How we gave Oxford University applicants a level playing field – article by Marchella Ward in The Guardian. "A huge range of factors are known to affect performance in the application process, including school type, access to experiences beyond the curriculum, opportunities to develop particular kinds of cultural capital and familiarity with higher education. Expecting all applicants to perform in similar ways was disadvantaging those who had not had the privilege of being taught how to make their abilities legible against the kinds of metrics used in university admissions processes. Once we had begun to think critically about our expectations of applicants – and to admit to ourselves that it was not fair to expect potential to look the same in applicants who had had vastly different opportunities – something changed. We looked at the kinds of questions we were asking and the kinds of answers we were expecting, we interrogated our own and each others’ assumptions about different forms potential might take in an applicant, and asked our admitting tutors to come together for a conversation about how to use contextual data to recognise diverse potential. As we sought to uncouple privilege from the assessment of potential, the most disadvantaged students became more than twice as likely to be offered places as the most advantaged. This kind of statistic sometimes draws accusations of 'social engineering' but bear with me: all of our offer-holders, regardless of background, are expected to achieve similar A-level grades. It is obvious why those who have achieved these against a background of disadvantage should have a higher rate of success."
When judges don’t know the meaning of rape, there is little hope of justice – article by Sonia Sodha in The Guardian. "It’s impossible to tell unless you find yourself there. Our body’s response to acute danger is not rational: it releases a flood of hormones that trigger an automatic response over which the thinking part of our brain has little control. For decades, that response was understood as fight or flight. But that was a highly gendered understanding developed as a result of tests primarily done on men.... The fight-or-flight response is just one provoked by a complex cocktail of hormones our brain releases in extreme danger. There’s cortisol, for energy, but also natural opiates, which act to dull physical and emotional pain, corticosteroids, which reduce energy, and oxytocin, which increases positive feelings. When a woman experiences sexual assault, she may fight or flee, but as a self-protection mechanism her body may also render her physically immobile – scientists refer to this as 'tonic immobility' or 'rape-induced paralysis' – and appear emotionless. It is the evolutionary equivalent to playing dead. Research suggests that up to 50% of survivors experience this during sexual assault. Additionally, the natural opiates inhibit survivors from encoding what happened into their memory, which makes it easy for legal defence teams to question their reliability as a witness.... Last August, Robin Tolson, a male judge in his 60s, issued a family court judgment in a child custody case that suggested a woman had not been raped by her partner because she hadn’t physically fought back. She appealed, and her case was heard by high court judge Alison Russell. ... Russell’s judgment ... is excoriating about her colleague, describing his approach to consent as 'manifestly at odds with current jurisprudence'. She says: 'The logical conclusion of this judge’s approach is it is both lawful and acceptable for a man to have sex with his partner regardless of their… willingness to participate.' Yes, you read that right: Tolson falls into the quarter of the population who think it’s OK for a man to rape his partner."
No history, no languages… the end of humanities only deepens divides – article by Kenan Malik in The Guardian. "Sunderland University wants to become more 'career-focused'. So it is to shut down all its language, politics and history courses and promote instead degrees that 'align with particular employment sectors'. It’s an illustration of what happens when universities turn into businesses, and their ethos is defined by the market. It’s also symbolic of the divisions that now rend Britain’s social fabric.... [It] seems to suggest that the study of the humanities should be reserved for the children of the rich, who can afford to move, while local working-class students should be confined to 'vocational' subjects. Existing divisions will only deepen."
Philip Pullman calls for boycott of Brexit 50p coin over 'missing' Oxford comma – article by Alison Flood in The Guardian. "Should the Royal Mint have used an Oxford comma on its Brexit 50p piece? Three million coins bearing the slogan 'Peace, prosperity and friendship with all nations' are due to enter circulation from 31 January, with Sajid Javid, chancellor of the exchequer, expressing his hope that the commemorative coin will mark “the beginning of this new chapter” as the UK leaves the European Union. However, early responses include His Dark Materials novelist Philip Pullman’s criticism of its punctuation.'The "Brexit" 50p coin is missing an Oxford comma, and should be boycotted by all literate people,' wrote the novelist on Twitter."
A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders: the curious history of alphabetical order – review by Joe Moran in The Guardian. "The alphabet has always been learned in a set order – but it was ages before this order was used for anything other than memorising the letters.... The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.... It may be a good moment to tell the hidden history of alphabetical order, when computer algorithms seem ready to do away with it. Who bothers with an A-Z atlas or a phone book in the age of the smartphone satnav and the search engine? Alphabetical order, which has stayed 'invisible through its eight centuries of active duty', in Flanders’s words, may already have begun its long, slow decline into irrelevance."
Why Twitter May Be Ruinous for the Left – article in The Atlantic by Robinson Meyer, referenced by John Naughton in his Memex 1.1 blog. "Walter Ong, a linguist and Jesuit priest who died at 91 in 2003[,] ... spent his life trying to understand the revolutionary technologies, such as the television and radio, unleashed during his lifetime. ... He did so by ... studying the difference between human cultures rooted in orality and those rooted in literacy. His topic matters for Twitter more than you may think.... For oral cultures, words are primarily vibrations in the air, Ong argued. Words must therefore be memorable, few in number, and tied to the concrete reality of day-to-day life. But after the advent of writing, words become more than invisible sounds. They become permanent symbols that exist outside their utterance and can be read long after the speaker has died. Words can also divorce from the physical world and start to reference ideas, concepts, and abstract states. And instead of words needing to aid memory, as they do in oral cultures (by using a repeated epithet, such as Homer’s 'wine-dark sea'), written words can suddenly act as a form of memory themselves. ... As I once wrote: 'Twitter lets users read the same words at different times, which is a key aspect of literacy. Tweets are chatty, fusing word and action like orality; and also declarative, severable, preservable, and analyzable like literacy.'... By 2014, the Canadian academic Bonnie Stewart had noticed a change in how Twitter worked as a social space. Tweets that were written as chatty musings for one group of users were interpreted as print-like declamations by another. 'The rot we’re seeing in Twitter is the rot of participatory media devolved into competitive spheres,' she said, 'where the collective "we" treats conversational contributions as fixed print-like identity claims.' ... Twitter has been a mess of speech-like tweets interpreted as print and print-like tweets interpreted as speech for as long as most users can remember. [But recently] I’ve wondered if that instability presents a political problem—particularly for the left in the United States. The word that sticks out to me now from Stewart’s post is identity."
