Pumping mums and airport security don’t mix

On her way home from Oslo, Jill Walker Rettberg—breastpump in tow—experiences gender discrimination in the airport security line:

On my way to Oslo I took it through as hand luggage - without milk since I hadn’t pumped yet, and the security people (young women) said it was fine and waved me through. On my way home, the airport train was delayed and I didn’t have much time for my flight. I assumed since Bergen had said the cooler pack was OK, I’d be fine taking the pump, milk and cooler packs through security again. But no - this time the security guy (an old man - coincidence?) stopped me and said the milk was OK but not the cooler packs.

Related: Jill links to a recent New York Times article on the subject.

Art in the DPRK

Socialist Realism is alive and well in the North Korean art scene.

Abstract painting does not exist as it is deemed bourgeois and anti-revolutionary, and if some representational art can be purely aesthetic without political overtones, many landscapes do portray places of the revolution or of political significance.

Anonymity is a hallmark of North Korean art because all artists must work out of state-run studio complexes. Artists are ranked A, B, or C, depending on skill level. About fifty top-ranked artists are further designated “Merited Artists” and a more elite group of 20 are designated “People’s Artists.”

bfunk's bookmarks tagged carceral urbanism

The readings for one of my seminars have recently focused on urban issues surrounding racism and law enforcement. I was happy to find a long list of supplemental material under bfunk’s carceral urbanism tag.

The best two sentences I’ve read for class today highlight the difficulty of finding employment if you’re an ex-offender in the United States:

In another striking example of the creative remaking of worker identities within this racially structured contingent economy, it was reported that some Latino ex-offenders would on occasion pass themselves off as undocumented workers, in order to gain access to the word-of-mouth recruitment channels and labor corners that have been organized around the undocumented population. The kind of work that can be accessed through these means tends to be extremely exploitative and often dangerous, but by the standards of the ex-offender labor market it is comparatively plentiful.

From Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2008). Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), 251-281. [available here behind a paywall]

Jody Williams, on collaboration via fax

Chief spokesperson for the International Campaign to Ban Landmines and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Jody Williams used the fax machine to help build organizational capacity:

Imagine trying to get hundreds of organizations – each one independent and working on many, many issues – to feel that each is a critical element of the development of a new movement. I wanted each to feel that what they had to say about campaign planning, thinking, programs, actions was important. So, instead of sending letters, I’d send everyone faxes. People got in the habit of faxing back. This served two purposes – people would really have to think about what they were committing to doing before writing it down, and we have a permanent, written record of almost everything in the development of the campaign from day one.

The quotation comes from the FAQ section of the ICBL website.

English things

A set of brand-name English food product illustrations.

See also the set of two Scottish things.

Say hello to the new guy

I announced back in February that yesterday I’d make the first change to the clique since I started it almost two months ago. I’m pleased to announce the new member is rgreco!

I actually discovered him via the very first comment on the Pick the Clique page so I think it’s appropriate that he’s also the first replacement. While rgreco has shared over 15,000 bookmarks, I’m interested in neither his sharing frequency nor volume; I’m more drawn to the breadth of topics covered, including dozens of bookmarks each for the tags sleep, curiosity, fear, and happiness.

And so what if his top tag is design? Isn’t everybody’s? I’m more interested in what I see in the long tail of his sharing.

Welcome, rgreco!

He and his lovely family also have a simple page offering a description of their work (it’s worth a look) and links to their flickr, tumblr, vimeo, and plush art gallery pages. If you’ll excuse me now, I’m off to wade through his 280 bookmarks tagged deschooling, whatever that means.

Selfish drivers and disciplined production

Traffic engineers in Korea have challenged convention by reducing the traffic capacity along a section of Seoul’s road network in order to increase the efficiency of the system as a whole. Somehow it worked. Researchers from the Sante Fe Institute recently concluded that a large number of network options countervails a large network capacity.

The “price of anarchy” is a measure of the inefficiency caused by selfish drivers. Analyzing a commute from Harvard Square to Boston Common, the researchers found that the price can be high—selfish drivers typically waste 30 percent more time than they would under “socially optimal” conditions.

The solution hinges on Braess’s paradox, Gastner says. “Because selfish drivers optimize a wrong function, they can be led to a better solution if you remove some of the network links,” he explains. Why? In part because closing roads makes it more difficult for individual drivers to choose the best (and most selfish) route. In the Boston example, Gastner’s team found that six possible road closures, including parts of Charles and Main streets, would reduce the delay under the selfish-driving scenario. (The street closures would not slow drivers if they were behaving unselfishly.)

It reminded me of something Brian Eno said in a recent interview about his role as a producer:

“But what I do can work for any artist. In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

Related: See bookmarks tagged counterintuitive by myself and others on delicious.

Islands of LA (ILA)

Since 2007 Ari Kletzky has been claiming Los Angeles traffic islands in the name of the community.

This year ILA has hosted daylong activities at intersections that stitch together the criss-crossing neighborhoods of Los Angeles, organizing concerts, tetherball games, picnics, birthday parties and public discussions. They aim to redefine expectations of what an island can be used for (mainly that it can be used for a lot more than traffic signals, poor landscaping and trash). They ask, Why don’t we all meet up in public spaces that are free and open, instead of at expensive bars and restaurants? Why do we hang out on beaches and in parks during the day but not at night?” “Is it legal to assemble on a traffic island?”

They’ve only recently had a run-in with the law, which they documented on the project’s blog.

Solar energy-harvesting party balloons

California’s Cool Earth Solar wants to replace expensive solar cells with larger versions of those crinkly, aluminized balloons you get at hospital gift shops.

Such balloons are made from metal-coated plastic. Cool Earth’s insight was that if you coat only one half of a balloon, leaving the other transparent, the inner surface of the coated half will act as a concave mirror. Put a solar cell at the focus of that mirror and you have an inexpensive solar-energy collector.

Tiny fish developed its own set of dracula fangs

A newly designated species of transparent fish native to a stream in Burma has recently been introduced to my nightmares.