A condensed remix of some our thinking around care and uncertainty. Dedicated to all the carers near and far. To all those providing essential services and all those in isolation or lockdown. To all who care. To all… https://t.co/e57RI2E7pIpic.twitter.com/TXvzyseoUj
Coronavirus pandemic, locusts in Africa and the Middle East, melting ice in Antarctica and the Arctic, warmest years and seasons ever, floods in the Midwestern US and many other places on Earth, and so on. When do we get to sing “Ding Dong the Witch Is Dead?” I think in November of this year.
A short essay where I argue that we should commandeer the toolkit of surveillance advertising to create an invasive, nonconsensual public health tracking system to help us control this pandemic https://t.co/k9dETPhyLB
This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.
“Okay, here’s the scenario. You are a crew member on a starship.”
“Cool.”
“Space travel is slow, you’ll be stuck with your crewmates a long time.”
“So we must get along.”
“Yes. Communicate, listen, share limited resources.”
“I can do that. What’s the starship called?”
“Earth.”
Beneath the dense noise of humanity, countless tiny critters. Intensifying densities and distances. “All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons” —F. Pessoa https://t.co/7RLhzbX961
With so many museums, galleries & art centres gradually closing, or reducing activities, this feels like an important & opportune moment to revisit @_foam’s pioneering work on fallow periods.
As always, @deziluzija& @zzkt were 5 years ahead of everyone:https://t.co/opKFe8AM7r
For data scientists, quants, ML folks looking for ways to help with the pandemic:
- Wash your hands often with soap for at 20 seconds.
- Avoid touching your face.
- Do not go to where there will be lots of people.
- Encourage others to do the same.
I’m sorry to say this but boomer critical theorists from Italy questioning the “authoritarian biopolitics” of the corona lockdown are really just the academic equivalent of GOP Senators going to their packed ribs restaurant the night of the travel ban.
This is not unique to coronavirus, but it feels like the people who know the *most* about something often express more uncertainty and doubt than people who have some adjacent knowledge but fall short of being subject-matter experts.
My spouse pointed out, when I wondered whether Zoom could handle every university class in the country, that I could always switch to meeting my students within World of Warcraft, because the MMORPGs are definitely equipped to handle this kind of traffic.
Looking forward to two weeks’ time when everyone has self-quarantined and declared their home a micronation. Post your Declaration of Independence here!
Reductions in air pollution due to COVID-19 in China have probably saved 20x the number of lives than have so far been lost to the virus. Does not mean pandemics are good, but rather that our economies absent pandemics are bad for health https://t.co/3UUIo4IpCA (Thread 1/n)
The thing people are missing about the jackpot is that’s it’s easily 300 years long, started at least 100 years ago, and we’re just reaching the point where we notice that. https://t.co/kGt9IugXct
I’m developing a new theory that ‘Cyclonopedia’ and 'Intelligence & Spirit’ are parts 1 and 2 of a long-winded argument, at the end of which Reza will declare that cyclopean masonry proves Iran invented Lego.
“To protect business, you must not go to work.” Keep it up coronavirus. You’re creating a gigantic general strike. As a matter of fact, you’re making neoliberalism create a gigantic distributed general strike.
The efficiency of Taiwan and Korea’s responses vs. the U.S., Japan, China and Iran suggest that democracies and autocracies both suffer from distinct failure modes in the face of external shocks, and that the best government is a democracy with competent technocratic leadership.
Far from the city, where the Milky Way shines in the night sky, she met an alien from a distant star.
“Why are you here, so far from civilisation?” she asked.
“I could ask the same,” the alien said.
“We can’t travel to other stars.”
“I know. I meant you.”
“Oh. To escape.”
“Same.”
Just blocked a few who discuss this virus in terms of “predicting” & track record, as Phil the rat @PTetlock & others in the “forecasting” BS are presenting it.
When you put your seat belt you aren’t “forecasting” a crash. When you lock your house you aren’t forecasting theft…
In FKA Twigs’ “Cellophane”, a male voice is mimicking the hi-hat line.
In Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy”, the hi-hat line is actually a sound recording of a traffic light in Sidney.
In Rosalía’s “Malamente”, flamenco clapping is playing the role of the hi-hat.
— Jose Luis de Vicente (@Macroscopist) March 4, 2020
