Keegan Lannon

@keeganlannon

PhD: Aberystwyth; Work: UI-Chicago. I twee—er, post (skeet?)—about all things that fall under the auspices of an English department, but especially comics, writing, and teaching (mainly about comics and writing).

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Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· 29d

…why?

A plastic statue of the horse statue from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. There is a panel in the stomach that opens to show the horse is stuffed with popcorn.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jul 6

Five paragraphs in, the authors spends four consecutive paragraphs explaining how the conservatives are just looking to ensure state funds are spent appropriately and presents a few quotes from the architects of the model legislation. The article provides no context for the quotes.

Those decade-old attempts did, though, prompt conversation about how to measure faculty productivity — or, indeed, whether it’s possible to do so given the wide variations in discipline, course size, and myriad other factors. “It’s hard to get your hands around good numbers, especially if you’re being deferential to faculty or institutional autonomy,” said Frederick M. Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. “The sources of data on this are miserable, and so it’s just not something that most higher-ed advocates or higher-ed critics have paid a lot of attention to.” And, because faculty members likely aren’t inclined to argue they should be working more, Hess said, “it has been comfortably swept under the rug.”

Hess said that he’s been raising the matter of teaching-load minimums with state and national lawmakers for “a decade, two decades, and everybody has rolled their eyes.” But while legislatures have typically afforded higher ed broad deference to conduct its own matters, “what’s happened in the last two, three years is [that] much of that protective bubble has suddenly shattered, especially in red states,” Hess said. “Once you’ve lost that trust, there’s a whole menu of issues that were traditionally left to institutional autonomy that are suddenly in play.”

Conservative advocates and lawmakers are using that momentum to further critiques of professors’ productivity and the value of their research to the general public. That was part of the impetus for model state legislation released in December by a trio of right-leaning think tanks: the Goldwater Institute, Defending Education, and the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. Among the model legislation’s key provisions is a requirement that full-time faculty members in fields outside of STEM or Americanism and Western civilization teach 18 credit hours per year, or three courses per semester.

In a December white paper, the Goldwater Institute found that, “especially when it comes …

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jul 2

The KC Green dog in a burning house cartoon, but rather than “This is fine,” he is saying “At least we got to set our AC to the temp we wanted.”

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 29

I coach my kids’ soccer and baseball teams, and that gives me great joy. But signing up my kids for their first MarioKart tournament is a whole other level of happiness.

Two kids with brown hair sit in front of a big projector showing four players playing MarioKart 8 (Moo Moo Meadows).

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 29

Going to be a sweaty one today.

A screen shot of the Apple Weather app showing today’s humidity forecast. As of 8:54 am, it shows the humidity to be 83%, dipping to 60% by 5:00pm and then back up over 80% by midnight.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 26

Hilary Clinton in a blue suit talks to Barack Obama in a black suit, white shirt and a tie. Both are seated in black leather low-backed chairs. Clinton, smiling widely, seems to have said something to Obama that has him doubled-over laughing in his chair.

The caption reads: "And then I said...I said put it in the back of the book. It's not like essential information, but it's interesting. These idiots will flip back and forth all day!"

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 26

Look at this from Politico. You can find pictures of these very public figures where they don’t look like they are living their best lives.

A screen shot of a Politico article titled “The Political Upset that should Haunt Zohran Mamdani.” The headline is paired with a black-and-white image of Mamdani looking into the camera that is positioned to his right. He is sitting on a bench hands clenched in front of him. His face is somber…haunted even. One eye brow is raised and he has no smile. He looks tired and worn.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 26

Listen, Fox News producers, if you are going to have someone on who says “look at these images coming out of New York…” you might not want to juxtapose his grim warnings about socialism with three pictures of smiling happy people. If you are going to engage in agitprop, do it well.

And image of Stuart Varney and Rep Carlos Gimenez gravely talking about the grim images coming from New York juxtaposed with a picture of Zohran Mamdani absolutely beaming with a warm grin. The image is warmly lit, and taken at a level angle.

The same two shots of Varney and Gimenez juxtaposed with a still of Darializa Avila Chevalier warmly smiling as she talks into a mic. The background is completely black, but it looks like Avila Chevalier is laughing convivially.

Varney and Gimenez continue looking grim next to a picture of Claire Valdez smiling warmly from behind a podium at a rally.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 23

Lysa Arryn, Game of Thrones (S4 E7)

A still of Lena Hyena from Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 20

I’m most annoyed by this forcing me to reconcile the fact that 2004 was 22 years ago. We are as far away from Season 3 of Scrubs, as S3 of Scrubs was from S3 of Magnum PI.

A picture of Tom Selleck in a wet suit vest and vanishingly short shorts smiling and hosing himself off on the set of Magnum PI

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 19

I'm going to start point to this whenever I see this dudes name cross my feed.

