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"Good food -- the sort Waters features at her restaurant -- is considered a luxury of the rich rather than a social justice issue. As Waters frequently argues, no one is worse served by our current food policy than a low-income family using food stamps to purchase rotted produce at the marked-up convenience store. Her vision is classically populist: It democratizes the concrete advantages health, pleasure, nutrition -- that our current food system gives mainly to the wealthy. But her language is suffused with the values and the symbols of, well, the sort of people who already eat at Waters' restaurant. Thus, in promoting an agenda that benefits poor people with little access to fresh food, Waters tends to communicate mainly with rich people interested in fine dining. "
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"Someone teaching at a college like mine simply cannot write certain kinds of books. At least, they cannot write them in only a few years. But that should not discourage those of us at liberal-arts colleges who want to be active scholars. Nor should it dissuade the many graduate students who, despite their desire to work at a large research university, will end up with heavy teaching loads and minimal publishing requirements for tenure. I hope this account of my experience will show that those of us at teaching-intensive colleges can contribute to scholarly conversations in our fields. But if we hope to publish books, we must take into account our real limitations and exploit our advantages."
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Don't put away your childish things.
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Everything you ought to know about copyright law, but probably don't.
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"What I find most interesting in this whole saga is that Pearson was never condemned for his earlier heresies, which strike me as more extravagant. He began his ministry, after all, as a protege of Oral Roberts and for years taught a variant of Roberts' "prosperity" doctrines. Going around and telling people that serving Mammon is the same as serving God apparently doesn't get you in hot water with the Joint College of African-American Pentecostal Bishops. Denying the existence of Hell does."
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"So the next time you present at a conference, instead of being confronted by a sea of faces looking at you, you may be phased by a sea of heads looking down at their laptops. The challenge is how to adapt to presenting with the back-channel."
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"The great challenge is to find socio/politico/economic machinery that meets three essential criteria: (1) It will bridge the gap between that price and the real economic costs (like salaries and travel expenses for writers) of the product. Like the other declining marginal cost goods in the header of this post, writing can only be provided efficiently (enough and the right quality) by government, which raises the next criterion: (2) It has to be accomplished without a Ministry of Information, censorship, or snooping on readers to see what they're into. And we don't just want a bunch of words as cheap as possible, we want the best words, which means (3) It has to reward creators differentially according to the value their work creates."
Uncertain Principles
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"Uncertain Principles" features the miscellaneous ramblings of a physicist at a small liberal arts college. Physics, politics, pop culture, and occasional conversations with his dog.
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links for 2009-03-03
Category: Links Dump
Posted on: March 3, 2009 4:00 AM, by Chad Orzel
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