Analysis of a field test of new instruments for measuring electrodermal activity reveals flatlining student brain activity during lectures and classes on par with watching TV.
Via Lisa Wade @ Sociological Images and Joi Ito, & Boing Boing.
Students brains flatlining during classes
The “zombified” US Research Works Act was dropped this week following a boycott and protest of Elsevier, one of the major sponsors of the bill and a campaign contributor to the acts’ sponsor, Carolyn Maloney. Maloney and Elsevier are attempting to circumvent the 2008 changes to the US National Institutes of Health which ensures all research funded by its grants are freely available to the public.
The developers of Turnitin, iParadigms, have gamified (and further zombified) plagiarism, with a new service called WriteCheck for students to check their assessments against the Turnitin database for $7US a piece.
Pirates are way cooler than ninjas (as the meme goes), but are they greater than zombies?
In the pirate corner is Aaron Swartz, a blogger, programmer and activist, currently the director of the political lobby group Demand Progress, (http://blog.demandprogress.org/). Swartz, described as a “respected Harvard researcher” and “Internet folk hero” by the New York times, was charged with computer fraud last week in Boston. He is accused of unlawfully downloading millions of documents from JSTOR (who represent our zombies), one of the largest online databases housing articles from hundreds of academic publishers.
At 24 years of age Swartz is a controversial figure, he has worked with some of the most interesting datamancers and legal luminaries of the information age, including Tim Berners-Lee at MIT, and Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons Foundation and has worked on the software architecture of the Open Library project at the Internet Archive. He help co-author the RSS 1.0 standard at age 14, and was involved with Reddit.com a social news site that enables user ‘upvote’ and ‘downvote’ content. Swartz provided programming for the site when his start up merged with the site’s was ‘founders’ Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, in 2006, and he was fired soon after Condé Nast Publications, owner of Wired, acquired Reddit in 2006.
This is a long term battle for Swarz, he wrote the ‘Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto’ in 2008, and is accused of downloading the JSTOR files in 2009.
News of Swartz’s indictment has recruited new pirates to the battle, most notably self-described ‘scientist hobbyist’, Greg Maxwell who published a torrent file earlier this week on The Pirate Bay. Maxwell has seeded a massive collection of academic publications (more than 30 gigabytes of data) from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published before 1923 ( and therefore technically in the public domain) with a manifesto of his own that is worth a read.
The zombies definitely have the legal, if the not the ethical high ground, but the pirates have opened up with a massive broadside.
So, the Rapture should be good this evening:
But don’t get too excited. For most of us lost souls, this is just the beginning of the end. According to judgementday2011.com, there’s actually still another five months of the End of Days to go: “anarchy, chaos, disasters, and the end of civilization as we know it”. There will be an earthquake
so powerful it will throw open all graves. The remains of the all the believers who have ever lived will be instantly transformed into glorified spiritual bodies to be forever with God. On the other hand the bodies of all unsaved people will be thrown out upon the ground to be shamed. The inhabitants who survive this terrible earthquake will exist in a world of horror and chaos beyond description
More here and still time to buy the T-shirt.
A few zombie highlights this week, first is the article ‘Dead Man Walking: What Do Zombies Mean?’ by Mark Dery at True/Slant. I don’t know how I missed this article last year, but it is worth a read, if only for the description of the zombies as “a polyvalent revenant, a bloating signifier”. I want that on a t-shirt.
Next up is a how to identify your “mutant zombie democracy” comic over at Crickey, personally I like the Theocracy, he seems like a nice guy.
Finally, and not to be missed, is the Whirlpool forum discussion page of Whelan and Gora’s article, Invasion of aca-zombies. Some really interesting comments and well thought out discussion points that oddly seems to devolve into a debate about law degrees.
*CALL FOR PAPERS: Monstrous Cultures: Embracing and Resisting Change in the 21st Century (Edited Collection) – DEADLINE 3/1/2011*
Eds: Marina Levina, PhD and Diem-My Bui, PhD (Eds.)
