Response to Michael Wesch's video about students today
YouTube - (Re)Visions of Students Today
Here is the original video.
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January 31, 2008
Why Jim matters
NPR: Was Jim of 'Huckleberry Finn' a Hero?:
As part of the NPR series, "In Character," we take a look at the enslaved character, Jim, in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — one of the most controversial novels in American literature.
Was Jim a stereotype or a hero?
For more on the much-debated portrayal of the classic American character, Farai Chideya talks with Dr. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, director of American studies and professor of English at Stanford University.
Money Well Spent
If you haven't seen it, check out The Library of Congress's Flickr page here. As you get your W2 statements, don't forget to pay your taxes promptly this year and please add a note that lets the IRS know that it's worth your tax revenues to have more money spent on federal digital libraries and less on the totally pointless Iraq War. Information about this particular photograph is here. Check out the tag "women" for images in the Rosie the Riveter tradition.
(Thanks to the always super-cool LOC librarian Laura Graham for the link.)
January 30, 2008
I Wouldn't Steal
The Greens | European Free Alliance in the European Parliament created this video as a statement against a media industry that fights illegal downloading and copying. To get its point across, the video uses visual references to the much-parodied "You Wouldn't Steal . . ." campaign, which appears at the front of many U.S. made films. As they argue at the I wouldn't steal website, the media industry has failed to offer viable legal alternatives and has failed to convince consumers that sharing equals stealing. Unfortunately, from the standpoint of wanting to convince American audiences of the value of progressive copyright reform, particularly of the DMCA, the video doesn't do much to explain possible artistic, educational, and critical uses for making and remixing content from digital copies and emphasizes only oppositional politics in the street.
Of course, I did appreciate the reference to Star Wars geeks.
Link via Marc van Gurp at Osocio
Now that's what I call...democracy?
From today's New York Times:
Republican candidates were traveling to California for a debate Wednesday evening at the Reagan Presidential Library. While most of the attention in Florida was on the Republicans, Democratic voters gave Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton a victory in a virtually uncontested race. The Democratic Party had stripped the state of its delegates as a punishment for moving its primary earlier in the year, and the leading candidates refrained from campaigning there.
To be clear, I'm not a fan of all the primary-upping shenanigans. This sort of calendar game produces its own set of undesirable political effects. Nonetheless, it seem to me that stripping states of their convention delegates is an awfully undemocratic response for a society that so champions, and persistently wages war in the name of, democracy. And I gather this response isn't confined to Florida. It happened in Michigan, too, which similarly moved its primary forward. Between uncounted ballots, malfunctioning voting machines, so-called superdelegates, and an increasingly shady primary system, I'm genuinely worried about what's happening to democracy in these United States.
January 29, 2008
Has the Library of Congress surrendered its role in standardizing how we catalog knowledge?
According to the Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control (Library of Congress):
The Working Group envisions a future for bibliographic control that will be collaborative,
decentralized, international in scope, and Web-based. The realization of this future will occur
in cooperation with the private sector and with the active collaboration of library users. Data
will be gathered from multiple sources; change will happen quickly; and bibliographic control
will be dynamic, not static.
The Report is based on the key premise that the community is at a critical juncture in the
evolution of bibliographic control and information access/provision. It is time to take stock
of past practices, to look at today’s trends, and to project a future path consistent with the
goals of bibliographic control: to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access
of and to library materials and other information products. Libraries must work in the most
efficient and cooperative manner to minimize where possible the costs of bibliographic
control, but both the Library of Congress and library administrators generally must recognize
that they need to identify and allocate (or, as appropriate, reallocate) sufficient funding if they
are serious about attaining the goals of improved and expanded bibliographic control.
So what does this mean? Can anyone explain to me what the ramifications of this are for the collection and distribution of knowledge? Collection building? Cataloging?
If anyone out there can help me, I sure would appreciate it.
Privacy and Security are not opposites
Bruce Schneier explains What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites
... If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it's true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.
We've been told we have to trade off security and privacy so often -- in debates on security versus privacy, writing contests, polls, reasoned essays and political rhetoric -- that most of us don't even question the fundamental dichotomy.
But it's a false one. ...
This is a right-on parody of life on campus, alas
YouTube - Daily Show & Colbert Writers Stage "Code Pink" Disruption
I love the "Vote for Ron Paul" shout at the end.
Picture Books
I have just finished Franco Moretti's Graphs, Maps, and Trees, a study in "big data" approaches to the humanities that takes information about the genres, narrative devices, and settings of novels -- from dozens of scenes in a single book to thousands of different books in separate national traditions -- to create visual representations that show how novels can be understood as evolving and changing during the course of their plots and also over the larger span of literary history.
So there was some irony to getting the link yesterday morning to Books That Make You Dumb from pal Virgil Griffith, which also provides several schematic representations of literary history, as seen through the filter of Facebook favorite books with a database mash-up of campus SAT scores. Griffith has apparently taken some heat from "Literature majors" who "lack any sense of humor" and so changed Lolita and Pride and Prejudice from "Erotica" and "Chick Lit" respectively to the less controversial "Classics. "
Actually, I suspect that the fact that when you sort by category, books labeled "African American" are disproportionately likely to be correlated with low SAT scores will be a source of much more contention about possible implicit racism in this mash-up in the long run. As someone who recently taught The Bluest Eye and is re-reading Song of Solomon with my teenager, I would have liked to have seen them on the list, as unquestionably intellect-building fare.
