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Via Arts & Letters Daily, take a few minutes to read this piece from the British counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education. It’s a bit of a screed, though genteel and professorial, about the rich douchebags and over-entitled princesses who make up the undergraduate population at Dear Old Harvard. The writer, John H. Summers, taught and advised Harvard undergrads for several years (he’s now at Boston College), and he’s more than willing to share his less-than-flattering assessment of them.

There are, he says, three kinds of Harvard undergrads: the rich kids who are already set for life because of Daddy’s money, the ambitious kids who know they’re going to be successful just because they are at Harvard, and the ironic hipster slacker kids who will fuck up for a while in their 20s then settle down to become successful rich people later on anyway, That third group, by the way, never really leaves Harvard. They’re the ones who end up living in Cambridge or Arlington or Somerville and turn into the pretentious yuppie twats who infest the Whole Foods market and become “helicopter parents”. Of the three, he seems to have a sort of begrudging admiration for the ambitious kids, even if he finds them dreadfully unimaginative and soulless.

He also spends some time on the grade-inflation situation, which turned into something of a minor scandal in these parts when the Boston Globe ran a story about it. The “Gentleman’s C” that got George W. Bush through Yale in the early 1970s is a “Gentleman’s B” if you slack your way through Harvard today. Since the real value of a high-caliber liberal arts education is pretty much lost on the majority of the undergrads anyway, he reasons, the smart instructor just goes along for the ride and doesn’t make waves, lest he be disinvited from the faculty dining rooms. To wit, the final two paragraphs:

Should I say I am grateful for the chance to teach at Harvard? I am. Should I acknowledge the many fine exceptions it was my privilege to instruct? I do, with pleasure. But the sedulous banality of the rich degrades teaching into a service-class preoccupation whose chief duty is preparing clients for monied careers. The liberal flattery of the student is both sentimental and irrelevant. If youth is wasted on the young, is teaching wasted on students?

Teaching on the part-time staff at Harvard is a little like visiting Disney World. The magic dust induces a light narcosis. The mind goes incontinent in the presence of paradox and conflict, and it is tough to tell how much fun you are having from how much you are having to pretend. The important thing is never to become the screamer who ruins the ride for everyone. The line is long.

Two newish websites for those of you who, like me, are documentary film fans.

The first is from the august National Film Board of Canada. Anyone knowledgable about documentary film at all will immediately know the importance of the NFBC in funding and promoting documentary filmmaking since the 1940s. So you will definitely want to explore this new beta site that lets you watch full-length films from their archives online. And not just documentaries, there are also animated films (some of the best short subject animations ever have been NFBC films) and short dramatic films. Presently there are over 400 films you can view, including this 1941 film which was the first documentary to ever win an Academy Award, the experimental animations of Norman McLaren, and some curated compilations of various films about life in Canada. Hours and hours of stuff to watch. (via)

The second is also a beta site. It’s called SnagFilms, and not only can you watch their selection of 225 documentaries (most of them very recent films), you can also embed the films on any website using a widget they supply (rather like the way you can embed YouTube clips). Their catalog includes National Geographic documentaries, NOVA episodes from PBS, some ABC News documentaries, and lots of indie films. Here, for example, is a film called “Paper Clips”, about a group of children who collected 6 million paper clips as a project to help them understand the extent of the Holocaust.:

Embedded video isn’t all that new at this stage, but the idea of helping to garner attention for documentary films that often get little public notice is very appealing.

Now THIS is a technology whose time is WAAAAAY overdue: the City of San Francisco is pilot testing a program to use an array of sensors embedded in the streets that can determine parking availability, then share that data over a meshed wireless network that can be accessed online so that you can get a reasonably accurate idea of where you can find a place to park. The picture above shows how the data can be plugged into Google Maps to display the parking availability on a block-by-block basis. The program uses different kinds of sensors to determine the density of parked cars (though they primarily rely on magnetic sensors), but the actual sensor arrays are small, and the combination of sensors means that they could also be used to relate other types of real-time data like pedestrian density, micro-climate data, and more.

I would pay almost anything to have this information available on my GPS. I cannot tell you how many hours of my time I have wasted trolling for parking, particularly in Harvard Square and its immediate surroundings. Not to mention the number of times I have just bitten the bullet and parked in a permit-only space knowing that there would be a ticket on my windshield when I got back, but having little other choice. The article also mentions that the developers are hoping that they’ll also be able to develop an algorithm that will predict parking availability for some point in the immediate future; say you want to know where you might find a space within a block of your destination sometime between 2:00 and 2:15. Wouldn’t THAT just be the cat’s ass?