Slow Stlouhs and Strews

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
~ Trust Yourself: Emerson on Self-Reliance as the Essence of Genius and What It Means to Be a Nonconformist

Inside Higher Ed, 'The Slow Professor' (reviewing The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (University of Toronto Press, Mar. 28, 2016), by Maggie Berg (Queen’s University) & Barbara K. Seeber (Brock University)) (interview):

New book argues that professors should actively resist the "culture of speed" in academe.

In 2013, the jobs website CareerCast named university professor the No. 1 least stressful job, unleashing a torrent of criticism that only grew after Forbes picked up the ranking. Professors -- those with tenure and without -- said the study ignored the changing dynamics of the university, namely the increasingly administrative nature of academic work, the emerging student-as-customer model, unrealistic research expectations and 24-7 contact with colleagues and students via email. Non-tenure-track professors also pointed out that they in many cases lack all job security.

SLOWER WAR: “German army forced to lay down weapons due to ‘overtime limits'” [Telegraph, U.K.]

FASTER, PLEASE: First gene therapy successful against human aging
All the Sad, Broke, Literary Men Helaine Olen, Slate

PERHAPS THE VERY FIRST PERSON IN HIS LIFE TO ACTUALLY SAY “NO” TO HIM:Queen: You Can Bring Only 3 Choppers, Obama.

How many Walkmans did he bring?

Inside Higher Ed, How (Not) to Hide a Scandal:

Google “University of California, Davis.” What do you see? Who controls what you see?

Until last week, here’s what you wouldn’t see: images of a police officer, back in 2011, pepper spraying a group of student protesters. The students are assembled peacefully, sitting in a line on the ground, heads ducked. ...

Here’s the video of the incident, which racked up over a million views in the days after it was posted ...

The Coetzee archives. “All writing is autobiography,” he likes to say. But how much could he bear to reveal in his own papers?... Papers 

IT’S NOT SOCIAL MEDIA, IT’S BIOLOGY:Why Do Girls Have More Anxiety Than Boys?

Physics is not a discipline or a set of procedures. It's a way of thinking about the world: a scheme that organizes cause and effect  

March for Water: Thousands Protest Corporate Greed in Guatemala teleSUR

Trump’s new image-maker honed his ‘dark’ arts in Ukraine FT

Speaking of Soviet Union, Leon Kamenev (meaning stone) came to Australia at the fall of the Soviet Union, looking to start an Empire of his own. And now… Leon Kamenev will finally build his palace. This week he was revealed as the mystery buyer who snapped up four harbour front Vaucluse properties, spending close to $80 Million, all to build his own private compound.

From penniless Soviet refugee to mega rich how the pizza boy made his millions

Got a Hot Seller on Amazon? Prepare for E-Tailer to Make One Too Bloomberg

I  suppose there is still somebody living who has not read or heard of Cold River: it seems inconceivable that it should be so, but queer things of this sort do happen ;-) Ataphorised 

Robert Wood, Startling Report Of IRS Tax Refund Frauds — Including Inside Jobs

Why Nudging Your Customers Can Backfire

Harvard Business Review  In their enthusiasm, marketers have overlooked some fundamental concerns about using nudges. A company that doesn’t understand these minefields could adversely affect its marketing. Nudges that are poorly thought out could be ticking time bombs waiting to explode and damage the company’s reputation and credibility among its loyal customers

Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge, Matthew Fisher, Mariel K. Goddu, and Frank C. Keil, Yale University. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 2015 American Psychological Association 2015, Vol. 144, No. 3, 674–687.

“As the Internet has become a nearly ubiquitous resource for acquiring knowledge about the world, questions have arisen about its potential effects on cognition. Here we show that searching the Internet for explanatory knowledge creates an illusion whereby people mistake access to information for their own personal understanding of the information. Evidence from 9 experiments shows that searching for information online leads to an increase in self-assessed knowledge as people mistakenly think they have more knowledge “in the head,” even seeing their own brains as more active as depicted by functional MRI (fMRI) images.”