This week, I have been mostly half-heartedly finishing another academic term, while reading:

• Joseph Stiglitz: “Deep-seatedly wrong” economic thinking is killing Greece - Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking: The common observation that the problem with Europe is economic union without political union is not strictly true. It's that economic union has been used to impose a kind of political union that would never have been accepted through a democratic process.
• The ‘flipped classroom’ is professional suicide - The never less than brilliant Jonathan Rees at the Daily Dot: "As Leslie Madsen-Brooks of Boise State University concluded after her school began capturing classroom lectures and posting them to iTunes: “In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of ‘delivering content’ that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.”"
• The MOOC revolution that wasn’t - The Daily Dot have also snaffled the always-brilliant Audrey Watters: "Rather than education for all, MOOCs now merely promise education for employability. This new narrative, according to George Siemens, one of the originators of the MOOC concept, casts education as simply skills training—a far cry from President Lyndon Johnson’s description, 40 years ago, of higher education as “a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward.”"
• Two real-life accounts of the effect of benefits sanctions - Peter Dwyer at the Conversation: Irritable Duncan Syndrome is caught out making up qualitative evidence in favour of punitive anti-welfare. Meanwhile non-fictional people suffer.
• Email from a Married, Female Ashley Madison User - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept points out that it's complicated: "The private lives and sexual choices of fully formed adults are usually very complicated and thus impossible to understand — and certainly impossible to judge — without wallowing around in the most intimate details, none of which are any of your business. That’s a very good reason not to try to sit in judgment and condemn from afar."
• DIY Tractor Repair Runs Afoul Of Copyright Law - Laura Sydell, NPR's All Things Considered: "[…] the little computer screen lets him know when something is wrong. Unfortunately, Alford isn't allowed to fix it. John Deere has a digital lock on the software that runs his tractor. And it won't give him the key. If something goes wrong with one of his tractors Alford has to take it to an authorized John Deere dealer — the closest one is about 40 miles away — or a John Deere rep has to come visit him."
• Data is not an asset, it’s a liability - Marko Karppinen at something called Richie that makes "app components": "If you work in software development, sooner or later you learn that code is a liability — all things being equal, the less code you have, the better off you are." Yup. "You can’t expect the value of data to just appear out of thin air. Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach critical mass and start producing insights." But it produces graphs. Stupid people love graphs. Stupid people in positions of authority really love graphs. I don't think you fully understand the app maker's job. It's not your business to produce the emperor's new clothes; it's your job to praise them.
• Writing, Typing, and Economics - JK Galbraith the Elder, writing in 1978 for the Atlantic: "[…] because the real world is so funny, there is almost nothing you can do, short of labeling a joke a joke, to keep people from taking it seriously. A few years ago in Harper's I invented the theory that socialism in our time was the result of our dangerous addiction to team sports. The ethic of the team is all wrong for free enterprise. The code words are cooperation; team spirit; accept leadership; the coach is always right. Authoritarianism is sanctified; the individualist is a poor team player, a menace. All this our vulnerable adolescents learn. I announced the formation of an Organization to combat this deadly trend and to promote boxing and track instead. I called it the C.I.A. — Congress for Individualist Athletics. Hundreds wrote in to Harper's asking to join."
• The UK Hits Moral Rock Bottom - Craig Murray: "On the day that it is revealed that 2,380 people in three years died within 14 days of being declared fit to work by an ATOS assessment and having benefit stopped, we also have 45 of the most appalling members of the political class elevated to trough it for life in the House of Lords, at a possible cost to the taxpayer of 67,500 pounds per week in attendance allowances alone."
• The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended - Jenna McLaughlin at the Intercept: "The track pad controller, they said, can hold up to 2 megabits of memory. All the different “chips” in your computer — from the part that controls the device’s power to the chips in the keyboard — also have the capacity to store information, like passwords and keys to other data, which can be uploaded through firmware updates. According to the public documents from other members of Five Eyes, it is incredibly difficult to completely sanitize a device of all its content."
• Tortured in Guantánamo, Uncharged Prisoner Details a US-Created Hell - excerpt from Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi: '"What terrorist organizations are you part of?" "None!" I replied. He put back the bag on my head and started a long discourse of humiliation, cursing, lies, and threats. I don't really remember it all, nor am I ready to sift in my memory for such bullshit. I was so tired and hurt, and tried to sit but he forced me back. I cried from the pain. Yes, a man my age cried silently. I just couldn't bear the agony.'
• I don’t teach critical thinking, I teach the material - Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net: "Obtaining truth is hard and there is no magical form of thinking called “critical thinking” that can be separated from specific domains. Aside from a very simple general rules of thumb, such as “don’t be emotional in arguing” or “show my your evidence,” the best way to be improve your thinking is to learn from those who have spent a lifetime actually trying to figure out specific problems." An ontological excision long overdue.
• Homes for the homeless - Suzie Cagle in Aeon: "The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes."
• All our needs are social - Branko Milanovic: " We are social beings. It was stated by Adam Smith very nicely that our needs vary in function of what we consider to be socially acceptable. In a much quoted passage, Smith contrasts a man living in a relatively poor society who is content with a roughly-hewn shirt and another one, living in a richer society, who would be ashamed to be seen in public without a linen shirt. Smith was drawing on his own experience, having observed how what is socially acceptable, i.e., what are our “needs”, has changed in his own lifetime as England and Scotland had become richer. "
• The case for realism in the social realm - Daniel Little: "In short, the social sciences do not possess the remarkable coherence and predictive accuracy of physics, so confidence in realism is not grounded in the high level of success of the enterprise. Sociology is not like physics. But equally, the concepts of the social sciences are not "hypothetical constructs" that depend upon their role in a developed theoretical system for application. It is therefore possible to be piecemeal realists. Again, sociology is not like physics." But: …
• Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!? - Brad DeLong: "But if you ask physicists whether the entities of Einstein's theory are really there, they will say: "Of course not: Those entities do not satisfy the quantum principle.[…]" There is something there. But just because your theory is good does not mean that the entities in your theory are "really there", whatever that might mean..." Which gets back to Chomsky's point that no scientist since Aristotle has tried to "explain" anything. We've been modeling things, with varying degrees of fidelity.
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  - Clay Bennett in Truthdig
• Whitewashing the IMF’s Destructive Role in Greece - Michael Hudson in CounterPunch: "The tragic Greek experience should stand as a warning of the need to withdraw from the rules that have turned the eurozone into an economic dead zone, and the IMF and Troika into brutal debt collectors for European, U.S. and British banks and bondholders. This is not a story that the mainstream press is happy to popularize."
• SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE BODY: The nipple - Todd Beer: "The social construction of the body may be hard for some students to understand because so much of the body seems to be tied to biology. How we treat nipples depending on who’s body they are attached to demonstrates the power of society." Listen to Beer. Free the nipple; it rhymes with tipple.