This week, I have been mostly reading:

• What Is Detected? - Carl Straumsheim, InsideHigherEd: "'We say that we’re using [Turnitin] in order to teach students about academic dishonesty, but we’re using software we know doesn’t work,' Schorn said. 'In effect, we’re trying to teach them about academic dishonesty by lying to them.'"
• The Nauru Inquiry Proves We Can't Outsource Our Ethical Obligations To Asylum Seekers - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "Nauru cannot do the job. […] It does not have the resources, the independent judiciary and police, let alone the political will to attend to the allegations arising from the detention centre. They will not be resolved. But offshore processing has never been about resolving problems. It’s about outsourcing them."
• Who Will Nudge the Nudgers? - Timothy Taylor: "Insights from behavioral economics applied to consumers, workers, savers, investors, and firms often suggest some basis for government actions to "nudge" behavior in other directions. But it seems plausible to me that behavioral economics as applied to government will suggest that a number of existing government actions are misdirected or misconceived. And when that happens, it's not clear who will "nudge" government in appropriate directions."
• Authoritarian capitalism in modern times: when economic discipline really means political disciplining - Peter Bloom st openDemocracy: "Authoritarian policies once reserved for the “developing” world have now come home to the west. Greece is just the latest example of a capitalism that respects democracy only so long as it profits elite stakeholders."
• Donald Trump Has the GOP Establishment’s Number - E.J. Dionne Jr. at Truthdig: "Trump struck again on Wednesday, tweeting a picture with another of his Donald-come-lately critics, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, 'in my office last cycle playing nice and begging for my support and money. Hypocrite!'" Hey, you guys can't touch me. I'm my own PAC!
• Depression’s Advocates - Brad DeLong at Project Syndicate: "Not only have policymakers in the eurozone insisted on repeating the blunders of the 1930s; they are poised to repeat them in a more brutal, more exaggerated, and more extended fashion. I did not see that coming."
• Speech to Labor National Conference - Julian Burnside: "Labor today looks like a weak centre-right party which does not believe in itself. A party that believes in nothing except power will end up with nothing at all."
• Europe in its Labyrinth, Greece on its Knees - Matías Vernengo, the Wire: "Krugman adds that the destruction of the European project is not Greece’s fault. However, this view seems to assume that the European project is still the old social-democratic project of the Treaty of Rome, the one that was designed with the failures of the inter-war period and the European Civil War, as Keynes referred to the Great War, in mind, and that was acceptable to the United States in the context of the Soviet menace. The actual project being defended by the European Commission today is the other one – the neoliberal project – and it is doing just fine."
• Varoufakis – a new kind of politics? - Paul Tyson, openDemocracy: "A politician who is ‘realistic’ must simple comply with the extra-state non-democratic dictates of high power if their own position within the tree of power is to be preserved. Here even big players, such as Chancellor Merkel, are pawns."
• How Labor Right sneaked turnbacks through National Conference - Independent Austrralia: "Bill Shorten and the Right leadership team, the source said: "... are petrified of the mainstream/Murdoch media responding to a Left win on the floor of the conference with a headline that says 'Socialist Left controls Labor Party' or 'Radical Left controls Bill Shorten'. That's why Labor's conference is furiously agreeing on almost all amendments.""
• Going Mainstream - Craig Murray: "The sheer panic gripping the London elite now is hilarious to behold. Those on the favoured side of Britain’s enormous wealth gap are terrified by the idea that there may be a genuine electoral challenge to neo-liberalism, embodied in one of the main party structures. This is especially terrifying to those who became wealthy by hijacking the representation of the working class to the neo-liberal cause."
• The last thing Labour needs is a leader like Jeremy Corbyn who people want to vote for - Mark Steel at the Independent: "If you look at Corbyn’s record it’s clear he just can’t win elections. In his constituency of Islington North he inherited a majority of 4,456, which is now 21,194. He’s one of the few Labour MPs whose vote increased between 2005 and 2010, when he added 5,685 to his majority. This is typical of the man, defying the official Labour policy of losing votes and getting more of them instead, just to be a rebel."
• Why I Support the BDS Movement Against Israel - Chris Hedges at Truthdig: "Israel is not an anomaly. It is a window into the dystopian, militarized world that is being prepared for all of us, a world with vast disparities of income and draconian systems of internal security. There will be no freedom for Palestine, or for those locked in our own internal colonies and terrorized by indiscriminate police violence, until we destroy corporate capitalism and the neoliberal ideology that sustains it."
• The Web We Have to Save - Hossein Derakhshan, Medium: "The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking. When I log on to Facebook, my personal television starts. All I need to do is to scroll: New profile pictures by friends, short bits of opinion on current affairs, links to new stories with short captions, advertising, and of course self-playing videos. I occasionally click on like or share button, read peoples’ comments or leave one, or open an article. But I remain inside Facebook, and it continues to broadcast what I might like. This is not the web I knew when I went to jail. This is not the future of the web. This future is television."
• So this company Cyagen is paying authors for citations in academic papers - Ben Goldacre: "The business model is very specific: if you cite them in an academic paper then you get $100, multiplied by the Impact Factor of the journal (a widely used measure of the journal’s influence). So if you cite them in the New England Journal of Medicine, which has an impact factor of 56, then you will receive $5600 from Cyagen. If you cite them in the British Medical Journal, you get $1700. And so on."