Overall, Griffith admits that correlation is not causation, but says the complete set of results is interesting "whether A causes B or B causes A, or even an unknown C causes A and B." Griffith's master chart with relative sizes of genres is below.
(In college, I would have probably said that my favorite book was Bouvard et Pécuchet, which I don't think is on any campus's list anywhere.)
Finally, the "Tipping Point" is tipping over
Ever since it came out, I have had big problems with Malcolm Gladwell's "Tipping Point" thesis. I had even bigger problems with Blink. But that's another issue.
I am thrilled that Clive Thompson has profiled the brilliant sociologist Duncan Watts and asks the question, Is the Tipping Point Toast?
Don't get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. "Oh, God," he groans when the subject comes up. "Not them." The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell's best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994--until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types ("Twenty? Fifty? One hundred--at the most?") began wearing the shoes.
Duncan Watts's research tells advertising execs precisely what they don't want to hear: All their clever (and lucrative!) targeted viral campaigning may ultimately be less effective than good old mass marketing.
These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any successful trend. "What we are really saying," he writes, "is that in a given process or system, some people matter more than others." In modern marketing, this idea--that a tiny cadre of connected people triggers trends--is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful folks, and you'll reach everyone else through them, basically for free. Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials, by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims "E-Fluentials" can "make or break a brand." According to MarketingVOX, an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at 36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising. That's on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect. Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts--a network-theory scientist who recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) --has performed a series of controversial, barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials, he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure.
"It just doesn't work," Watts says, when I meet him at his gray cubicle at Yahoo Research in midtown Manhattan, which is unadorned except for a whiteboard crammed with equations. "A rare bunch of cool people just don't have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart. There's no there there."
And this is not, he argues, mere academic whimsy. He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people--and ignoring Influentials altogether.
Not everyone appreciates the mind bomb Watts has tossed into their midst. He says one music executive pronounced his work "bullshit" on the spot. But a growing group of marketers believes Watts is radically altering the way companies attempt to produce trends. "He is changing the way people think about the way we communicate," raves Robert Barocci, president of the Advertising Research Foundation. "He's one of the best thinkers in the industry today." But is Watts right? ...
...But Watts, for one, didn't think the gatekeeper model was true. It certainly didn't match what he'd found studying networks. So he decided to test it in the real world by remounting the Milgram experiment on a massive scale. In 2001, Watts used a Web site to recruit about 61,000 people, then asked them to ferry messages to 18 targets worldwide. Sure enough, he found that Milgram was right: The average length of the chain was roughly six links. But when he examined these pathways, he found that "hubs"--highly connected people--weren't crucial. Sure, they existed. But only 5% of the email messages passed through one of these superconnectors. The rest of the messages moved through society in much more democratic paths, zipping from one weakly connected individual to another, until they arrived at the target.
Why did Milgram get it wrong? Watts thinks it's simply because his sample was so small--only a few dozen letters reached their mark. The dominance of the three friends could have been a statistical accident. "And since Milgram's finding sort of made sense, nobody even bothered to redo the experiment," Watts shrugs. But when you perform the experiment with hundreds of successfully completed letters, a different picture emerges: Influentials don't govern person-to-person communication. We all do. ...
I wish Thompson had avoided all that "virus" talk because it reeks of those mythical creatures, memes.
I am not convinced of everything Watts writes. But this seems right on.
Can Cory Doctorow save Copyright?
... Now you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of their adorable toddler dancing to it.They are also acting as though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the church basement.
This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it, is it?).
It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not going to stop doing culture.
New regime
We need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale, hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.
A diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access to disabled users of information.
The drafting group - which is open to the general public - includes representatives of creators' groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators' works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like M馘ecins Sans Fronti鑽es.
A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It's the first breath of sanity in the copyright debate. Let's hope it's not the last one.
January 28, 2008
E. coli conservatism
From this Chicago Reader article:
... What happened once Goldwater and Reagan posthumously got their way with the FDA? The number of FDA employees dropped by 12 percent, and in 2006 there were 47 percent fewer federal food inspections than there’d been in 2003. A Perlstein blog post in April 2007 was a classic. It began, “First they came for the spinach . . . ”
He went on, “I went to the produce section to buy a bag. But they had all been recalled. Three people had died from E. coli contamination from eating spinach. I decided I could live without the spinach.
“Next they came for the peanut butter.”
And after that, he wrote, they came for the tomatoes, the Taco Bell lettuce, the mushrooms, the ham steaks and summer sausage, and even the pet food. And he noted that in the case of the peanut butter, it was a bad roof and a defective sprinkler system in a plant in Georgia—never noticed by the remaining FDA inspectors—that had allowed salmonella to flourish. Perlstein’s conclusion: “George Bush’s Food and Drug Administration—and our other major food-inspection arm, the U.S. Department of Agriculture—are Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan’s noble words made flesh. But don’t let your family get too close to the flesh. They might get sick and die.”
Peanut butter’s just the beginning. From airport delays to coal mine safety to collapsing ridges, Perlstein and other bloggers have been making the case that conservatism is a failure—not because of incompetence or cronyism but because it is not and cannot be a governing philosophy. (Past posts by Perlstein and other Campaign for America’s Future bloggers can be found at ourfuture.org/thebigcon.) ...
Clothespins!
an exhibition from the collections of yoav ziv and
gad charny, curated jointly with yaacov kaufman,
and exhibited at his studio. the exhibition contains
nearly 300 pegs, old and new, from all over the
world.
