position:professor

A revealing map of the world’s most and least ethnically diverse countries

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/16/a-revealing-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-ethnically-diverse-coun

Ethnicity, like race, is a social construct, but it’s still a construct with significant implications for the world. How people perceive ethnicity, both their own and that of others, can be tough to measure, particularly given that it’s so subjective. So how do you study it?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2013/05/diverity-map-harvard2.jpg

But... A professor who studies race and ethnic conflict responds to this map:

5 insights on the racial tolerance and ethnicity maps, from an ethnic conflict professor

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/17/5-insights-on-the-racial-tolerance-and-ethnicity-maps-from-an-ethnic

This week, we’ve examined global comparative data on ethnic diversity (here’s our map of the most and least diverse countries) and, more controversially, on racial tolerance (here’s our map of countries where people show the highest and lowest levels of racial tolerance). I say “controversially” because of the subject’s sensitivity and because reducing such a complicated, subjective phenomenon to a single metric – the frequency with which people in a certain country said they would not want neighbors of a different race – is going to produce some highly disputable results.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/files/2013/05/racism-map3.jpg

#cartographie #visualisation #racisme #xénophobie #ethnicité #diversité_ethnique

Aveuglés par les donnés : c’est les modèles, idiots ! – ReadWrite
http://readwrite.com/2013/05/20/blinded-by-big-data

Par définition, les Big Data ne savent pas prédire les « cygnes noirs », plus nous avons de données, plus il devient difficile de trouver le signal dans le bruit, rappelle Nassim Taleb et plus nous risquons de nous focaliser sur des corrélations erronées.  Tags : internetactu2net internetactu fing (...)

#bigdata

Brook Baker: Challenges Facing a Proposed WIPO Treaty for Persons Who are Blind or Print Disabled | Knowledge Ecology International
http://keionline.org/node/1723

The book famine in the Global South continues and text on the internet is frequently soundproof. Rather than address the pragmatic human rights needs of people who are blind and print-disabled by crafting a low-cost, easy-to-use solution, copyright and other IP industries, and their proxies in U.S. and E.U. trade offices, are holding a Treaty for the Blind hostage in order to build higher bulwarks to protect their monopoly right kingdoms.

#drm vs #accessibilité
#handicap #aveugles #traité #propriété_intellectuelle

Al Jazeera management orders Joseph Massad article pulled in act of pro-Israel censorship | The Electronic Intifada
http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/al-jazeera-management-orders-joseph-massad-article-pulled-act-pr

Le dernier article de Joseph Massad sur Al-Jazeera english retiré.

Explication:

Although Qatar-based Al Jazeera receives much criticism, and often deserved for reflecting Qatar’s foreign policy, the censorship of Massad’s article for political reasons is unprecedented because the English-language website had, until now, enjoyed complete editorial independence.

It is well understood that Al Jazeera’s red lines have always been criticism of Qatar or its Emir, and yet, Massad has even published several articles on Al Jazeera English that harshly criticized both Qatari foreign policy (See here, here and here) and the Emir himself without ever being censored.

And Massad has written plenty of articles that have enraged Zionists.

This indicates, without doubt, that the decision to remove Massad’s article today was taken at the highest level.

But why would this happen now?

One reasonable interpretation would be that the removal of Massad’s article reflects a tightening of the editorial line as the Qatar-based network launches its new channel, Al Jazeera America, which will rely – for access to cable systems, and “mainstream” credibility – on forging good relations with US elites.

An illustration of what this process might look like was on display when Ehab Al Shihabi, executive director of Al Jazeera’s international operations and the official responsible for setting up Al Jazeera America, recently visited Chicago – which will be home to a major Al Jazeera bureau.

...

De la nécessité d’articuler #Féminisme et anti-racisme - intersectionnalité
http://www.alsacelibertaire.net/spip/spip.php?article108

Ce sont les militantes du courant Black Feminism, puis du féminisme chicano, qui ont fait émerger cette problématique en remettant en cause la domination blanche sur le mouvement des femmes. En effet, les années 60 aux Etats-Unis ont été le théâtre de mouvements de femmes chicanas et noires, qui ont dénoncé les tendances racistes dans le mouvement féministe et l’invisibilisation de revendications spécifiques des femmes non-blanches. Elles ont mis en avant des différences entre le vécu des femmes (...) (...)