A tweet from "Lauren @NotABigJerk" that reads: "i'm not falling for that hot take. that's clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at. i refuse to participate in that kind of perversion"

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 19

My exact reaction while reading this piece:

The Kombucha Girl meme (but reversed) where she is interested at first and then disgusted. The captions read: [Interested] "There should be a greater emphasis on a truly liberal arts education" [Disgusted] by only studying western thinking, art, politics and literature."

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 15

This is part of the value of including people who think about language and communication: they bring a necessary nuance to the discussion. A tool designed to extract sentiment from consumer reviews is not going to be good at extracting political sentiments or emotional arcs.

An excerpt of the above-linked essay that reads: "Put another way, this is a problem of perception linked to the tools used for generating particular visions of the social world. As art historian Jonathan Crary writes, referring to the new ways of seeing generated by photographic capture in the 19th century, “perception transformed alongside new technological forms of spectacle, display, projection” (p. 2). Similarly, the tools of sentiment analysis generate frameworks of perception for social media that change the way political discourse is described,
even when the tools are not necessarily designed with this application in mind, and the theoretical justification appears far sounder for their original purpose than for the new one.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 15

Today's article on sentiment analysis is already off to a better start, and one of the key differences between this and other sentiment analysis articles is that one of the two researchers studies communications. This is an important distinction about what is being measured.

An excerpt from the article in discussion, from the intro, that reads: "Sentiment analysis, also commonly referred to as opinion
mining, is increasingly used in a wide range of research
areas, including the social sciences and the media and communication
field (Ceron, Curini, Iacus, & Porro, 2014;
Driscoll, 2015; Murthy, 2015; Papacharissi & de Fatima
Oliveira, 2012; Schwartz & Ungar, 2015; von Nordheim,
Boczek, Koppers, & Erdmann, 2018; Wojcieszak & Azrout,
2016). With origins in computational linguistics and computer
science, its proliferation in market research, public
relations, and political forecasting, and increasingly also as a
method in the social sciences, parallels the globally growing
relevance of social media, from a minority pursuit to a ubiquitous
activity. Its purpose is to represent emotional or affective
tendencies, often within user-generated content (UGC),
though frequently no clear distinction is made between affect
expressed in a text and the emotional state of a text’s author.
The growing prominence of sentiment analysis can been
seen as a response to both datafication and “post-factual”
politics, emphasizing the role of emotion in areas of inquiry
previously understood chiefly in rational and analytical"

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

See...this is a problem. This is from a write-up of the experiment in The Atlantic:

An excerpt of the Atlantic write-up that reads: They did this by training the machine to take all the words of the book, section by section, and measure the average happiness of a given bag of words based on how an individual word scored. The researchers assigned individual happiness scores to more than 10,000 frequently-used words by crowdsourcing the effort on the website Mechanical Turk. This portion of the research is fascinating in and of itself: The 10 words that people ranked as happiest were laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, and joy. The 10 words that people ranked as least happy were terrorist, suicide, rape, terrorism, murder, death, cancer, killed, kill, and die. (You can see how all the words ranked by visiting this site.)

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

Oops. Try again with alt text:

To examine how the emotional trajectory impacts success, in Figure 7 we examine the downloads for all of the books that are most similar to each SVD mode (for additional modes, see Figure S3 in Appendix B in Additional file 1). We find that the first four modes, which contain the greatest total number of books, are not the most popular. Along with the negative of mode 2, both polarities of modes 3 and 4 have markedly higher median downloads, while we discount the importance of the mean with the high variance. The success of the stories underlying these emotional arcs suggests that the emotional experience of readers strongly affects how stories are shared. We find ‘Icarus’ (-SV 2), ‘Oedipus’ (-SV 3), and two sequential ‘Man in a hole’ arcs (SV 4), are the three most successful emotional arcs. These results are influenced by individual books within each mode which have high numbers of downloads, and we refer the reader to the download-sorted tables for each mode in Appendix E in Additional file 1.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

The authors admit that downloads don't necessarily equate to success (left undiscussed is that Project Gutenberg is a collection of works out of copyright; so downloading these text aren't really tied to commercial success), but there is something interesting in this data.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

Yowza, this is inscrutable, which is not the fault of the authors here. This was published in a data science journal, so I am assuming this all makes sense to someone. I'm not even sure where to begin to figure out what this means...

We implement a self-organized map (SOM), an unsupervised machine learning method (a type of neural network) to cluster emotional arcs [27]. The SOM works by finding the most similar emotional arc in a random collection of arcs. We use an 8 x 8 SOM (for 64 nodes, roughly 5% of the number of books), connected on a square grid, training according to the original procedure (with winner take all, and scaling functions across both distance and magnitude). We take the neighborhood influence function at iteration i as

[a long equation with many characters unavailable in alt text]

(3)
for a node k in the set of nodes N, with distance function D given above and total number of nodes N. For results shown here we take
[alpha] = -0.15. We implement the learning adaptation function at training iteration i as [more characters and symbols unavailable in alt text], again with [beta[ = -0.15, a standard value for the training hyper-parameters.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

I kind of feel like if I sought to prove that the universality of anything in data analytics is a settled theory, and I referenced a TED Talk as the example of people discussing that theory, the data science people would raise their hands with some fairly righteous questions.