The Corporate Machine
Fungi Photos
January 25, 2008
The Library Of Congress Will Educate Your Child About Copyright
One might call their approach "abstinence only."
January 24, 2008
Essential Copyright Book on the way
Oxford University Press: Copyright's Paradox: Neil Weinstock Netanel
Copyright's Paradox Neil Weinstock NetanelISBN13: 9780195137620ISBN10: 0195137620 hardback, 288 pages
Mar 2008, Not Yet Published
Price:
$34.95 (01)Description
The United States Supreme Court famously labeled copyright "the engine of free expression" because it provides a vital economic incentive for much of the literature, commentary, music, art, and film that makes up our public discourse. Yet today's copyright law also does the opposite--it is often used to quash news reporting, political commentary, church dissent, historical scholarship, cultural critique, and artistic expression.In Copyright's Paradox , Neil Weinstock Netanel explores the tensions between copyright law and free speech, revealing how copyright can impose unacceptable burdens on expression. Netanel provides concrete illustrations of how copyright often prevents speakers from effectively conveying their message, tracing this conflict across both traditional and digital media and considering current controversies such as the remix and copying culture rampant on YouTube and MySpace, hip-hop music and digital sampling, and the Google Book Search litigation. The author juxtaposes the dramatic expansion of copyright holders' proprietary control against the individual's newly found ability to digitally cut, paste, edit, remix, and distribute sound recordings, movies, TV programs, graphics, and texts the world over. He tests whether, in light of these developments and others, copyright still serves as a vital engine of free expression and he assesses how copyright does--and does not--burden speech. Taking First Amendment values as his lodestar, Netanel argues that copyright should be limited to how it can best promote robust debate and expressive diversity, and he presents a blueprint for how that can be accomplished.
Copyright and free speech will always stand in some tension. But there are ways in which copyright can continue to serve as an engine of free expression while leaving ample room for speakers to build on copyrighted works to convey their message, express their personal commitments, and create new art. This book shows us how.
Reviews"If there is anyone who doesn't yet see how copyright badly done burdens free speech, it is only because they have not read this well-crafted and powerfully argued book."--Lawrence Lessig, author of Free Culture
"Recent controversies over the tensions between copyright and free speech have surfaced in the courts, in the academic literature, and in public and political discourse. It is the virtue of Neil Netanel's fine book that it combines a balanced and comprehensive guide to and analysis of these controversies, while also offering nuanced prescriptions that avoid the unrealistic and extreme positions often taken by those embroiled in the fight over copyright's reach."--Frederick Schauer, author of Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry
"Elegantly and clearly, Neil Netanel presents a scholarly middle ground in the copyright debates, avoiding both the misguided conservative view that copyright should be about either economic efficiency or natural rights of property and the copy-left view that no or minimal rights are proper. Instead, Netanel rightly locates a limited acceptance of copyright in its contribution to freedom and especially to democracy."--C. Edwin Baker, author of Media Concentration and Democracy: Why Ownership Matters
"The tension between copyright law and freedom of speech knows no treatment more sophisticated or nuanced than Neil Netanel's. This magnificent book searches the roots of both doctrines, offering a penetrating analysis of how our democratic institutions call for the preservation of traditional copyright and at the same time curtail its more recent 'bloated' manifestations. Highly recommended for devotees of both fields."--David Nimmer, co-author of Nimmer on Copyright
Once this book comes out, there will not be much use for my Copyrights and Copywrongs. I relied on Neil's work to get the core argument for that book.
Anyway, make sure to order this book ASAP!
How will the recession affect libraries?
Paul Courant explains:
... The obvious problem is that recessions bring with them reductions in income – the stuff that state legislatures and student households use to support universities, and wealth – the stuff that constitutes university endowments. Much has been written recently about the terrific endowment growth that universities experienced during fiscal year 2007. Well, the stock market has been falling quite sharply for the last several months, and I’ll bet that the number of universities whose endowments grow appreciably in the current fiscal year will be fairly small. So, the sources of the money that we spend on collections and services are likely to be under stress in the next year or so, and libraries will get to share in some of the pain that our institutions will experience. (There is a longer discussion, that I will provide at some point, about the problems that arise when institutions that collect with an eye to the needs of users over years and decades have to deal with the vagaries of budgets that bounce around from year to year. Briefly, it would be good for both us and our universities to try to smooth out the effects of the business cycle, but that’s not easy to do.)
The less obvious problem has to do with the indirect effects that a recession will have on the behavior of publishers and media companies as they continue to press Congress for protection against all and sundry, most emphatically including libraries. ...
The Fakery Behind Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers"
From Slate:
... Absent the institutional standards that govern (however notionally) professional journalists, Web 2.0 stakes its credibility on the transparency of users' motives and their freedom from top-down interference. Amazon, for example, describes its Top Reviewers as "clear-eyed critics [who] provide their fellow shoppers with helpful, honest, tell-it-like-it-is product information." But beneath the just-us-folks rhetoric lurks an unresolved tension between transparency and opacity; in this respect, Amazon exemplifies the ambiguities of Web 2.0. The Top 10 List promises interactivity—"How do I become a Top Reviewer?"—yet Amazon guards its rankings algorithms closely. A spokeswoman for the company would explain only that a reviewer's standing is based on the number of votes labeling a review "helpful," rather than on the raw number of books reviewed by any one person. The Top Reviewers are those who give "the most trusted feedback," she told me, echoing the copy on the Web site.