#Analyses #Intersectionnalité #Antifa #Autocritique #islamophobie
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_feminism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimberl%C3%A9_Williams_Crenshaw
http://www.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-du-genre-2005-2-page-51.htm
►http://lmsi.net/Antisexisme-ou-antiracisme-Un-faux
http://www.cairn.info/de-la-question-sociale-a-la-question-raciale--9782707158512-page-230.htm
http://remi.revues.org/2359
http://www.cairn.info/revue-cahiers-du-genre-2005-2-page-83.htm

Le moment #mooc et la fin de la réforme – The New Inquiry
http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/the-mooc-moment-and-the-end-of-reform

Pour Aaron Bady, la moocification de l’enseignement supérieur n’est ni une très bonne chose ni une très mauvaise. Les moocs sont plus une fin qu’un commencement. Certes, ils ne coutent pas cher, parce qu’on enregistre une fois les cours et qu’on peut les réutiliser... Leur risque est de solidifier les hiérarchies et le panthéon académique, réifier la connaissance en marchandise. La méthode scientifique est tout l’inverse. Tags : internetactu (...)

#Éducation

Les femmes vivent plus vieilles que les hommes, c’est à cause de leurs hormones.
Elles perdent moins vite leurs lymphocytes.

Women’s immune systems hold the secret to longer life - Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10056901/Womens-immune-systems-hold-the-secret-to-longer-life.html

A new study has shown that levels of key white blood cells, which are responsible for fighting off infections, become lower in men as they get older compared to women.
The average life expectancy for men in the UK is 79 years old, while for women it is 82 years old. In some parts of the world, such as Japan, the gap is even larger, with women living on average nearly six years longer.
(…)
Scientists in Japan have now uncovered another reason after finding that the levels of white blood cells and other parts of the immune system called cytokines decline faster in men.
They believe this might be because female sex hormones such as oestrogen can boost the immune system’s response to infections.

In #Louisiana, 1 person in 55 is behind bars (1619 by 100k population): http://i.imgur.com/216yIMy.jpg
World record by far, by an utterly corrupt system : ►http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/05/louisiana_is_the_worlds_prison.html - and the #USA have the worst incarceration rate in the world ranked by country: 25% of the world’s inmates from only 5% of the world’s population ! #prison

Quelles nouvelles orientations technologiques ? - McKinsey & Company
http://www.mckinsey.com/Insights/High_Tech_Telecoms_Internet/Charting_technologys_new_directions_A_conversation_with_MITs_Erik_Brynjolf

« Allons-nous être, dans les décennies à venir, confrontés à la question de savoir si nous sommes capables de créer un système économique qui s’adapte et change aussi rapidement que notre système technologique ? » interroge Erik Brynjolfsson.  Tags : internetactu2net fing internetactu

Ayant le sentiment que l’auditoire de Seenthis aime bien le troll hirsute, je vous propose ce magnifique spécimen de classe internationale :

In speech at conference, Harvard professor implied economist lacked foresight because he was childless and gay

In his apology Niall Ferguson explained: ’I had been asked to comment on Keynes’s famous observation “In the long run we are all dead.”’

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/04/niall-ferguson-apologises-gay-keynes

Professor, Ex-Addict, Confronts Perils American Indians Face - NYTimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/us/professor-ex-addict-confronts-perils-american-indians-face.html?nl=todayshe

LAWRENCE, Kan. — The visitor to Haskell Indian Nations University detailed his roaring 20s: drug addict, garbage collector, suicidal burnout once told by a doctor that he was mentally retarded. It was a curious way to inspire a group of young American Indian students long surrounded by these types of problems. Until he got to the good part.

#états-unis #autochtones #indiens #peuples_premiers

Noam Chomsky helped lobby Stephen Hawking to stage Israel boycott | World news | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/10/noam-chomsky-stephen-hawking-israel-boycott?CMP=twt_gu

Robert Booth and Harriet Sherwood in Jerusalem
The Guardian, Friday 10 May 2013 19.47 BST

Chomsky, who has backed “boycott and divestment of firms that are carrying out operations in the occupied territories”, agreed to add his considerable weight to the pressure on Hawking after email correspondence with the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine campaign group (Bricup), said its chair, Jonathan Rosenhead.