A screenshot from the article that reads: "We objectively test aspects of the theories of folkloristics [8, 9], specifically the commonality of core stories within societal boundaries [4, 10]."

The citation for reference 4: Cave S (2013) The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death. http://www.ted.com/talks/stephen_cave_the_4_stories_we_tell_ourselves_about_death

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

**Stares in Gerard Genette**

An excerpt from the above-linked article that reads: We objectively test aspects of the theories of folkloristics [8, 9], specifically the commonality of core stories within societal boundaries [4, 10]. A major component of folkloristics is the study of society and culture through literary analysis. This is sometimes referred to as narratology, which at its core is ‘a series of events, real or fictional, presented to the reader or the listener’ [11]. In our present treatment, we consider the plot as the ‘backbone’ of events that occur in a chronological sequence (more detail on previous theories of plot are in Appendix A in Additional file 1).

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

Irony, sarcasm, metaphor: Natural Language Processing has long struggled with this. Humans, especially in artistic expression, use words in contradictory ways. Just look at this KC Green cartoon. What the dog is expressing is not what the reader feels. But also, what is the emotional arc here?

The KC Green dog in a burning house cartoon. In panel 1: the dog is sitting in a house that is clearly burning down. He seems calm, sitting at a dining room table with a cup of coffee, wearing a fedora. In panel two, the dog, smiling, says, "This is fine." In panel 3, the dog still smiling and now drinking from his coffee says, "I'm okay with the events that are unfolding currently." In panel 4, he takes a drink from his cup as the fire spreads to the table and his fedora. In panel 5, his arm is melting, and he puts the cup back on the table saying, "That's okay. Things are going to be okay." In panel six, we see a close-up on the dog whose face and eyeballs are melting.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 12

See: evoking emotions is...complicated. I am very interested in the "simple, robust" sentiment analysis tool they used, including how they label and identify what a reader is meant to feel, how they *determined* what the...correct? approrpriate?...emotional response is?

An excerpt from the above-linked article that reads: "We seek to better understand stories that are captured and shared in written form, a medium that since inception has radically changed how information flows [7]. Without evolved cues from tone, facial expression, or body language, written stories are forced to capture the entire transfer of experience on a page. An often integral part of a written story is the emotional experience that is evoked in the reader. Here, we use a simple, robust sentiment analysis tool to extract the reader-perceived emotional content of written stories as they unfold on the page."

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 11

In both SHRINKING and THE FOUR SEASONS, Vernée Watson was cast as a mother of a main character with ailing health who resists moving in with her adult child, which is a very niche typecasting.

A picture of Vernée Watson, a 77-year-old black woman, smiling wearing a blue shirt, a thin gold chain, and gold hoop earrings.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 10

I went to see if I could snag cheap seats to the Jimmy Eat World show tomorrow and I feel like this guy isn’t trying too hard to sell his seats.

A map of the Huntington Bank
pavilion showing seats ranging between $26 and $197 dollars. The selected seats are in row Q section 203 and are listed for $3024 each.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 9

Some pictures for my fifth talk as part of my summer residency for Lectures on Tap. It was a fun time and there were a lot of great questions.

A brightly-lit bar with natural wood tables and metal stools. The bar has open rafters with white rope lights. There are about twenty people around the bar.

The same bar, but a white man in a grey suit and turquoise shirt stands, facing left under a projector screen. On the screen it reads: “Feelings, Facts and the Art of Persuasion”. There is a picture of a marble statue of Julien the Jurist.

A photo like the previous one, but the white man is facing towards the audience.

A black man in a dark suit coat and white shirt is talking into a microphone. A white man in the grey suit and turquoise shirt stands next to him smiling.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 8

The High Septon/Elvis Impersonator who marries Sansa and Tyrion. Good side burns in this show.

A picture of an older white man with coiffed white hair and long, chin-length white side burns.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 5

I’m sorry, Baseball Gods, for so brazenly taunting the Giants.

The box score from the Giants V Cubs where the Giants won 18-3.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 4

I know it’s not the worst thing about this map, but why are all the bubbles so differently sized.

A terrible AI-created map showing bubbles identifying cities with the city name and the flag of the country training there. None of the bubbles are the same size, in either height or width.

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 1

*steps to mic* *taps to ensure it’s on* *clears throat* “fuuuuuuuuck youuuuuuuu”

A screen shot of the article which features a quote from a multimillionaire investor who made his money from Candy Crush and, perhaps importantly, never went to college that reads: "Universities have to embrace Al in a way that is almost threatening to the very essence of what universities are, which is that we've got to basically accelerate our ability to innovate, our ability to research, our ability to produce products with outcomes quicker."

Keegan Lannon@keeganlannon· Jun 1

This video of Local H does not properly represent how egregiously loud the band was. A killer performance, but just so loud.