As in any numbers game (tax returns, elections) opacity abets manipulation. Amazon's rankings establish a formal, public competition for power—or its online equivalent, recognition—wherein each competitor follows his own private sense of fair play. Or not. On the tongue-in-cheek Harriet Klausner Appreciation Society blog, I found allegations that Grady Harp's 92,000 "helpful votes" are the product of collusion—that Amazon reviewers often strike e-mail bargains to "yes" one another's reviews. Klausner herself told the New York Times in 2004 of a conspiracy to unseat her. Though Amazon officials assured me that they do their best to "weed out" loyalty votes when calculating the reviewer standings, recent software innovations seem to come down on the side of the weeds. A social-networking feature allows a reviewer to identify hundreds of other reviewers as "friends"; an RSS option lets them track his feedback in real-time. Certainly, Harp has been generous to his Amazon "friends," among whom are authors he has reviewed and others for whose self-published books he has provided jacket copy. ("A book that is well worth the attention of our weary state in America today."—Grady Harp, Amazon.com.) The watchdogs of HKAS point to Harp's staggering vote total—a tally surpassed only by Klausner's—as evidence that this generosity has been repaid. ...
Via The Consumerist:
Amazon reviews, especially the effusive ones, have always been suspect—you never know when a five-star review came from an employee, publicist, or marketing type. Slate describes the dishonest world of Amazon's "Top 10 Reviewers," where a small group of writers churn out purple-prosed blurbs and jacket-ready compliments at an astounding rate, sometimes for a fee. In turn, these reviewers are inundated with a sort of fame as well as free merchandise—mostly books in the past, but now electronics and other goods. Because good reviews sell more books, Amazon has no incentive to weed out the reviewers who have turned the system into a cottage industry. We suggest you disregard any review with a "Top 10 Reviewer" label on it.
But definitely believe all the good reviews of Siva's books!
January 23, 2008
A helpful guide to academic publishing
SSRN-Publishing Advice for Graduate Students by Thom Brooks:
Publishing Advice for Graduate StudentsTHOM BROOKS
University of Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) - Newcastle Law School January 18, 2008
Abstract:
Graduate students often lack concrete advice on publishing. This essay is an attempt to fill this important gap. Advice is given on how to publish everything from book reviews to articles, replies to book chapters, and how to secure both edited book contracts and authored monograph contracts, along with plenty of helpful tips and advice on the publishing world (and how it works) along the way in what is meant to be a comprehensive, concrete guide to publishing that should be of tremendous value to graduate students working in any area of the humanities and social sciences.
Every Bush lie leading up to the illegal invasion of Iraq
The complete list was compiled by The Center for Public Integrity. It's truly stunning.
False Pretenses
Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carefully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
By Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith
President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.
On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration's case for war.
It is now beyond dispute that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction or have meaningful ties to Al Qaeda. This was the conclusion of numerous bipartisan government investigations, including those by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2004 and 2006), the 9/11 Commission, and the multinational Iraq Survey Group, whose "Duelfer Report" established that Saddam Hussein had terminated Iraq's nuclear program in 1991 and made little effort to restart it.
In short, the Bush administration led the nation to war on the basis of erroneous information that it methodically propagated and that culminated in military action against Iraq on March 19, 2003. Not surprisingly, the officials with the most opportunities to make speeches, grant media interviews, and otherwise frame the public debate also made the most false statements, according to this first-ever analysis of the entire body of prewar rhetoric.
...
The Big Man stands up for Obama!
Unbeknownst to him, basketball legend-turned-author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was pulled into the 2008 campaign fray this week.
In a radio ad airing in South Carolina, Abdul-Jabbar's former teammate Magic Johnson endorses Hillary Clinton and suggests that her chief rival, Barack Obama, is an overreaching rookie.
"We won our first game on a last-second shot," the former L.A. Lakers point guard says in the ad. "I was so hyped. But the captain of my team said, 'Take it easy rookie, it's a long season, it's a long road to the championship.' He was right."
The team captain that Magic is referencing: Mr. Abdul-Jabbar, who told the Huffington Post that Magic has it wrong about Obama. "I don't think he's a rookie. He's served as a senator very capably, and he is very skilled in terms of his ability to organize and lead people. And that's what we need right now."
Abdul-Jabbar, who recently authored a book charting the lasting impact of the Harlem Renaissance, said he doesn't fault Magic Johnson for his endorsement. "Mrs. Clinton is not a bad choice, I just think Mr. Obama is the best choice."
But he noted, "Unfortunately, Mrs. Clinton has been at many times a divisive figure, and I don't think that's intentional on her part, but I do think that's the case."
Abdul-Jabbar's book "On the Shoulders Of Giants" addresses the legacy of key African American leaders (in a glowing book review, the Washington Post said the author had transitioned from "iconic professional athlete to astute cultural historian.") But he chose not to weigh in on the recent racially-loaded spats between Obama and Clinton.
Instead, he pointed to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney's false claim that his father had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. as the "most outrageous attempt to use Dr. King's legacy in a very fraudulent way." He also described as "disgraceful" former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee's recent embrace of the Confederate Flag as a political issue.
Abdul-Jabbar saved his sharpest criticism for the Bush administration. "I don't think a country that practices extraordinary rendition and has denied people habeas corpus and has practiced torture, that is not a country I am very proud of," he said. "We need people that can reach out in various directions and make the case for our nation both internally and in terms of foreign policy. I think Obama's the right person to do that."
