These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• Local Motors Com­pe­ti­tion: Terra Prix 2085 — Core77 — “Local Motors, a rev­o­lu­tion­ary crowd-​​sourced car com­pany, is hold­ing a con­cept design com­pe­ti­tion for a transcon­ti­nen­tal race vehi­cle with a sup­port ship.”

industrial-​​design com­pe­ti­tion Syd-​​Mead engineering-​​design awe­some
• Faulty Tow­ers: The Cri­sis in Higher Edu­ca­tion | The Nation — “…For all its pre­ten­sions to pub­lic impor­tance (every pro­fes­sor secretly thinks he’s a pub­lic intel­lec­tual), the pro­fes­so­ri­ate is awfully quiet, essen­tially nonex­is­tent as a col­lec­tive voice. If acad­e­mia is going to once again become a decent place to work, if our best young minds are going to be attracted back to the pro­fes­sion, if higher edu­ca­tion is going to be reclaimed as part of the Amer­i­can promise, if teach­ing and research are going to make the coun­try strong again, then pro­fes­sors need to get off their back­sides and orga­nize: depart­ment by depart­ment, insti­tu­tion to insti­tu­tion, state by state and across the nation as a whole. Tenured pro­fes­sors enjoy the strongest speech pro­tec­tions in soci­ety. It’s time they started using them.”

reformation-​​is-​​gonna-​​be-​​ouchy disintermediation-​​targets life-o’-the-mind cultural-​​assumptions edu­ca­tion graduate-​​school academia-doesn’t-guarantee-acuity academic-​​culture
• Ninth Cir­cuit Court: Secret GPS Track­ing is Legal | Exec­u­tive Gov — ‘In the major­ity opin­ion, the Ninth Cir­cuit Court ruled that since Pineda-Moreno’s dri­ve­way wasn’t enclosed and was open to passersby like deliv­ery men and neigh­bor­hood chil­dren, it didn’t pass the Dunn test for cur­tilage.  Never mind that in the Dunn opin­ion, the major­ity writes “we do not sug­gest that com­bin­ing these fac­tors pro­duces a finely tuned for­mula that, when mechan­i­cally applied, yields a “cor­rect” answer to all extent-​​of-​​curtilage questions.”’

Bushism free­dom search-​​and-​​seizure Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity feds lawyers
• What Bureau­cracy Looks Like —

pho­tog­ra­phy exhi­bi­tion bureau­cracy work­life soci­ol­ogy cultural-​​norms
• Tak­ing the plunge | johnau​gust​.com — “You’ll be told it’s because it makes com­mu­ni­cat­ing your vision eas­ier, and that’s true.  But there are two more impor­tant rea­sons.  First, if you know how to be a sound man, you know how to make the sound man’s job eas­ier. This has the poten­tial to make you very pop­u­lar with sound men (or edi­tors, or cin­e­matog­ra­phers, etc), some­thing you’ll need when your only cur­rency is good will.  Sec­ond, when you begin pro­duc­ing your own work, this renais­sance approach to film­mak­ing will allow you to start before any­one else signs on.  Know­ing you can fin­ish in a pinch, if you have to, will lend you a con­fi­dent relent­less­ness that makes oth­ers want to get involved.”

gen­er­al­ism learning-​​by-​​doing advice
• James on Habit — “…Keep the fac­ulty of effort alive in you by a lit­tle gra­tu­itous exer­cise every day. That is, be sys­tem­at­i­cally heroic in lit­tle unnec­es­sary points, do every day or two some­thing for no other rea­son than its dif­fi­culty, so that, when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.”

habit psy­chol­ogy soci­ol­ogy William-​​James advice learn­ing
• Seth’s Blog: The future of the library — “The next library is a place, still. A place where peo­ple come together to do co-​​working and coor­di­nate and invent projects worth work­ing on together. Aided by a librar­ian who under­stands the Mesh, a librar­ian who can bring domain knowl­edge and peo­ple knowl­edge and access to infor­ma­tion to bear. The next library is a house for the librar­ian with the guts to invite kids in to teach them how to get bet­ter grades while doing less grunt work. And to teach them how to use a sol­der­ing iron or take apart some­thing with no user ser­vi­ca­ble parts inside. And even to chal­lenge them to teach classes on their pas­sions, merely because it’s fun. This librar­ian takes responsibility/​blame for any kid who man­ages to grad­u­ate from school with­out being a first-​​rate data shark. The next library is filled with so many web ter­mi­nals there’s always at least one empty. And the peo­ple who run this library don’t view the com­bi­na­tion of access to data and con­nec­tions to peers as a sidelight–it’s the entire point. Wouldn’t you want to live and work and pay taxes in a town that had a library like that? The vibe of the best Brook­lyn cof­fee shop com­bined with a pas­sion­ate racon­teur of infor­ma­tion? There are one thou­sands things that could be done in a place like this, all built around one mis­sion: take the world of data, com­bine it with the peo­ple in this com­mu­nity and cre­ate value.”

library2.0 seth-​​godin libraries communities-​​of-​​practice exper­tise librar­i­ans museums-​​too