Back in August, Colin Marshall remarked that drones “have drawn bad press in recent years: as the intrusive tools of the coming surveillance state, as deliverers of death from above in a host of war zones, as the purchase-delivering harbingers of world domination by Amazon.com.” “But as with any technology,” Colin went on to note, “you can also use drones for the good, or at least for the interesting.” Like capturing mesmerizing aerial footage of major cities around the world, cities such as Los Angeles, New York, London, Bangkok & Mexico City. Now let’s add Chernobyl to the list.
While working on a recent 60 Minutes episode, filmmaker Danny Cooke visited Chernobyl, and, using a drone (a DJI Phantom 2 and GoPro 3+, to be precise), he captured haunting footage of the city devastated by the nuclear meltdown of April 26, 1986. Chernobyl has cooled off enough that journalists and scientists can now visit the area for short periods of time. (Biologists, for example, are actively studying the crippling effects radiation has had on Chernobyl’s animal life, and producing disturbing videos showing howbirds are developing tumors, and spiders are spinning asymmetrical webs.) As for when Chernobyl will be truly habitable again, the best guess is another 20,000 years. By that time, the detritus will have fully given way to nature, and, if people still roam the earth, they’ll get something close to a fresh start.
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Tonight, a St. Louis County grand jury decided not to bring criminal charges against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot to death Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, in Ferguson, Missouri this past summer. Following the controversial decision, St. Louis Public Radio started to upload key documents from the grand jury proceedings to its website. The documents include grand jury testimony, forensic evidence, medical reports, and law enforcement interviews. View it all here and be sure to check back for updates.
Most likely everything you know about Edward Snowden’s unmasking of government surveillance programs has come through an indirect source — meaning, you haven’t had the chance to learn about Snowden’s motivations, thought processes, goals, etc. from Snowden himself. Here’s a chance to change that.
In the video interview recorded on October 20th at Harvard Law School, Lawrence Lessig spent an hour talking with Snowden on a Google Hangout. Lessig, a law professor with dual interests in keeping information open and limiting government corruption, was a natural choice to conduct the interview. However, I wouldn’t say that he gives Snowden a soft interview. He asks some good questions, which gives Snowden the chance to spell out his thinking — to explain the problem he observed while working in the NSA and how he went about addressing it.
One thing that comes across is that Snowden has thought things through. Snowden might not have the credentials of the Harvard Law students in the audience — he got a GED and took a few community college courses, after all — but you get the sense that he could teach a pretty good Introduction to American Government course, if not a thought-provoking seminar on constitutional law. Regardless of what position you take on Snowden, it’s worth watching this interview before you declare final judgement.
Neil Young has a new book out — Special Deluxe: A Memoir of Life & Cars — which means he’s doing a quick media blitz. Tuesday morning, Young paid a 90 minute visit to the Stern Show, where they talked about, well, everything: polio, the rift with David Crosby, how he writes his music, the time he spent with Charles Manson, what went wrong at Woodstock, what’s gone wrong with music (and how the PonoPlayer will fix it), and how we’re trashing the environment. Young takes the environment and politics seriously. No doubt. But he could also work it all into a good joke. Just witness his performance later that day with Stephen Colbert.
In my day job, I have the privilege of overseeing Stanford’s Continuing Studies program where we bring Stanford courses to the San Francisco Bay Area community, and increasingly the larger world. This fall, we’re presenting a pretty special course called The State of the Union 2014. Taught by Rob Reich (Political Science, Stanford), David Kennedy (History, Stanford), and James Steyer (CEO, Common Sense Media), the course examines “the abundant challenges and opportunities of major themes contributing to the health, or disease, of the United States body politic: inequality, energy and the environment, media and technology, the economy, and the 2014 midterm elections.” And to help sort through these complex questions, the professors will be joined by 18 distinguished guests, including Steven Chu (former Secretary of Energy), Reed Hastings (CEO of Netflix), Janet Napolitano (former Secretary of Homeland Security), Ruth Marcus (columnist for the Washington Post), Karl Eikenberry (former US Ambassador to Afghanistan) and Joel Benenson (chief pollster for President Barack Obama).
We’re filming the class sessions of this seven-week course and making them available on YouTube and iTunes. The first two sessions (each lasting about 90 minutes) can be viewed in the playlist above. The first session focuses on the Midterm elections; the second on the state of California. New sessions will be added each week, generally on Thursday or Friday.
Education
Technology and Social Change
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, make sure you check out the Continuing Studies program. It’s a tremendous resource for lifelong learners.
On his web site, former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne writes:
I received this email last Friday morning from my friend, Brian Eno. I shared it with my office and we all felt a great responsibility to publish Brian’s heavy, worthy note. In response, Brian’s friend, Peter Schwartz, replied with an eye-opening historical explanation of how we got here. What’s clear is that no one has the moral high ground.
First comes Eno’s clearly heartfelt condemnation of civilian deaths in Gaza (particularly the death of children) and America’s apparent indifference to what’s happening there:
Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shredded (the hospital’s word) by an Israeli missile attack — apparently using their fab new weapon, flechette bombs. You probably know what those are — hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was 4 years old.
I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time.
Then I read that the UN had said that Israel might be guilty of war crimes in Gaza, and they wanted to launch a commission into that. America won’t sign up to it.
What is going on in America? I know from my own experience how slanted your news is, and how little you get to hear about the other side of this story. But — for Christ’s sake! — it’s not that hard to find out. Why does America continue its blind support of this one-sided exercise in ethnic cleansing? WHY?