The American Kleptocracy
Last week, this story appeared buried inside the business pages of The Washington Post. Why wasn't the story on Page 1? The Post reports that the blue-blooded five, Wall Street's five top investment banking houses, awarded their management $39 billion in bonuses for 2007 -- a period when those firms combined to earn investors about $11 billion in profits. Merrill Lynch lost $8 billion in 2007, Morgan Stanley $3 billion and Bear Stearns $230 million, yet the executives of these companies were showered with billions of dollars in bonuses. Otherwise, they would refuse to do any work! Which, apparently, would be in shareholders' interest. Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley could have done better by their shareholders in 2007 by simply purchasing Treasury bills; a software program designed to make simple conservative investment decisions about market-following mutual funds would have performed better in 2007 than the top management of most investment banking houses. And the software program would not have paid itself billions of dollars in bonuses for screwing up! (TMQ owns no stock in any of the mentioned firms.)
It's one thing when profitable firms shower money on their CEOs and other top brass; often the amounts are indecent, but as long as shareholders come out ahead, the executives have at least some justification for their windfalls. But in the modern milieu of corporate kleptocracy, even when the company does terribly and the CEO makes decisions that blow up in the firm's face, the CEO awards himself hundreds of millions of dollars, anyway. Why is this not seen as white-collar crime?
Last week's buried Post story included this priceless quote: "'To many people, [the bonuses] will be shocking and questionable,' said Jeanne Branthover, managing director of Boyden Global Executive Search. 'People in New York in the world of investment banking will understand it. It's critical that pay is still there or you're going to lose really good people.'" Beyond that executive headhunter firms such as Boyden have a self-interest in running up CEO pay -- this can increase the search firms' headhunting commissions -- consider the reasoning: OMG, we can't lose the really good people who cost our shareholders billions of dollars with dim-witted decisions! The notion that top corporate managers must be paid fantastic amounts because they possess incredible, astonishing expertise often is used to justify CEO pay, even when the managers who claim the incredible, astonishing expertise make foolish decisions. "We'll put billions of dollars of money entrusted to our care into subprime gimmick mortgages backed by no documentation of income; my incredible, astonishing expertise tells me this is totally safe!"
Today the market fell sharply, while Wall Street executive bonuses rose in futures trading.
If corporate managers who screwed up received $5.85 an hour, the federal minimum wage, for the year in which they screwed up -- that is, if their wallets were at risk when they perform poorly -- then they might fairly argue for huge bonuses when they perform well. But there is no evidence that the people who made the big investment calls on Wall Street last year (except at Goldman Sachs, which avoided the subprime mess) are any better at what they do than people chosen at random off a Brooklyn street. You bet "people in New York in the world of investment banking" will understand huge executive bonuses paid in the same year as huge losses. What's happening is basically a hustle, intended to enrich the executives while separating the investors from their cash. "People in New York in the world of investment banking" understand that, all right!
The Downfall of the Dallas Cowboys
January 22, 2008
Apple unveils iNvisible iBook
Only the coolest, smartest Apple customers can see it, here.
Whoops.
MPAA Admits Mistake on Downloading Study.
Hollywood laid much of the blame for illegal movie downloading on college students. Now, it says its math was wrong.
In a 2005 study it commissioned, the Motion Picture Association of America claimed that 44 percent of the industry's domestic losses came from illegal downloading of movies by college students, who often have access to high-bandwidth networks on campus.
The MPAA has used the study to pressure colleges to take tougher steps to prevent illegal file-sharing and to back legislation currently before the House of Representatives that would force them to do so.
But now the MPAA, which represents the U.S. motion picture industry, has told education groups a ''human error'' in that survey caused it to get the number wrong. It now blames college students for about 15 percent of revenue loss.
The MPAA says that's still significant, and justifies a major effort by colleges and universities to crack down on illegal file-sharing. But Mark Luker, vice president of campus IT group Educause, says it doesn't account for the fact that more than 80 percent of college students live off campus and aren't necessarily using college networks. He says 3 percent is a more reasonable estimate for the percentage of revenue that might be at stake on campus networks. ...
Romney defends himself from allegations of tolerance
What is the most important issue to American voters?
Can Tim Wu fix Fair Use?
Over at a New York Times Blog Sivacracy friend Tim Wu offers a straightforward and simple definition of fair use:
Tim Wu: Fair Use doctrine is creaking and groaning in the digital age, and it threatens to be surpassed by industry practice. There was once a well-understood line between what original and “secondary” authors were allowed to do. In the literary world this was the line between the original book on the one hand, and a book review or literary criticism on the other. But today things are much more confusing. Books begat films, character merchandising, giant fan guides, remix videos, fan art and other forms of secondary authorship that simply didn’t exist 100 years ago. These forms of authorship are in a gray zone; likely to fail the “four factor test” of fair use, but nonetheless largely tolerated by firms like NBC as a form of marketing. It is a sign of how ridiculous things are today that a copyright lawyer cannot give you a straight answer as to how much of Wikipedia is actually legal.
That’s why it is time to recognize a simpler principle for fair use: work that adds to the value of the original, as opposed to substituting for the original, is fair use. In my view that’s a principle already behind the traditional lines: no one (well, nearly no one) would watch Mel Brooks’ “Spaceballs” as a substitute for “Star Wars”; a book review is no substitute for reading “The Naked and the Dead.” They are complements to the original work, not substitutes, and that makes all the difference.
