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Here's an awesome version of My Chemical Romance's "Welcome to the Black Parade"—it's called "Pride Parade" and is performed by Sub-Radio, the same pop-punk band that treated us to "Stacy's Dad," "Mr. Darkside," and "Pop-Punk Mario." — Read the rest
Enlarge / SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket soars through the sky over Cape Canaveral with Europe's Euclid space telescope. (credit: Stephen Clark/Ars Technica)
A European Space Agency telescope launched Saturday on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida to begin a $1.5 billion mission seeking to answer fundamental questions about the unseen forces driving the expansion of the Universe. The Euclid telescope, named for the ancient Greek mathematician, will observe billions of galaxies during its six-year survey of the sky, measuring their shapes and positions going back 10 billion years, more than 70 percent of cosmic history.
Led by the European Space Agency, the Euclid mission has the ambitious goal of helping astronomers and cosmologists learn about the properties and influence of dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to make up about 95 percent of the Universe. The rest of the cosmos is made of regular atoms and molecules that we can see and touch.
“To highlight the challenge we face, I would like to give the analogy: It’s very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there’s no cat,” said Henk Hoekstra, a professor and cosmologist at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands. “That’s a little bit of the situation we find ourselves in because we have these observations … But we lack a good theory. So far, nobody has come up with a good explanation for dark matter or dark energy.”
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has threatened to reconsider his state’s relationship with the College Board.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has campaigned against what he has described as “woke indoctrination” in the classroom.
I’ve been online long enough to know that you should copy to the clipboard text you’re about to post as a comment. That way you don’t lose it. Don Presant’s blog ate my comment on this post, so I’m posting it here.
For context, Brian Mulligan wondered about the burden that employers/institutions face when an application that contains a large number of digital credentials. He wondered whether anyone is working on tools to ease the burden of validating and evaludating the credential.
My response:
Brian, you make good points here – and ones that have been made before. The problem is that both hiring and Higher Education are broken. And by ‘broken’ (as someone has been through the entire system and has a terminal degree) I mean broken.
So we’re now in a situation where people ask a series of questions to candidates before they look at their CV. This is ostensibly for diversity and unconscious bias (which I fully support) but also because CVs do a terrible job at differentiating between candidates.
Given that many microcredentials simply take existing ‘chunky’ credentials such as degrees and diplomas, and break them down into smaller parts, they’re not solving the problem. They’re just allowing universities to make more money by prolonging it.
Instead, we need full-spectrum recognition of individuals. We’ve been at this ever since the start of my career – first with eportfolios, then with badges, then with blockchain, and now with Verifiable Credentials. The issue is that people mistakenly think it’s the credential, badge, or portfolio that needs to be validated. It’s not, it the identity of the individual.
We’re not going to live in a world where everyone has their own domain, sadly, so we need verification systems that allow people to claim and controlled identifiers either publicly or anonymously identify them. If you think about it, you shouldn’t have to apply for jobs, because jobs should come looking for you. I think the systems that are being built now, coupled with some of the AI that Don was talking about, so I think we’re getting closer to solving all of this.
For those dissatisfied with the false dawn of microcredentialing, I’m working on a ‘Reframing Recognition’ email course which I’m hoping to have ready after I get back from holiday. It’ll help people understand why Open Recognition is a much better approach. Come join badges.community to find out why.
The post The old ‘chicken and egg’ problem about microcredentials kind of misses the point first appeared on Open Thinkering.
Here's a helpful compilation of "every horrible bill proposed by DeSantis's Florida GOP this year." It's infuriating to read, but it's important that we are informed of the awful things happening down in Florida (and all over the country, really). The list (which is subtitled: "Homophobes, racists, billionaires, and white nationalists rejoice?") — Read the rest
A current first grade history lesson in use in Florida.
There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:
That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.
The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.
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