The letter to Hawking declared: “Israel systematically discriminates against the Palestinians who make up 20% of its population in ways that would be illegal in Britain”, its treatment of the people of Gaza amounts to “collective punishment”, the construction of Jewish settlements breaches the Geneva convention and “Israel places multiple roadblocks, physical, financial and legal, in the way of higher education, both for its own Palestinian citizens and those under occupation”.

The letter continued: “Israel has a name for the promotion of its cultural and scientific standing: ’Brand Israel’. This is a deliberate policy of camouflaging its oppressive acts behind a cultured veneer.”

Professor Malcolm Levitt, a fellow of the Royal Society and an expert in magnetic resonance at Southampton University, who signed the letter, said: “Israel has a totally explicit policy of making life impossible for the non-Jewish population and I find it totally unacceptable. As a scientist, the tool I have available to prevent the normalisation of that situation is boycott. It is a tough choice because Israel is full of brilliant scientists and they are our colleagues.”

Israel may not be a pariah, but it’s definitely a headache - Diplomacy & Defense - Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/israel-may-not-be-a-pariah-but-it-s-definitely-a-headache.premium-1.520012

Le Ha’aretz tente de relativiser l’acte de Stephen Hawking en accusant les pro-droit international de «bombardement»...

The media’s reports Wednesday that Professor Stephen Hawking would not be attending the President’s Conference in Israel next month prompted many to accuse the world-renowned scientist of anti-Semitism.

Hawking, however, has already visited Israel four times, including the last time, in 2006, at the invitation of the British Embassy. During that trip, he visited universities in Israel and the Palestinian Authority and said he hoped to meet Israeli and Palestinian scientists.

According to a report in the Guardian, ever since Hawking’s participation in the conference was made known some four weeks ago, he has been bombarded with countless emails and letters from Britain and other places in the world, calling on him to revoke his decision.

In view of Hawking’s previous visits to Israel, however, it would be difficult to brand him anti-Semitic. Perhaps he just wanted to avoid the headache involved in any visit to Israel by a well-known scientist or performer.

Among those fighting to thwart the repeated attempts, especially in Britain, to boycott universities in Israel is David Newman, Dean of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Newman says that the majority of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement was once limited to mere proclamations by various organizations, but that this has been changing in recent years. Now, he says, boycott efforts are carried out primarily by determined activists who bombard public figures planning to come to Israel with an onslaught of emails and faxes. This is probably what happened to Hawking. If so, it means Israel may not be a pariah yet, but it is certainly no longer a place everyone travels to gladly.

According to Newman, one of the founders of Ben-Gurion University’s politics and government department, which has been accused by local McCarthyists of having dangerous leftist tendencies, the answer to these attempts to impose an academic boycott on Israel is to strengthen the cooperation between Israeli and international scientists.

Acts such as upgrading the status of the Ariel University Center, and threats like the one by the Higher Education Council to shut down Ben-Gurion’s politics and government department hardly contribute to furthering said cooperation.

Le physicien Stephen Hawking soutient le boycott académique d’Israël
►http://www.lemonde.fr/proche-orient/article/2013/05/08/le-physicien-stephen-hawking-soutient-le-boycott-academique-d-israel_3173677

(...) Dans une déclaration publiée avec son accord, le Comité britannique pour les universités palestiniennes (CBUP), qui soutient ce boycott et s’oppose à l’occupation des territoires palestiniens, explicite « sa décision prise en toute indépendance de respecter le boycott, sur la base de sa connaissance de la Palestine et des conseils unanimes de ses contacts académiques là-bas », rapporte le Guardian . Au sein de l’université britannique de Cambridge, où M. Hawking travaille depuis 1962, on la justifie en revanche par des « problèmes de santé ». Atteint de sclérose latérale amyotrophique (maladie de Charcot), Stephen Hawking se serait vu déconseiller par ses médecins de prendre l’avion.

UNE DÉCISION POLÉMIQUE

Depuis l’annonce de sa participation à cette conférence, il y a quatre semaines, Stephen Hawking croulait sous les messages venus de Grande-Bretagne et d’ailleurs pour l’enjoindre à rejoindre la campagne BDS. Désormais, ce sont les accusations d’antisémitisme qui s’accumulent dans les boîtes e-mail du physicien. On ne lui prête pourtant aucun propos de cette nature en public. Depuis sa visite en 2006 dans des universités israéliennes et palestiniennes, le scientifique aurait durci sa position à l’égard d’Israël. En 2009, le physicien a dénoncé l’opération Plomb durci menée pendant trois semaines par Israël dans la bande de Gaza, qualifiant de « disproportionnée » la réponse apportée par l’Etat hébreu aux tirs de roquettes palestiniens. « La situation ressemble à celle qui prévalait en Afrique du sud avant 1990 et ne peut continuer », avait-il déclaré sur la chaîne Al-Jazira .