This simple concept would bring much clarity to the problems of secondary authorship on the web. Fan guides like the Harry Potter Lexicon or Lostpedia are not substitutes for reading the book or watching the show, and that should be the end of the legal questions surrounding them. The same goes for reasonable tribute videos like this great Guyz Nite tribute to “Die Hard.” On the other hand, its obviously not fair use to scan a book and put it online, or distribute copyrighted films using BitTorent.
We must never forget that copyright is about authorship; and secondary authors, while never as famous as the original authors, deserve some respect. Fixing fair use is one way to give them that.
Bravo, Tim. I think this would work in a whole lot of cases, perhaps most cases in which we want to recognize the chains of culture.
I see two caveats to this general principle: copying for use in teaching and research (explicitly allowed in Sec. 107 as I read it); and the all-too-strong concept of "derivative rights." The tension between fair use and derivative rights (sequels, action figures, etc.) is one of the biggest problems with copyright today. Alas, the statute does not help the tension. It creates it. And the case law has not clarified it. All we can really know is that if you can afford a great lawyer (like Houghton Mifflin did with The Wind Done Gone), you can use fair use. If not, then fair use might as well not exist.
Ever wonder why political journalism is so vapid?
The Beast Without a Brain
Why Horse Race Journalism Works for Journalists and Fails Us
By Jay Rosen
Just so you know, "the media" has no mind. It cannot make decisions. Which means it does not "get behind" candidates. It does not decide to oppose your guy... or gal. Nor does it "buy" this line or "swallow" that one. It is a beast without a brain. Most of the time, it doesn't know what it's doing.
1. The Herd of Independent Minds
This does not mean you cannot blame the media for things. Go right ahead! Brainless beasts at large in public life can do plenty of damage; and later on -- when people ask, "What happened here?" -- it sometimes does make sense to say... the beast did this. It's known as "the pack" in political journalism, but I prefer "the herd of independent minds" (from Harold Rosenberg, 1959) because I think it's more descriptive of the dynamic. Mark Halperin of Time's The Page (more about him later) calls the beast the Gang of 500. But gangs have leaders, which means a mind. That's more than you can say about the media.
Now, the pack, lacking a brain, almost had a heart attack when Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, since they had told us Obama would run away with it because the pollsters told them the same thing. The near-heart attack wasn't triggered by a bad prediction, which can happen to anyone, but rather by some spectacular wreckage in the reality-making machinery of political journalism. The top players had begun to report on the Obama wave of victories before there was any Obama wave of victories. The campaign narrative had gotten needlessly -- one could say mindlessly -- ahead of itself, as when stories about anticipated outcomes in the New Hampshire vote reverberated into campaigns said to be preparing for those outcomes even before New Hampshire voted. ...
... But the biggest advantage of horse-race journalism is that it permits reporters and pundits to "play up their detachment." Focusing on the race advertises the political innocence of the press because "who's gonna win?" is not an ideological question. By asking it you reaffirm that yours is not an ideological profession. This is experienced as pleasure by a lot of mainstream journalists. Ever noticed how spirits lift when the pundit roundtable turns from the Middle East or the looming recession to the horse race, and there's an opportunity for sizing up the candidates? To be manifestly agenda-less is journalistic bliss. Of course, since trying to get ahead of the voters can affect how voters view the candidates, the innocence, too, is an illusion. But a potent one.
Imagine if we had them all -- the whole Gang of 500 -- in a room and we asked them (off the record): How many of you feel roughly qualified to be Secretary of State? Ted Koppel having retired, no hands would go up. Secretary of the Treasury? No hands. White House Chief of Staff? Maybe one or two would raise a hand. Qualified to be President? No one would dare say that. Strategist for a presidential campaign? I'd say at least 200 hands would shoot up. Reporters identify with those guys -- the behind-the-scenes message senders -- and they cultivate the same knowledge.
What a waste! Journalists ought to be bringing new knowledge into the system, as Charlie Savage and the Boston Globe did in December. They gave the presidential candidates a detailed questionnaire on the limits of executive branch power and nine candidates responded. This is a major issue that any candidate for president should have to address, given the massive build-up of presidential power engineered by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. We desperately need to know what the contenders for the presidency intend to do -- continue the build-up or roll it back? -- but we won't know unless the issue is injected into the campaign.
Now, that's both a political and a journalistic act. And where does the authority for doing such things come from? There is actually no good answer to that within the press system as it stands, and so the beast would never go there. ...
The whole essay is brilliant. Check it out.
Just think: This week next year ...
... George W. Bush and Richard Cheney will be out of office.
Nice thought, eh?
January 21, 2008
Now that Bush has devalued the dollar...
Courtesy of my colleague, John Louis Lucaites...
In Front of the SC State House Dome, Underneath the Confederate Flag, Attending a Martin Luther King Day Rally, Noticing That the Only Woman Who Got To Speak Was Hillary Clinton
2008 King Day At The Dome. That's where and how I spent the morning. Video excerpts here. Billed as "A Statewide March and Rally for Justice and Equity," the substantive speaker program was as follows:
"Welcome and Opening Remarks" by Dr. Lonnie Randolph, President of the S.C. State Conference of the NAACP. "Greetings" by Quentin T. James, President of the SC NAACP Youth & College Division. "Remarks" by The Honorable Roy Romer, Former Governor of Colorado, representing Strong American Schools. "Presentation of the NAACP National President" by Reverend Nelson B. Rivers, III, NAACP Chief of Field Operations. "Remarks" by NAACP National President & CEO Dennis C. Hayes, Esquire. "Remarks" by Floyd A. Keith, Executive Director, Black Coaches and Administrators. "Greetings" by The Honorable Leon Howard, Chairman, S.C. House of Representatives District 76.
