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 Thursday, May 23, 2002
Snewp a new news headline search service [via Scripting News], provides two interesting links for the search term pipeline:
- MLWebblog offers a host of links connecting the dots between Bush and Co. and the proposed oil/gas pipeline through Afghanistan. Definitely worth a look.
- Mindspace.org says "the real reason behind 'the war on terror': gas pipeline planned in Afganistan." Hmmm... It couldn't be true, could it?
As Dave Winer is so fond of saying: It's even worse than it appears. Much. 3:50:21 PM 
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Harvard still doesn't get it. According to The New York Times, Harvard faculty voted to change its grading system so that fewer students will get A's and graduate with honors.
 At a closed meeting, the faculty voted in favor of two sweeping changes. First, Harvard will switch from an idiosyncratic 15-point grading scale to the more conventional scale in which a 4.0 is an A and a zero is an F. The change will narrow the difference between an A-minus and a B-plus, which the faculty hopes will make a B more palatable. Second, Harvard will limit the number of students allowed to graduate with honors to 60 percent of a class. Nearly 90 percent of the students in Harvard's class of 2001 graduated with some form of honors. 
Great. They're trying to make a B more "palatable." Not more meaningful, but more palatable. The trouble with grades is that they don't mean anything. What does a B mean? It means something different to every single faculty member at Harvard, and it means something different to every single student at Harvard, and it will mean something different to every single person who ever looks at a student's transcript. What Harvard doesn't get (or at least doesn't acknowledge), is that grades have simply become the easiest way to reduce people to a numerical scale which can then be used to divide them into their appropriate work track. This sick reduction of people to numbers (changing them from ends to means, if you want to get Kantian) serves no one but owners of businesses who are trying to increase profits by hiring "good" workers. Of course, that's something Harvard probably doesn't care about, since the vast majority of it's enormous endowment comes directly from those business owners. It's sad. There's this idea that once institutions of higher education once attempted to increase knowledge in the world, to enlighten people, to push humanity to greater achievement. Whether that was ever true I don't know. But what's undeniable now is that institutions of higher learning have been themselves reduced to worker factories for big business. Welcome to McHarvard. What kind of McDegree do you want today? 9:28:48 AM
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David Watson has been keeping tabs on the backlinking thread and has collected some great links on the topic. rjsjr offers several different ways to access the backlinks of sites you visit, as well as giving readers easy access to the backlinks for your own pages. His bookmarklets poll Blogdex, Daypop, and Google, so they cover the bases pretty well. rjsjr also offers some good links to coverage of backlinking in its sidebars. Meanwhile, drop.org fills in some history of backlinks, with interesting mentions of the Amaya browser from the W3C -- probably the ultimate example of unfulfilled promise on the Web.
So I still don't understand why the "blogosphere" or whatever isn't all gaga over backlinks. I mean, if the point is to create conversations, what better way is there?
(Unrelated, but also covered by Watson, is Bloglet a service that allows your readers to subscribe to email notifications of updates to your site. This is something that Moveable Type automates, but Radio seems as if it's not important (asfaik). Kind of surprising, since Radio bills itself as a content management tool rather than a simple blogging tool, while MT seems primarily interested in blog creation and maintenance.) 9:05:51 AM
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Eric Alterman's blog, Altercation, despite being paid for by MSNBC.com, is actually terrific so far. Lots of great lengths. But today he says he'll try not to talk so much about news and stories that only appear in print sources. I think this would be a serious mistake. The web covers a lot, but it doesn't cover everything. Restricting yourself to online sources will restrict your readers to a still too narrow view of the world.
Otherwise, Alterman points to Media Whores Online, Eric Boehlert's coverage in Salon, Spinsanity, and The Hamster as good sources for keeping up to date on current political developments. He also reprints a letter from a staunch defender of Georgia Democrat Cynthia McKinney who was dismissed a few weeks ago when she said the same things everyone is saying now -- that we need to find out what was known about terrorist plans prior to 9-11, by whom, and when. That letter points to thisindictment of The Washington Post, which is good background for the following extensive analysis of attempts to discredit McKinney. Who says the media is liberally biased?
Unfortunately, the Boehlert piece referred to above is in Salon's premium section, which, again, I highly recommend. Luckily, you can read some of the same perspective in Alternet's "Doomsday Mongering", which suggests Bush and Co. are trying to distract attention from their failures by scaring Americans with random terrorist warnings. If you prefer, you can read the BigMedia version at The New York Times. Also relevant in this vein are these two opinion pieces at The NYT. Wow. So much reading, so little time. When are the "American People" going to wake up? Better yet, when are those poll numbers going to drop? 8:24:42 AM
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