The New Cartographers | Science Careers

http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2013_03_18/caredit.a1300045?goback=%2Egde_1033567_member_236148631

The New Cartographers
By Emily Underwood
March 18, 2013

Twenty years ago, a driver lost at night would pull his car over, take out a paper map bought at a gas station, and pore over its folds under a dim light. With luck and some critical thinking, he would eventually get where he was going. Today, he’d be more likely to swipe his finger across a smart phone screen and follow directions using Google Maps.

As maps have changed, so have mapmakers. No longer static images, maps have become active interfaces for information exchange, continuously determining where we are in relation to distant satellites and suggesting where we ought to go, says Seth Spielman, a 38-year-old geography professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Today, the global geoservices industry collects, shares, and analyzes data on an unprecedented scale. It’s valued at as much as $270 billion per year and employs 500,000 people in the United States, according to a recent report from Google. The rapid transformation, which Spielman equates with a “renaissance” in the field, has overturned traditional ideas of what a geographer does.

#cartographie

Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel | World news | The Guardian
►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/08/stephen-hawking-israel-academic-boycott

“The use of an academic boycott against Israel is outrageous and improper, particularly for those to whom the spirit of liberty is the basis of the human and academic mission. Israel is a democracy in which everyone can express their opinion, whatever it may be. A boycott decision is incompatible with open democratic discourse.”

:D ... Mais bien sur! http://bit.ly/13hhIkB

Et un(e) de plus :

« Stephen Hawking joins academic boycott of Israel »

Physicist pulls out of conference hosted by president Shimon Peres in protest at treatment of Palestinians

►http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/08/stephen-hawking-israel-academic-boycott

Professor Stephen Hawking is backing the academic boycott of Israel by pulling out of a conference hosted by Israeli president Shimon Peres in Jerusalem as a protest at Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Hawking, 71, the world-renowned theoretical physicist and Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, had accepted an invitation to headline the fifth annual president’s conference, Facing Tomorrow, in June, which features major international personalities, attracts thousands of participants and this year will celebrate Peres’s 90th birthday.

Hawking is in very poor health, but last week he wrote a brief letter to the Israeli president to say he had changed his mind. He has not announced his decision publicly, but a statement published by the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine with Hawking’s approval described it as “his independent decision to respect the boycott, based upon his knowledge of Palestine, and on the unanimous advice of his own academic contacts there”.

#Palestine #BDS #boycott_Israël #Israël

American English Dialects

http://aschmann.net/AmEng/#SmallMap

Signalé par Johan Schimanski, Associate Professor of General and Comparative Literature at Tromsø university (Norway)

Assez impressionnant comme doc de travail

North American English Dialects, Based on Pronunciation Patterns

https://dl.dropbox.com/s/xdvo47c3yhmioq2/americadialectmaps.png

#états-unis #langues #langages #dialectes #cartographie #visualisation

Perpetual Motion Test Could Amend Theory of Time
https://simonsfoundation.org/features/science-news/perpetual-motion-test-could-amend-theory-of-time

Physicists plan to create a “time crystal” — a theoretical object that moves in a repeating pattern without using energy — inside a device called an ion trap …

Source: Simons Foundation: Advancing Research in Basic Science and Mathematics

#perpetual_motion #time #quantum_mechanics #time_crystals #physics #frank_wilczek #patrick_bruno #hartmut_häffner #jakub_zakrzewski #xiang_zhang #tongcang_li #physics #quantum_mechanics #time #time_crystals

« An Obstacle of Democratic Change. »
http://www.correspondents.org/node/2488

Professor Abul-Magd, how do you view the status of the military under the Second Republic?

To begin with, there is no second republic. We still live under the same authoritarian regime, supported by Mubarak, which is based on a one-party monopoly of power, a neo-liberal economy, repressive practices carried out by the police against opponents, and restrictions imposed on the media and civil society organizations.

Mubarak regime’s main loyalists still exist and operate along the same policy. Therefore, we cannot claim that there is a Second Republic, but we may say the Muslim Brotherhood has inherited Mubarak’s authoritarian regime.