NOT ONE WOMAN SPEAKER...
.. until the Candidates for U.S. President spoke. First went Barak Obama, and he gave a great, inspiring speech about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, and about hope, and unity, and working togther to solve the nations problems. And then John Edwards spoke, and he too gave a great speech about the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, and about helping poor people, and about making sure that every American had access to healthcare. And then Hillary Clinton spoke. And she also began by invoking the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, AND THEN SHE GAVE TRIBUTE TO CORRETTA SCOTT KING, AND HER LEGACY, something no one else had yet done, and something that would have gone undone had Hillary Clinton not been on the program. And she too gave a great speech about improving this country.
--Ann Bartow
What's Missing from This Picture
In honor of the Martin Luther King Day holiday, Mark Marino has released a remix of Michael Wesch's portrait of increasingly wired student offline angst and anomie, "A Vision of Students Today." Wesch is also known for his much-viewed video on Web 2.0, "The Machine is Us/ing Us."
Marino's parody points out something obvious to anyone who teaches this short film in Southern California: the lily-white demographics of the students who are supposed to be emblematic of the "digital generation," a term that Siva and others have been interrogating in recent months.
The Original:
The Remix:
Marino explained his rationale to the Institute for Distributed Creativity mailing list as follows:
Recently I've been considering these two videos, "Us/ing" and "A Vision," in
light of each other. The one seems to capture the excitement some of us
feel about various new software applications (mostly in free beta release).
It creates a dream-like celebration o the software that is part of that
contested and derided category (Web 2.0). That first video seemed to give
us a teaser for today, a trailer for contemporary technologies in which we
are the full-access subjects, the transcendental eye balls floating through
all levels of media (from code to interface), able to make the internet
dance. This was the video that established Wesch as an authority on these
topics.
The second video focuses on one of these technologies, Google Docs, but, by
contrast, also brings in images of human users. If the voice of "Us/ing" is
a timeless, bodiless voiceover, in "A Vision," that bodiless commentator
(made of text alone) shares the screen with the faces of some of the 200
other contributors. What's more, because these students are represented
not merely text, we now have something else to contend with: their bodies.
These are the bodies of "Students Today," though perhaps that title should
be qualified to "students in Michael Wesch's KSU class room on the day of
the recording." They are more than just color-coded user-names
collaboratively generating a document. They are human subjects.
As the video proceeds, these students become a (low-affect) medium for the
information from the Google Doc. With nonplussed faces, they hold up
placards that reveal statistics about the state of their computer use and
their other academic habits. The implicit suggestion is that these students
are not what we expect and that they are different from those who came
before them. They Facebook in class. They buy expensive books they never
use. A number of these students have laptops. And they are a wall of
white.
It is their image of their raced bodies that carries so much information and
yet goes uncommented.
Of course, Michael Wesch doesn't have to deal with every topic every time he
makes a video, but I would argue that the homogeneity in the featured
students' appearances communicates something about race, even if that was
not the intention. This isn't to rehash representational politics but to
comment on what happens when Wesch's subjects go from social software to
sample students.
Now it's not that the video isn't representative. Surely, KSU doesn't have
anything to apologize for. It's demographics are not too different from
state demographics with respect to race and ethnicity. It's economic
diversity also shows its openness. (Nor am I suggesting that other
universities get the mix of diversity better.)
But this video isn't about KSU. Part of the problem may be that due to the
success of Wesch's Web 2.0 video, this "Vision" has taken a kind of
hegemonic weight. Again, its title offers the video as an image, albeit ONE
image, of "students today" (in America, presumably) and in the process
ignores its own implicit message about race.
My first reaction is: I'm not surprised. In my experience, white students
do not tend to think about race. As one professor has pointed out to me
elsewhere, students from homogeneous environs don't nec. think about race
with the same frequency that students growing up in more integrated environs
do.
My second reaction is: I'm concerned. How often do our conversations about
"this generation" of internet-using, always-Googling, Facebooking students
drop questions of race, or the questions of access or institutionalized
discrimination that underlie them.
For my mock-up, I attempted to use Wesch's collaborative technological
approach from "Us/ing" to remix and rewrite "A Vision," not as a "gotcha,"
but as my own contribution to that Google Doc and a small reflection for MLK
day.
Marino gives more context and commentary here.
A new business model for videogames?
From today's New York Times:
Ever since John Riccitiello took over last year as chief executive of Electronic Arts, the video game industry bellwether, he has promised to revitalize the company with new games and new ways of reaching consumers. Now, that may be happening.
In a major departure from its traditional business model, E.A. plans to announce Monday that it is developing a new installment in its hit Battlefield series that will be distributed on the Internet as a free download. Rather than being sold at retail, the game is meant to generate revenue through advertising and small in-game transactions that allow players to spend a few dollars on new outfits, weapons and other virtual gear.
I know this sounds a lot like the business model for Second Life and other such games, yet in some ways, it seems to me something of a departure as well. For those of you who may know more about gaming than I, is this "buy to get ahead" ethic something common? To me it's always a sad day when more skills-oriented competition is complicated by economics. Invariably these situations produce what economists call a "race to the bottom," in which those who think they want to succeed must spend and spend and spend simply to keep up.
