linkstream2 microblog

Pictures from an Institution http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/pictures-institution Interesting fact on #Bard College: Leon Botstein became president decades ago at 23

Leon Botstein made Bard College what it is, but can he insure that it
outlasts him?Profiles SEPTEMBER 29, 2014 ISSUE
BY ALICE GREGORY

QT:{{"
Botstein graduated from high school at sixteen and went to the
University of Chicago, where he majored in history and founded the
school’s chamber orchestra. He began Ph.D. studies at Harvard,
focussing on the social history of modernist music in Vienna. In
Cambridge, he met his first wife, with whom he had two daughters. (He
has two more children from his second marriage.) In 1970, having left
Harvard to be a special assistant to the president of the New York
City Board of Education, Botstein took a job as president of Franconia
College, a small, now defunct institution in New Hampshire, run out of
a former resort hotel. At twenty-three, he was the youngest college
president that America had ever had. A 1971 profile that ran in
Playboy described him as “a bespectacled, long-haired youth” and
included a photo of him, in a rumpled shirt and a paisley tie, next to
an office door marked “President” in a curiously Tolkienesque font.

…
December, 2013, after a three-month review, Moody’s Investors Service
downgraded Bard’s bond rating three notches and revised its outlook to
“negative.” The Moody’s report cited Bard’s “exceedingly thin
liquidity with full draw on operating lines of credit,” “weak
documentation and transparency,” “willingness to fund operations and
projects prior to payment on pledges,” and “growing dependence on cash
gifts.” (The report found that in 2012 and 2013 more than forty per
cent of annual operating revenues came from gifts. Among other small
private colleges, about seven per cent is typical.) Six months
earlier, Bard had had monthly liquidity of $7.1 million—equal to just
two weeks’ worth of operating costs. Bard is highly leveraged,
carrying a hundred and sixty million dollars of debt, which is close
to its operating budget of a hundred and eighty-five million. The
undergraduate endowment (eighty million dollars) is a tenth that of
Vassar, a school that is comparable to Bard in both size and age and
is one Amtrak stop to the south.

"}}

The Solace of Oblivion http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion In Europe, the right to be forgotten trumps #Google. In the US copyright is effective for this

QT:{{
In the effort to escape unwanted attention on the Internet,
individuals and companies have had success with one weapon: copyright
law. It is unlawful to post photographs or other copyrighted material
without the permission of the copyright holder. “I needed to get
ownership of the photos,” Bremer, the Catsouras family’s lawyer, told
me. So he began a lengthy negotiation with the California Highway
Patrol to persuade it to surrender copyright on the photographs. In
the end, though, the C.H.P. would not make the deal.

Other victims of viral Internet trauma have fared better with the
copyright approach. In August, racy private photographs of Jennifer
Lawrence, Kate Upton, and other celebrities were leaked to several Web
sites. (The source of the leaks has not been identified.) Google has
long had a system in place to block copyrighted material from turning
up in its searches. Motion-picture companies, among others, regularly
complain about copyright infringement on YouTube, which Google owns,
and Google has a process for identifying and removing these links.
Several of the leaked photographs were selfies, so the women
themselves owned the copyrights; friends had taken the other pictures.
Lawyers for one of the women established copyrights for all the
photographs they could, and then went to sites that had posted the
pictures, and to Google, and insisted that the material be removed.
Google complied, as did many of the sites, and now the photographs are
difficult to find on the Internet, though they have not disappeared.
“For the most part, the world goes through search engines,” one lawyer
involved in the effort to limit the distribution of the photographs
told me. “Now it’s like a tree falling in the forest. There may be
links out there, but if you can’t find them through a search engine
they might as well not exist.”
…
The job had two parts. The first was technical—that is, creating a
software infrastructure so that links could be removed. This was not
especially difficult, since Google could apply the system already in
place for copyrighted and trademarked works. Similarly, Google had
already blocked links that might have led to certain dangerous or
unlawful activity, like malware or child pornography.

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http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.16278,y.2014,no.6,content.true,page.1,css.print/issue.aspx

http://lectures.gersteinlab.org/summary/Overview_ENCODE_Elements–20141018-i0ashg14

http://lectures.gersteinlab.org/summary/SVs_n_Pgenes–20141019-i0ashg14+SV

http://archive.gersteinlab.org/meetings/s/2014/10.24/i0ashg14-talk-for-A-Frankish-on-Gencode

(Lab-only link to a ppt I gave, some with “audio” annotation.)

https://storify.com/markgerstein/favorite-tweets-from-ashg-14-ashg14-i0ashg14

http://linkstream2.gerstein.info/tag/i0ashg14

What Kids Around the World Eat http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/08/magazine/eaters-all-over.html Neophobia: "evo-sensibly" they initially reject unfamiliar food. Sugar is an exception

QT:{{

Children, and young omnivorous animals generally, tend to reject
unfamiliar foods on the first few tries. Evolutionarily, it makes
sense for an inexperienced creature to be cautious about new foods,
which might, after all, be poisonous. It is only through repeated
exposure and mimicry that toddlers adjust to new tastes — breakfast
instead of, say, dinner. That we don’t put pickle relish on waffles or
eat Honey Bunches of Oats for supper are rules of culture, not of
nature. As children grow, their palates continue to be shaped by the
food environment they were born into (as well as by the savvy
marketers of sugar cereals who advertise directly to the 10-and-under
set and their tired parents). This early enculturation means a child
in the Philippines might happily consume garlic fried rice topped with
dried and salted fish calledtuyo at 6 in the morning, while many
American kids would balk at such a meal (even at dinnertime). We learn
to be disgusted, just as we learn to want a second helping.

Sugar is the notable exception to “food neophobia,” as researchers
call that early innate fear. In utero, a 13-week-old fetus will gulp
amniotic fluid more quickly when it contains sugar. Our native sweet
tooth helps explain the global popularity of sugary cereals and
chocolate spreads like Nutella: Getting children to eat sugar is easy.
Teaching them to eat slimy fermented soybeans, by contrast, requires a
more robust and conservative culinary culture, one that resists the
candy-coated breakfast buffet.

}}

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/productivity_hacks_how_to_be_more_productive_during_your_commute.html?wpsrc=fol_tw

https://storify.com/markgerstein/favorite-tweets-from-ashg-14-ashg14-i0ashg14 http://linkstream2.gerstein.info/tag/i0ashg14

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/21/one-of-a-kind-2

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/9/205

http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/97/1/127.long