6.12.13 … T S Eliot reads his Four Quartets – Enjoy!

T.S. Eliot’s the Four Quartets, read by the author, Open Culture:  I just stumbled on Open Culture.  I may have a new favorite website!  I think listening to the author read often changes my understanding.  What do you think?

T S Eliot reads his Four Quartets – YouTube.

Eliot considered the Four Quartets his greatest work. “I’d like to feel that they get better as they go on,” he told Donald Hall in a 1959 interview for the Paris Review. “The second is better than the first, the third is better than the second, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flatter myself.”

The Four Quartets are perhaps the most mystical and religious of Eliot’s poems. Each one is a meditation on time, mixing Christian and Hindu imagery with personal and historical events. “In The Waste Land the waste was place, the ‘Unreal City,’” writes Eliot’s biographer, Lyndall Gordon; “here, the waste is time–time unredeemed by a sense of the timeless.”

via Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets | Open Culture.

6.12.13 … NSA Scandal: Orwell or Kafka? …

NSA Scandal, Orwell, Kafka, Daniel J. Solove’s The Digital Person, Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic:  Needles to say,  I found this fascinating.

As people have tried to make sense of the recent revelations about the government’s mass data-collection efforts, one classic text is experiencing a spike in popularity: George Orwell’s 1984 has seen a 7,000 percent increase in sales over the last 24 hours.*

But wait! This is the wrong piece of literature for understanding the NSA’s programs, argues legal scholar Daniel J. Solove. In his book, The Digital Person, Solove writes that the troubles with the collection of massive amounts of personal data in databases are distinct from those of government surveillance, the latter being the focus of 1984. He summed up his argument in a later paper (emphasis added):

Many commentators had been using the metaphor of George Orwell’s 1984 to describe the problems created by the collection and use of personal data. I contended that the Orwell metaphor, which focuses on the harms of surveillance (such as inhibition and social control) might be apt to describe law enforcement’s monitoring of citizens. But much of the data gathered in computer databases is not particularly sensitive, such as one’s race, birth date, gender, address, or marital status. Many people do not care about concealing the hotels they stay at, the cars they own or rent, or the kind of beverages they drink. People often do not take many steps to keep such information secret. Frequently, though not always, people’s activities would not be inhibited if others knew this information.

I suggested a different metaphor to capture the problems: Franz Kafka’s The Trial, which depicts a bureaucracy with inscrutable purposes that uses people’s information to make important decisions about them, yet denies the people the ability to participate in how their information is used. The problems captured by the Kafka metaphor are of a different sort than the problems caused by surveillance. They often do not result in inhibition or chilling. Instead, they are problems of information processing–the storage, use, or analysis of data–rather than information collection. They affect the power relationships between people and the institutions of the modern state. They not only frustrate the individual by creating a sense of helplessness and powerlessness, but they also affect social structure by altering the kind of relationships people have with the institutions that make important decisions about their lives.

Privacy is hard to define and even harder to defend. The legal scholar Arthur Miller called it “exasperatingly vague and evanescent.” Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis famously described it as the “right to be let alone” (something that the NSA’s programs can only very indirectly be characterized as violating, since they operate without interfering with us pretty much at all). In Solove’s formulation, we should ease off the privacy hand-wringing and turn our attention to something much more fundamental: how we relate as citizens to our government and how much power we have in that relationship.

via Why Should We Even Care If the Government Is Collecting Our Data? – Rebecca J. Rosen – The Atlantic.

 

6.12.13 … Nate Silver and the NSA Scandal … enough said …

Nate Silver ‏@fivethirtyeight 13h

Was agnostic about Snowden but some of the Op-Ed columns attacking him are so terrible I’m now convinced he must have done something right.

Nate Silver ‏@fivethirtyeight 16h

I’m reluctant to conclude from polls that a majority backs the NSAs activities. The whole question is what those activities encompass.

Nate Silver ‏@fivethirtyeight 11 Jun

Domestic Surveillance Could Create a Divide in the 2016 Primaries http://nyti.ms/18s7d2F

via Nate Silver (fivethirtyeight) on Twitter.

6.12.13 … donut chicken sandwich: They’ve gone too far! And they say you will save the world …

People’s Food Truck, donut chicken sandwich, Thrillist Atlanta, over the top, charities:  They’ve gone too far!  And they  say you will save the world.  And which is more gross, this donut chicken sandwich or this 6.4.13 … Dunkin Donuts Donut Bacon Sandwich?

If you’ve ever wondered what the best thing you can do to help local families in need is… it’s eat a piece of fried chicken sandwiched between two grilled donuts! Seriously. The super-chef behind King + Duke, The Optimist, et al. has teamed up with City of Refuge to raise money for charity by selling these delicious monstrosities (and other eats) from the back of a mobile food operation called People’s Food Truck.

via People’s Food Truck: If you eat this donut chicken sandwich, you will save the world – Thrillist Atlanta.

6.12.13 … Baby Names: Study Shows Divide Between Democrat And Republican Choices … Jack, Edward and Molly ….

California, political baby names, study political divide, divide, Democrat, Republican, cultural gap:  I think I fall  in the Republican group or maybe I am just a white educated female.

Oliver told LiveScience that he decided to look at baby names as a way to determine the cultural gap between liberals and conservatives in a way largely separate from economics.

“Baby names kind of popped out as a possibility, largely because they’re good barometers of taste, and they’re remarkably free from market effects, because nobody is out selling baby names,” he explained, noting that he initially didn’t expect to find a significant difference between the two groups. “The fact that we would find any kind of systematic differences, much less the magnitude of differences that we found–I really did not anticipate that.”

Oliver discovered that liberals tended to pick more feminine sounding names with “L” sounds and soft-“A” endings–such as Liam or Sophia–whereas conservatives’ choices went towards the more masculine end of the spectrum with harder “K” and “T” sounds–like Kurt.

…

The study also looked at the race and education level of the mothers and found that, while liberals across the board were more likely to pick uncommon names than conservatives, those demographic features also played a large role in child naming decisions. Whites and Hispanics were much less likely to give their kids an uncommon name than were Blacks or Asian/Pacific Islanders.

The types of uncommon names given also varied widely depending on the mother’s education level. The uncommon names more educated parents gave their children tended to be obscure cultural references, whereas less educated parents were more prone to giving names that are new spellings of already popular names.

Researchers found that the affect of political leaning on naming behavior was much stronger in Whites than it was for mothers of other races.

However, for all political stripes, the higher one goes up the socioeconomic status, the greater the prevalence of names that are already very popular across the culture.

“Over the past decade, there has been much speculation about whether the ideological fragmentation of elected representatives is also evident in the mass public,” wrote the study’s authors. “Yet, at the same time, the effects of ideology are mostly confined to the better educated echelons of white, American society. So, yes Americans are divided by ideology, but it is an ideological division largely limited to its educated, white population.”

via California Political Baby Names: Study Shows Divide Between Democrat And Republican Choices.