The Class Room featuring Alice Cappelle
When millions of French protesters shut down their country over the president’s decision to raise the retirement age, U.S. commentators said it could never happen here. But why?
To find out why, we went back through decades of U.S. and French history. We took a look at the different narratives we tell ourselves about strikes and the different laws protecting the right to collective action in the United States and Europe.
By Andrew Mee in collaboration with the OS API Working Group
This technical guide to building a USB MIDI 2.0 device is the first in a series of articles targeted specifically to device developers.
For musicians, please see this article: https://midi.org/midi-articles/what-musicians-and-artists-need-to-know-about-midi-2-0
USB MIDI 2.0 was released by the USB-IF in June 2020, with Apple adding support within CoreMIDI in October 2021 and Google added support in Android in August 2022. At the time of writing, Microsoft has announced upcoming support for MIDI 2.0 and now on a public Github, and also patches have been submitted by ALSA for inclusion in Linux Kernel 6.5. An update to the MIDI 2.0 UMP specification was approved in the first half of 2023.
For the full article, point your browser here ▓
“The Education Myth” challenges the prevailing notion that education is the primary avenue to economic opportunity in America. Author Jon Shelton, associate professor and chair of Democracy & Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, explores the historical shift in the perception of education’s role in society, revealing that its connection to economic well-being was not always inevitable.
While early public education aimed to foster democratic participation, the mid-20th century saw the rise of the education myth, stifling social democratic alternatives and sidelining notions of economic security and social dignity for all.
Shelton tracks the transformation from the 1960s onward, as both Democrats and Republicans, including figures like Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, perpetuated this myth, leading to an unequal economy and a deeply divided political landscape over the past four decades.
Link to the book at Cornell University Press
For a spot on book review, point your browser to:
Public Education Is Vital for Democracy. But It’s Not the Solution to Poverty or Inequality
By Jennifer C. Berkshire | Jacobin
On this episode of the Grassroots Economic Organizing podcast, Mike Leung talks with Josh Davis about a paradox in how start-up losses are handled in worker cooperatives.
There has been a lot of interest recently in 3d printed vs aluminum injection molds. I know I thought about that. At first glance, it seems that using 3d printed mold inserts would be faster and easier than making aluminum molds. That turns out not to be the case, and there are other downsides to using 3d printed mold inserts.
Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland speak with Jon D. Erickson, professor of sustainability science and policy at The University of Vermont, to discuss his recent book The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.
When ideas and movements that threaten to overturn established hierarchies of power are absorbed into elite institutions like Ivy League universities and for-profit corporations, they get transformed into ideas that support the status quo, while remaining cloaked in the language and symbols of radicalism and egalitarianism.
The replacement of the word “equality” by the word “equity” in the worlds of academia, NGOs, activism, and corporate HR departments, is an example of the attempts by elite people and institutions to transform historical movements for racial and gender equality, into ideas that promote the interest of elites – in particular, economic inequality and the division of the working classes.
In this episode we explore how forms of oppression based on cultural factors like skin colour or gender or religion, etc, can only be understood and effectively combatted by understanding them in the context of economic exploitation and economic competition which is what the human propensity to discriminate evolved for in the first place.
Billionaires and multi-millionaires love to pat themselves on the back for their charitable giving. But what if we just taxed the rich and regulated their business practices instead of letting them get away with theft and atrocity while still getting to pad their reputation by giving away the millions of dollars they stole from their laborers?
On May 31st, Muzic published a research paper on their first ever text-to-midi application, MuseCoco.
Trained on a reported 947,659 Standard MIDI files (a file format which includes MIDI performance information) across six open source datasets, developers found that it significantly outperformed the music generation capabilities of GPT-4 (source).
You can explore a non-technical summary of the full collection of Muzic research papers to learn more about their efforts to train machine learning models on MIDI data.
The latest word from Pete Brown the Chair of the Executive Board of the MIDI Association, is that we will see MIDI 2.0 Windows drivers by Fall of this year.
Pete is the Principal Software Engineer and lead of the MIDI 2.0-focused Windows OS MIDI Services Project, so to subscribe to ongoing updates about Microsoft’s MIDI and related music efforts, point your browser to their DEVLOG and-or their MIDI GitHub Repository.
The full MIDI Association article and details can be found here 👇🏾
