Links of the Day #11

Happy New Year! Today's round-up begins with freedom (broadly construed): freeing ethnography, freeing the web, freeing academic publishing and the hidden world of highly paid cheating facilitators earning a good living from your students (taking academia for a "free" - ultimately costly - ride). Next are a few links to do with appearances: media representations of anorexia and obesity; questions about tourism, tourists and the value of places; and visualizing friendships. Some social media tips are thrown in for good measure and, for Spanish-speakers, sobre nuestra relación con la tecnología.

UNHOSTED - Freedom from web 2.0's monopoly platforms Posted: 20 Dec 2010 02:47 AM PST Unhosted is an Open Source project aiming to provide users with their own share of online resources, thus making it perfect for altruistic websites and for bringing public domain applications to the web. How does unhosted work? A website is a specific web app, hosted on a specific server farm. There is a limited number of big centralized websites, that we all connect to. Our web has been taken hostage and monopolized. Unhosted web apps are not hosted on one specific server farm. They are freed. The once-important server farms now become commodity infrastructure, and authors of unhosted web apps liberate the user. The Shadow Scholar Posted: 10 Dec 2010 02:48 AM PST Must read: "You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students' writing. I have seen the word "desperate" misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn't write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren't getting it." Dos lecciones sobre la tecnología y la vida « Tesis-Antítesis Posted: 19 Nov 2010 06:27 AM PST Cuántas lecciones hay que aprender todavía sobre nuestra relación con la tecnología…. Zero Geography: Internet access as a human right Posted: 19 Nov 2010 04:37 AM PST Five countries have now declared internet access as a fundamental human right. Four of these countries are in Europe (Estonia, Finland, France and Greece) and one is in Central America (Costa Rica). Ethnographic Terminalia Posted: 25 Nov 2010 09:52 AM PST No longer content to theorize the ends of the discipline and possibilities of new media, new locations, or new methods of asking old questions, those associated with Ethnographic Terminalia are working in capacity to develop generative ethnographies that do not subordinate the sensorium to the expository and theoretical text or monograph. Ethnographic Terminalia is an initiative designed to celebrate borders without necessarily exalting them. Inside Higher Ed: New Models for University Presses Posted: 22 Nov 2010 09:22 AM PST A special issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing features a series of calls for change in the way university presses are run -- suggesting that the current business model is collapsing: "As individuals at beleaguered institutions are wont to do, the initial reaction of some at university presses consisted of circling the wagons, repeatedly intoning stale mantras of self-praise, clinging to fraying publishing practices like a security blanket, and convincing themselves (or letting their benighted professional organization convince them and others) that they could ride out this technological tsunami intact, in part by clutching ferociously to the Disney-corrupted version of the print copyright regime," says an introduction to the issue, by its guest editor, Phil Pochoda, director of the University of Michigan Press. ethnografix: And sometimes I ask myself...how did these people get here? Posted: 22 Nov 2010 09:20 AM PST Ryan asks some pertinent and universal questions about tourism and tourists: "What motivated those people to go THERE, of all places? What beliefs? What economic factors? What matters of taste? What historical interests? What biases? What discourses have come together to create Coba as a desirable destination, as a place worthy of spending income on to visit? What happens when those discourses change--when Coba is no longer seen as a valuable place? Does it just become another old pile of rocks, as it was before being resurrected by the tourism industry (and archaeologists, of course)?" Media Binge » Contexts Posted: 22 Nov 2010 09:14 AM PST Thoughts on body image and the media. "News reports from 1995 to 2005 demonstrate that anorexia and bulimia are generally cast as beyond an individual's control, often the unfortunate result of social pressures. In contrast, obesity is framed as the fault of the individual, a self-inflicted bodily disorder that's a result of choice. There are moral connotations—while thinness is associated with high social status and virtue, fatness is linked to low status and seen as a sign of gluttony—and the way the media characterizes people with these eating disorders reflect these ideas. Anorexics and bulimics are mostly depicted as young, white females who have fallen victim to structural forces, but obese people are depicted as poor minorities making poor choices.  Visualizing Friendships Posted: 20 Dec 2010 04:51 AM PST Paul Butler's map of Facebook friendships worldwide: "I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user's current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city." 40 New Social Media Resources You May Have Missed Posted: 20 Dec 2010 02:50 AM PST How-to's and other social media features for mobile, business and more.