What follows is part of futurist Peter Schwartz’s response, which, rich in historical detail, splits the blame somewhere down the middle. Echoing Byrne’s sense that the two sides have lost their moral positions, Schwartz notes:
Even though I have no support for the Israeli position I find the opposition to Israel questionable in its failure to be similarly outraged by a vast number of other moral horrors in the recent past and currently active. Just to name a few; Cambodia, Tibet, Sudan, Somalia, Nicaragua, Mexico, Argentina, Liberia, Central African Republic, Uganda, North Korea, Bosnia, Kosovo, Venezuela, Syria, Egypt, Libya, Zimbabwe and especially right now Nigeria. The Arab Spring, which has become a dark winter for most Arabs and the large scale slaughter now underway along the borders of Iraq and Syria are good examples of what they do to themselves. And our nations, the US, the Brits, the Dutch, the Russians and the French have all played their parts in these other moral outrages. The gruesome body count and social destruction left behind dwarfs anything that the Israelis have done. The only difference with the Israeli’s is their claim to a moral high ground, which they long ago left behind in the refugee camps of Lebanon. They are now just a nation, like any other, trying to survive in a hostile sea of hate.
We should be clear, that given the opportunity, the Arabs would drive the Jews into the sea and that was true from day one. There was no way back from war once a religious state was declared. So Israel, once committed to a nation state in that location and granted that right by other nations have had no choice but to fight. In my view therefore, neither side has any shred of moral standing left, nor have the nations that supported both sides…
I don’t think there is any honor to go around here. Israel has lost its way and commits horrors in the interest of their own survival. And the Arabs and Persians perpetuate a conflict ridden neighborhood with almost no exceptions, fighting against each other and with hate of Israel the only thing that they share.
If you’re a long-time reader of Open Culture, you know all about Archive.org — a non-profit that houses all kinds of fascinating texts, audio, moving images, and software. And don’t forget archived web pages. Since 1996, Archive’s “Wayback Machine” has been taking snapshots of websites, producing a historical record of this still fairly new thing called “the web.” Right now, the Wayback Machine holds 417 billion snapshots of web sites, including one page showing that “Igor Girkin, a Ukrainian separatist leader also known as Strelkov, claimed responsibility on a popular Russian social-networking site for the downing of what he thought was a Ukrainian military transport plane shortly before reports that Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 had crashed near the rebel held Ukrainian city of Donetsk.” (This quote comes from The Christian Science Monitor, which has more on the story.) Girkin’s post was captured by the Wayback Machine at 15:22:22 on July 17. By 16:56, Girkin’s post was taken offline — but not before Archive.org had its copy.
To keep tabs on this story, follow Archive’s Twitter and Facebook pages.
Anyone who does any sort of research-based writing knows how easy it is for an occasional close approximation of another’s prose to slip into a summary. Such instances rarely constitute plagiarism, but they can occupy an uncomfortable gray area. Recent allegations against Slovenian theorist Slavoj Žižek, however, charge the wholesale theft of entire passages of text, almost verbatim. It’s an unusual story, not least because of the source material Žižek allegedly lifted—an article in American Renaissance, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white supremacist publication.
In a July 11th article breaking the story, Newsweek wrote that it had contacted Deogolwulf and Sailer for comment, but neither responded by the time of publication. However, James Williams, senior managing editor for the journal Critical Inquiry, which published Žižek’s article, did, saying Žižek “absolutely” borrowed from Hornbeck. Had they known, said Williams, “we would have certainly asked him to remove the illegal passages.” Hornbeck also responded, calling the borrowing “contemptible.”
Did Žižek knowingly plagiarize American Renaissance (does Žižek even read American Renaissance)? According to Žižek himself, the answer is no. In an email to Critical Theory, he writes that the close resemblance between his article and Hornbeck’s review is the result of a summary of MacDonald’s work given to him by an unnamed “friend.” Here’s more from Žižek’s email. (Note: he uses the word “résumé” here in the sense of “summary”):
With regard to the recent accusations about my plagiarism, here is what happened. When I was writing the text on Derrida which contains the problematic passages, a friend told me about Kevin Macdonald’s theories, and I asked him to send me a brief resume. The friend send [sic] it to me, assuring me that I can use it freely since it merely resumes another’s line of thought. Consequently, I did just that – and I sincerely apologize for not knowing that my friend’s resume was largely borrowed from Stanley Hornbeck’s review of Macdonald’s book.
“The problematic passages,” Žižek continues in his defense, “are purely informative, a report on another’s theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever.” He adds at the end, “I nonetheless deeply regret the incident.”
It is true that unlike, say, Senator Rand Paul—who apparently passed off almost wholly plagiarized articles as his own original work—Žižek does not take any credit for MacDonald’s ideas and summarizes them only in an attempt to refute them. Nonetheless, as Newsweek notes (in an unfortunate choice of words), for conservative critics, Žižek is “a big scalp” and the matter a very serious one. Zizek’s “sloppy citations,” writes Critical Theory, have come under fire before—notably in his feud with Noam Chomsky, who caught Žižek misattributing a racist quote to him. (Žižek “admitted the mistake and apologized.”) This case seems much more severe for the length of the passages lifted as well as Žižek’s failure to check and cite his source. Charges of academic plagiarism frequently go to press. But with such a public figure (and film star) as the flamboyant Marxist Žižek, and such inflammatory far right source material, this particularly regrettable incident—unintentional as it may be—makes for some particularly sensationalist headlines.
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