Archive for 2020
June 30, 2020
THAT WOULD BE NICE SINCE WE MIGHT BE NEARING THAT FIGURE ALREADY: Coronavirus: could it be burning out after 20% of a population is infected?
FACULTY — AND ESPECIALLY ADMINISTRATORS — TEND TO ENCOURAGE THE EXACT OPPOSITE: Colleges must teach ‘constructive dialogue’ or students will keep getting more intolerant, UNC researchers say.
Most conservative and liberal students at the University of North Carolina want to socially engage with each other, enjoy having classes with the other, and agree that the university is better with their differently minded peers on campus.
Then what’s the problem? Faculty and administrators aren’t teaching them how to engage with each other outside the classroom – a venue for structured debate that doesn’t mirror their daily lives, a professor said in an online event.
Americans used to know how to do this, before some people thought it was better that they didn’t.
PRIVACY: Tons of news apps caught unnecessarily snooping on iPhone clipboard. “The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and scores of other apps may have accessed your passwords and other copy and pasted data.”
While news apps are the most concerning, there are a ton of other apps that also over-access iOS’s clipboard. A few popular games include 8 Ball Pool, Classic Bejeweled, Fruit Ninja, Plants vs. Zombies Heroes, PUBG Mobile, and more.
Social apps like Viber, Weibo, and Zoosk are also included. Bottom line: it’s not looking good. Christian Selig, the developer of Apollo, a Reddit app for iOS, told The Telegraph he’d also remove the creepy feature.
And these are only the apps that we know of so far. As iOS 14 blows the whistle on more apps snooping in the background, we’re sure more apps will be added to the list.
TikTok was caught by researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk in February for its egregious clipboard access. ByteDance, the developer behind TikTok, didn’t take steps to correct the excessive data access until Emojipedia creator Jeremy Burge and several other users noticed iOS 14’s new paste notification feature alerted him that the app was “grabbing the contents of my clipboard every 1-3 keystrokes.”
Due out this fall, iOS 14 is supposed to put a stop to this kind of snooping, but in the meantime, the privacy-busting tricks revealed by the iOS beta reveal just how little regard major publications have for their readers.
ALSO, PHLOGISTON CHEMISTRY: Academic department calls on Penn State to require ‘structural racism’ courses.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Lockdown 2, BS Boogaloo Is Upon Us. “The lockdown virtue-signaling is already back in full bloom. Il Ducey’s Twitter feed was positively insufferable on Monday night. It was almost as if he were auditioning to be the Democrats’ new favorite useful idiot Republican. The liberal responses were so laden with hysteria that I think the poor dears are at greater risk of succumbing to cardiac arrest than they are COVID-19.”
THEY DIDN’T START THE FIRE — WELL, EXCEPT THAT, YOU KNOW, THEY DID: Bashing Administrators While The University Burns. Reduce their numbers to 2000 levels and we’ll talk. It’s not like universities were understaffed then.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE. The ADL’s Disgrace: A Jewish organization partners with Al Sharpton to score political points.
CHANGE: Momentum Building in States to Require Campus ‘Intellectual Diversity.’
One of the arguments for affirmative action is that taxpayers can’t be expected to support schools that look radically different from their states’ population. Apply this to politics and an awful lot of campuses fail.
SIGN OF THE TIMES: I’m leaving Seattle for Texas so my employees can be free: Billion dollar business owner.
Say, when is Texas going to get serious about Glenn’s welcome wagon proposal?
SORRY, THAT’S A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND. SHE’S JUST TWISTING THE KNIFE YOU PUT THERE YOURSELF: Media fret: Kayleigh McEnany undermining journalism ‘credibility.’
CORONAVIRUS AND DISABILITY LAW: Can Faculty Be Forced Back on Campus? “Faculty members who seek accommodations under the ADA must show that that they will be able to perform the essential functions of their job at home. When most colleges thrust faculty members into online teaching in March and continued to pay them, the colleges essentially agreed that faculty members are able to perform the essential functions of their jobs from home, at least during this pandemic. Colleges would be hard pressed to now argue that working from home is not a reasonable accommodation. Moreover, they have resisted tuition refunds for students this spring on the grounds that online education is not inferior to in-person classes.”
TOO BAD Y’ALL SCREWED UP DETECTION, TESTING, MASKS, ETC., HUH? CDC says U.S. has ‘way too much virus’ to control pandemic as cases surge across country.
That said, because so many cases are asymptomatic, and because it was much more widespread in the country than we realized by late February/early March, I’m not sure there was a lot that would have really worked. By the time WHO and China admitted there was human transmission it was probably already too late.
Good Question: If We Jettison Standardized Testing, What’s the Replacement?
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Is a Law School Meltdown Coming?
I MENTIONED THIS THE OTHER DAY, BUT HERE’S MORE: WaPo Opinion Editor Deletes Tweet Floating ‘Revenge’ Against White Women.
Why does the Washington Post believe that this sort of open hatred is acceptable in a senior employee?
LOOPHOLE THAT GOES ALL THE WAY TO CHINA: Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) says it’s time to shine light on a provision of the 1984 U.S./China tax deal that lets Beijing avoid levies on the interest it is paid on those U.S. Treasury securities it buys to fund America’s national debt.
DC Statehood: What Would Frederick Douglass Do?
CHARLES LIPSON: Three Ideas to End the Rot on College Campuses. “It’s not just that a careless word can cost your job, it’s that people tremble in fear that they might say the wrong word.”
Very Sovietesque.
More:
What’s wrong with this rigid groupthink? First, it takes real problems, such as police misconduct or Confederate statues, and inflates them for political purposes. It vastly exaggerates their extent and gravity, mistakenly generalizes them (Ulysses Grant is not Stonewall Jackson), ignores significant progress in correcting old errors, calls any disagreement “racist,” and relies on intimidation and sometimes violence, not democratic procedures, to get their way. The loudest voices say America and its history are fundamentally evil, that its institutions need to be smashed so they can be reestablished on “socially just” foundations. The mob and their fellow travelers will determine what is just. Who gives them that right? This arrogation of power and attack on public order will not end well.
The second problem is that America’s major institutions have been overwhelmed by these demands and have bowed down to them. Public trust has eroded in all America’s major institutions since the late 1960s. We now see the supine results. Instead of standing up to this swelling irrationalism and intimidation, they have appeased it—and sometimes embraced it. Predictably, appeasement has only fueled more extreme demands.
The rot began in America’s universities before spreading to mass media, cultural magazines, philanthropies, museums, and corporations. More and more parents are concerned that it now suffuses K-12 education. They don’t want a Pollyanna history, but neither do they want their children indoctrinated with a grim, doctrinaire view that America is an evil nation, incapable of reforming its own defects.
Universities have led this parade of self-flagellation. One reason is that so many administrators and professors agree with the mob demands.
Read the whole thing.
DEMOCRATIC PARTY: Mount Rushmore Glorifies White Supremacy. “Perhaps Biden and Pelosi can hire the Taliban. They have experience removing monumental sculpture.”
