miss takes

"Freedom from Want" de Norman Rockwell

Technology companies are on the defensive, battling waves of criticism. You’d never know it by asking the American people. Amazon, Facebook, and Google have all held steady in daily favorability polls.
in "What Tech Backlash? Google, Facebook Still Rank High in Polls" ^{12 out 2017}

Triste. Outras tristezas que nos são queridas: elites agora.

The very long-standing problem of science and elitism: science uses its intrinsic difficulty as a mechanism for enforcing an otherwise artificial exclusivity. Wikipedia editing and writing is an active thing, an interminable back and forth among editors. In a way you can imagine impenetrable writing as a defensive strategy wielded to scare off editor-meddlers. That would be elitism, like in its most literal active form.
in "Wikipedia’s Science Articles Are Elitist" ^{12 out 2017}

Antes: Wikipedia? Mea culpa também.

Good journalists know well enough that Wikipedia is in itself not a reliable source, but a page's references section can wind up being a solid repository of links to sources likely to be reliable. With that disclaimer out of the way: Yes, I look up science stuff on Wikipedia.
in "Wikipedia’s Science Articles Are Elitist" ^{12 out 2017}

Disclaimer feito. Mas back to point:

A Wikipedia article should be an opportunity to increase science literacy rather than a barrier to it.

Wikipedia articles about "hard science" topics are really mostly written for other scientists. This particular class of Wikipedia article tends to take the high-level form of a scientific paper. There's a brief intro (an abstract) that is kinda-sorta comprehensible, but then the article immediately degenerates into jargon and equations. I have no idea who the article exists for because I'm not sure that person actually exists: someone with enough knowledge to comprehend dense physics formulations that doesn't also already understand the electroweak interaction or that doesn't already have, like, access to a textbook about it.
in "Wikipedia’s Science Articles Are Elitist" ^{12 out 2017}

Segway a outros tipos de jargão académico e debates próprios de identidade, a propósito de autenticidade. Diz-nos AG de "Gender Trouble" por Judith Butler, cuja "sua crítica do feminismo, sempre feita a partir do interior dele, não se confunde de nenhum modo com aquilo a que se chamou pós-feminismo":

Judith Butler usa os instrumentos da descontrução e da French Theory (que, como sabemos, é uma construção americana da filosofia francesa pós-estruturalista)
in "O género e o sexo em sentido extra-moral" ^{13 out 2017}

Perguntamos-nos a quem se dirige AG nesse excerto: todos aqueles que o sabem, certamente estarão igualmente, necessariamente familiarizados com a obra, "livro que conquistou um lugar central nos “estudos de género", "provocou um efeito poderoso, ainda hoje bem activo", e cuja autora o próprio descreve de "uma eminente figura do nosso tempo".

Mas não vamos atirar pedras: o quadro anterior? retiramos deste artigo "A New Language for a New World" ^{12 out 2017}, a poucas linhas de se discutir uma crítica a "functionalist accounts of society" também no tópico de identidades - no caso, de como "undo, unthink, the sovereign European state".

A fechar, o nosso takeaway do quadro do Norman Rockwell na Wikipedia ^{13 out 2017} :

Although the image was popular at the time in the United States and remains so, it caused resentment in Europe where the masses were enduring wartime hardship. Artistically, the work is highly regarded as an example of mastery of the challenges of white-on-white painting.

...não estamos mais a falar mais do quadro, pois não?

shift happens