The Second Republic will be born when the elements and mechanisms needed to change Egyptian society’s economic, political and social structure are made available. So, I can say the military enjoys the same position and plays the same roles it used to play under Mubarak, and has even grown more powerful and become a formidable obstacle of democratic change.

The History Of Modern Terrorism | WUNC
http://wunc.org/post/history-modern-terrorism

In the United States, terrorism existed in its founding, as the settlers cleared Indians out of the way to make room for more Europeans. That’s according to Martin Miller, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University and author of “The Foundations of Modern Terrorism.”

“The evidence is extraordinarily clear... that this was a savage, state-run exit of an entire population,” he told Host Frank Stasio on The State of Things. “I hesitate to use the term genocide because I don’t think that was the purpose of the U.S. Government.”

Most recently, we think of terrorism in regard to events like the attacks of September 11, 2001. Miller said that oftentimes, the governments trying to combat terrorists like Al-Qaeda, end up using similar tactics.

“Agents of violence in government, here and there, have at different time periods engaged in pretty much the same violence,” he said.

Lynchings during the Jim Crow era also characterize the type of violence that is terrorist in nature, though often unrecognized as such by history.

#democracy, #solidarity and the European Crisis
http://www.kuleuven.be/communicatie/evenementen/evenementen/jurgen-habermas/democracy-solidarity-and-the-european-crisis

Lecture delivered by Professor Jürgen #habermas on 26 April 2013 in Leuven Tags: democracy solidarity #europe habermas

Our Feel-Good War on Breast Cancer - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on-breast-cancer.html

In the United States, some researchers credit screening with a death-rate reduction of 15 percent — which holds steady even when screening is reduced to every other year. Gilbert Welch, a professor of medicine at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice and co-author of last November’s New England Journal of Medicine study of screening-induced overtreatment, estimates that only 3 to 13 percent of women whose cancer was detected by mammograms actually benefited from the test.

If Welch is right, the test helps between 4,000 and 18,000 women annually. Not an insignificant number, particularly if one of them is you, yet perhaps less than expected given the 138,000 whose cancer has been diagnosed each year through screening. Why didn’t early detection work for more of them? Mammograms, it turns out, are not so great at detecting the most lethal forms of disease — like triple negative — at a treatable phase. Aggressive tumors progress too quickly, often cropping up between mammograms. Even catching them “early,” while they are still small, can be too late: they have already metastasized. That may explain why there has been no decrease in the incidence of metastatic cancer since the introduction of screening.

At the other end of the spectrum, mammography readily finds tumors that could be equally treatable if found later by a woman or her doctor; it also finds those that are so slow-moving they might never metastasize. As improbable as it sounds, studies have suggested that about a quarter of screening-detected cancers might have gone away on their own. For an individual woman in her 50s, then, annual mammograms may catch breast cancer, but they reduce the risk of dying of the disease over the next 10 years by only .07 percent — from .53 percent to .46 percent. Reductions for women in their 40s are even smaller, from .35 percent to .3 percent.

If screening’s benefits have been overstated, its potential harms are little discussed. According to a survey of randomized clinical trials involving 600,000 women around the world, for every 2,000 women screened annually over 10 years, one life is prolonged but 10 healthy women are given diagnoses of breast cancer and unnecessarily treated, often with therapies that themselves have life-threatening side effects.

BBC News - Reinhart, Rogoff... and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190

All these results were published by Thomas Herndon and his professors on 15 April, as a draft working paper. They find that high levels of debt are still correlated with lower growth - but the most spectacular results from the Reinhart and Rogoff paper disappear. High debt is correlated with somewhat lower growth, but the relationship is much gentler and there are lots of exceptions to the rule.

4/22/2013

CSUS / inquire about the current employment status of Barbara O’Connor

Dear Madam/Sir:

This will serve to verify and inquire about the current employment status of Barbara O’Connor with respect to California State University, Sacramento.

Specifically, is she presently a professor with the university? My initial research leads me to believe that she is no longer affiliated with CSUS, even though she is listed elsewhere as a current professor (ie, CETF website. See: http://www.cetfund.org/aboutus/board/OConnor-Barbara ).

For that reason, I would like for you to verify this matter by providing me with the exact dates of her employment.

Thank you for your assistance and anticipated prompt response.