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.
According to the film summary, the new documentary “depicts the life of American computer programmer, writer, political organizer and Internet activist Aaron Swartz. It features interviews with his family and friends as well as the internet luminaries who worked with him. The film tells his story up to his eventual suicide after a legal battle, and explores the questions of access to information and civil liberties that drove his work.”
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Vi Hart is back at it again. Hart has a knack for demystifying complex concepts with her visually-rich mathematical videos. She has previously tackled Stravinsky and Schoenberg’s 12-Tone Compositionsand the Space-Time Continuum. This week, she’s taking on the concept of Net Neutrality. The FCC will soon consider whether it wants to end the era of net neutrality and the open web — something that could have far-reaching consequences for you. The web keeps getting more and more corporatized (even by companies that claim to support net neutrality). And by killing net neutrality, the FCC can officially ensure that big corporations run the show.
In the video above, Hart explains the concept of net neutrality and why it’s important to defend. On her blog, she also includes a lot of additional resources — including more videos that explain net neutrality, plus information on how you can tell your political representatives to keep the web open.
Recently attacked by Cossacks in Sochi and by black-clad men with green antiseptic in Moldova, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina have, since their December release from a two-year prison sentence, remained the very public faces of the punk band/agit-prop collective known as Pussy Riot. The two also continue to raise the band’s profile in the States. Last month alone, they appeared on The Colbert Report and onstage with Madonna at a star-studded Amnesty International event.
Not only prominent activists for prison reform, Nadia and Masha—as they’re called in the HBO documentary Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer—have become celebrities. (So much so that other mostly anonymous members of the group have disowned them, citing among other things issues with “personality cult.”) The HBO doc begins with profiles of the women, as does a new book, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot, by Russian journalist Masha Gessen.
In an interview Friday for KQED in San Francisco (above), Gessen—a lesbian mother who recently moved to the United States for fear of persecution—describes how Vladimir Putin, Pussy Riot’s primary target, has regained his popularity with the Russian people after his aggressions at the Ukraine border and Crimea’s Sunday vote for secession. She cites, for example, alarming poll numbers of only 6% of Russians who oppose an invasion of Ukraine. Yet at the time of Pussy Riot’s infamous performance at a Moscow cathedral in February of 2012, which led to Tolokinnikova and Alyokhina’s imprisonment, the anti-Putin protest movement made the autocratic ruler very nervous.
Gessen sketches the history of the movement in her interview (and details it in the book). At first the protests involved the situationist antics of performance art collective Voina—“War”—(see Tolokonnikova, above at far right, with other Voina members in 2008). The feminist punk band has only emerged in the past three years, when Voina’s art-school pranks became Pussy Riot’s provocations days after Putin announced his intent to return to the presidency.
One month before the cathedral performance that sent Nadia and Masha to prison, the band appeared in their trademark fluorescent dresses and balaclavas in Red Square (top). Only three months prior, on October 1, 2011, they released their first song, “Ubey seksista” (“Kill the Sexist”) and—as members of Voina—announced the arrival of Pussy Riot, a radical opposition to the authoritarianism, patriarchy, and crony capitalism they allege characterize Putin’s rule.
In November of 2011, Pussy Riot staged its first public performance (above), scaling atop scaffolding and Moscow trolley and subway cars while scattering feathers and dancing to their song “Osvobodi Bruschatku” (“Release the Cobblestones”). The song recommends that Russians throw cobblestones in street protests because–as Salon quotes from the group’s blog—“ballots will be used as toilet paper” in the approaching elections.
The collective next released the video for “Kropotkin Vodka” (above), featuring a montage of public appearances in fashionable locations around Moscow. The locations were chosen, the band writes, specifically as “forbidden sites in Moscow.” More from their (Google-translated) blog below:
The concerts were held in public places [for] wealthy putinists: boutiques in the capital, at fashion shows, luxury cars and roofs close to Kremlin bars […] Performances included arson and a series of musical occupations [of] glamorous areas of the capital.
The song takes its title and inspiration from Peter Kropotkin, the 19th century Russian aristocrat-turned-anarcho-communist intellectual.
In their open letter publicly releasing their two most prominent members from the group, six members of Pussy Riot write that the “ideals of the group” Nadia and Masha have allegedly abandoned were precisely “the cause for their unjust punishment.” The two have become, they say, “institutionalized advocates of prisoners’ rights.” And yet in mid-December, 2011, the band performed their song “Death to Prison, Freedom to Protests” on the rooftop of a detention center holding opposition leaders and activists. This was at the height of the anti-Putin movement when upwards of 100,000 people took to the streets of Moscow chanting “Russia without Putin” and “Putin is a Thief” and demanding free elections.
While most of us only heard of Pussy Riot after their arrest and trial for the cathedral stunt, their “breakthrough performance,” writes Salon, occurred one month earlier at the Red Square appearance at the top of the post. This was when the band decided to “take revolt to the Kremlin,” and coincided with promises from Putin to reform elections. “The revolution should be done by women,” said one member at the time. “For now, they don’t beat us or jail us as much.” The situation would turn rather quickly only weeks later, and it was with Pussy Riot, says Gessen, that the wave of arrests and beatings of protesters began. The band’s current schism comes just as the anti-Putin movement seems to be fracturing and losing resolve, and the future of democratic opposition in Putin’s increasingly belligerent Russia seems entirely uncertain.
Now we can share an interactive tool that is using some of those Landsat images to stop illegal deforestation.
With help from Google Earth Engine, the World Resources Institute launched Global Forest Watch, an online forest monitoring and alert system that allows individual computer users to watch forests around the world change in an almost real-time stream of imagery.
Whistle blowers are making powerful use of the Global Forest Watch tool. Using spatial data streams available on the site to observe forest changes in southeastern Peru, a number of users submitted alerts about rapidly escalating deforestation near a gold mine and river valley. In another case, observers submitted an alert about illegal logging in the Republic of the Congo.
Five years ago, NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey lifted protocols that kept Landsat images proprietary. Now, agencies like the World Resources Institute—and even tiny citizen watchdog groups around the world—have access to incredibly rich tools and data. Some of the imagery is hard to interpret. Global Forest Watch developed a number of different data layers for users to apply, making it possible to monitor forest areas for trends or illegal logging. The video at the top of this page gives a good overview of how the site works. This one gives more detail about how to use the maps on the Global Forest Watch site.
Select an area of the world and then select a data set that interests you. Choose to look at terrain, satellite, road, tree height, or composite images of a particular region. Data layers can be layered on top of one another to show trends in forest management. In Indonesia, for example, you can use the FORMA alerts button to see what has already been reported in that area of the humid tropics.
How can you tell if forest change is due to illegal logging? Turn on the Forest Use filters to see which areas are authorized for logging and mining and which are protected. In Indonesia, many areas are designated for oil palm production, but expansion of those crops are often associated with loss of natural forest.
Do your own sleuthing. The site is designed to harness data from government and academic scientists, along with observation from individuals (us). There is even information about companies that are growing oil palm trees, so it’s possible that a diligent user could catch an over-aggressive grower stepping over the forest boundary.
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