Book Description: In her famous book, *Our Vampires, Ourselves* (1997), Nina Auerbach writes that each age embraces the vampire it needs. This statement speaks to the essential role that monster narratives play in culture. They offer a space where society can safely represent and address anxieties of its time. In the past decade, our changing world faced fears of terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication
technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where rapid mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. It is safe to say that, over the past decade, we have been terrorized by change. The speeding up of cultures, technologies, and environments –what Paul Virilio refers to as a defining organization concept for contemporary world – has also led to a surge in narratives about vampires, zombies, werewolves, ghosts, cyborgs, aliens, and other monstrous bodies. Popular films and television shows, such as Popular films and television shows, such as *True Blood, Twilight, 28 Days/Weeks Later*, *Paranormal Activity*, *District 9*, *Battlestar Galactica*, *Avatar, The Walking Dead*, and other multiple monstrous iterations have allowed us to deal with the profound acceleration in changing symbolic, economic, and technological systems. This collection purports to explore monstrous culture at the advent of the 21st century. As a whole, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent social collective anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. They can be read as a response to a rapidly changing cultural, social, political, economic, and moral landscape. And while monsters always tapped into anxieties over a changing world, they have never been as popular, or as needed, as in the past decade. This collection explores monstrosity as a social and cultural category for organizing, classifying, and managing change. Moreover, it puts monster narratives within the cultural perspective of change in the 21st century.
Contribution Details: We are seeking chapters that engage with monstrosity in the 21st century from critical cultural studies and media studies perspectives. We are especially interested in works that engage with monstrosity as a social and cultural category for organizing, classifying and managing change in the past decade. Chapters can be either case studies of particular monstrous media narratives or theoretical explorations of monstrosity in the 21st century. Possible topics can include, but not be limited to:
Narratives of terrorism as monstrosity in popular culture
Alien films and immigration
Cyborgs, cylons, and the changing notions of humanity
Ghosts, ghouls and the specters of 9/11
Zombies and viral pandemics
Zombies and the economic crisis
Monsters and globalization
Robotics, machines and mechanical monstrosity
Network as a monster
New technologies, social media, and other monstrous information technologies
Genetics, biotechnology and the production of monstrous bodies
Cloning and Cloned Bodies
Vampires and addiction narratives
Vampires and the New Sexuality
Racial, ethnic, and religious identity in monstrous narratives.
We have strong interest in the collection from several publishers and we expect to place the collection shortly after abstracts are submitted.
Submission Deadlines:
March 1st – 500 word abstract + brief bio and short publication CV (Word or
PDF format)
April 1st – Acceptance notification
August 1st – Draft of Chapters is due, about 6,000 words
Sept 30th – Feedback from Editors
Dec 1st – Final Chapters are due
Please direct all questions and submissions to monsterculture2011@gmail.com
Editors Bios:
Marina Levina is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on critical studies of science, technology and medicine, network and new media theory, visual culture, and media studies. She is an avid fan of monster and horror narratives and has written articles and book chapters on critical meaning of monsters, and especially their connection to scientific and medical cultural anxieties. She has also repeatedly taught a course on monster films. Recent publications include an edited collection *Post-Global Network and Everyday Life* (with Grant Kien Peter Lang, 2010); a chapter in the volume *A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium* (edited by Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and articles in* Journal of Science Communication* and in *Spontaneous Generations: History and Philosophy of Science and Technology*. *You can find her at *www.marinalevina.com*.***
Diem-My T. Bui currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her, research interests include transnational feminist media studies, critical cultural studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, and film. Her work examines cultural production, cultural memory, and embodiments of difference in representations of Vietnamese women in the U.S. cultural imaginary. Her publications are included in the journal *Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies* and in an edited book, *Globalizing Cultural Studies* (2007). She has taught courses on communication, Asian American studies, film studies, and popular culture.
Great series on Zombies and The Living Dead in literature available through iTunes university, by Sean Hoade, lecturer at the University of Alabama, and interviewer Matt Scalici of filmnerds.com.
Also check out the great new zombies series from the revamped Machinima.com, called Bite Me – episode 2 is very promising.
And beware zombies in the skies – zombie satellites.