You can read the full article here.
January 19, 2008
17 Different Ways To Tie Shoelaces
January 18, 2008
Would You Like Fries With This Very Strange Video?
Another Reason To Be A Vegetarian
Here's A Video Of Mitt Romney Getting Cranky In My Neighborhood Staples
Is Huckabee Trying To Trash MCain With Push Polls? Or is McCain Trying To Trash Huckabee With Accusations About Push Polls?
I'll just be glad when the SC Republican primary is over.
January 17, 2008
Google Censors Picasa Albums
From the Consumerist:
Laura used Picasa to share photographs of her mastectomy with members of her support group, as well as family and friends. Now they're gone, deleted without warning because some anonymous jackass flagged them as inappropriate. [Update: Pics are back up! Google apologized and reinstated the entire album, along with comments.] The first problem with this is that it's hard to figure out which category of "inappropriate" surgical pictures fall under: obscenity, pornography, promotions of hate, incitement of violence, spam, malicious code, or viruses?
[Here's the rest of the original post.] The second problem is that, instead of temporarily locking her pics away from public view or otherwise disabling them, Google removed them entirely from its servers, including all the comments and corresponding sense of community that had been built up around them. This is why you should never trust a corporation to be the primary steward of your personal info, and why we distrust services like Google Docs for anything more than temporary uses. ...
"Vermont celebrates 40 billboard-free years"
From AdFreak:
This year marks the 40th anniversary of Vermont’s landmark billboard law, which prohibits roadside ads all across the Green Mountain State, allowing the green and the mountains to shine through. The proposal became law back in 1968 mostly thanks to the efforts of one man, Ted Riehle, a state legislator. Riehle faced stiff opposition from farmers, who made money leasing their land, and from advertisers, who wanted the ad space. But Riehle convinced the state that it would benefit financially and aesthetically by taking the existing billboards down and banning new ones.
Of course here at Sivacracy we are all about blogside ads, see e.g.
January 16, 2008
Food For Thought: IBM's "Blogging Guidelines"
"The Hardest Working Presidential Candidate Logo"
A positive deconstruction of the Obama brand identity here!
January 14, 2008
Another Leaky Pipeline: Women in History
You’re probably like Historiann, in that you didn’t get to see the recent AHA panel called “The Leaky Pipeline: Issues of Promotion, Retention, and Quality of Life Issues for Women in the Historical Profession,” chaired by Leo Spitzer, and starring Tiya Miles, Claire Potter, and Nancy Hewitt. (Potter has posted a brief description at Tenured Radical, in which she reveals that the room this panel was assigned was in fact IN a garage, presumably with leaky pipes about to burst all over the assembled pilgrims. Surely, it’s just a coincidence that the panel on women’s working conditions was given this room!) The title of the panel appears to have been inspired by a 2005 Report on the Status of Women in the Profession by Liz Lunbeck, which argues that the “pipeline” from Ph.D. to full Professorship for women “is in fact quite leaky, with women dropping out at every step up the ladder.” The most senior of the three panelists, Nancy Hewitt, wrote to Historiann and very generously shared the full text of her comments with me, the title of which was “The Feminization of History, or the Disciplining of Women? Women in the Historical Profession since the 1970s.” ...
Read the rest here.
"Sleevefaces"
Where's Jesus?
Lots of places, it turns out.
Bonus sacrilege: What Makes Baby Jesus Cry?
The Scientist: Why aren't there more women scientists in major universities?
The Scientist : Fixing the Leaky Pipeline
By Phoebe Leboy
Fixing the Leaky Pipeline
Why aren't there many women in the top spots in academia?
Back in 2006, I took a quick survey of the basic science departments in medical schools to see how women were doing in science. Close to half of the top 10 National Institutes of Health-funded academic health centers had no women among their junior tenure-track faculty in their biochemistry and cell biology departments. Looking at such statistics, a young woman might get the impression that her shot at the faculty positions at these schools would be difficult, if not out of reach. When I surveyed the schools, Harvard Medical School had 23 tenure-track faculty members in its cell biology and biochemistry/ molecular pharmacology departments, but none were women (since then, two women have joined the ranks). Why are so few women making it onto the tenure ladder at major medical schools?
These top institutions represent an extreme example of a general problem. For example, the NIH reports that only 20% of their senior scientists are women. Postdoctoral award data show that the biomedical pipeline is filled with good candidates, but disproportionately few get into the tenure track stream at major research institutions. Clearly some major leaks along the way are causing only a trickle of women to make it to the top....
Reflecting on Jacoby's 'The Last Intellectuals'
Ever since I read it 16 years ago or so, I have thought Russell Jacoby's book, The Last Intellectuals, was intellectually thin and historically wrong. And I thought for sure that the loud flock of young public intellectuals at work today would have drowned out any lingering affection for it.
Not so. Jacoby still believes that there are none of us out here.
How does he know? Because he has never heard of any of us. Here is what Jacoby wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week:
... Yet valid criticisms have been raised about my argument, and only the obtuse could claim that nothing has happened in the last two decades that might recast the terms of intellectual life. For starters, a new group of African-American intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gerald Early, and Cornel West, as well as several tough-minded women columnists like Maureen Dowd and the late Molly Ivins, emerged. Yet their appearance may qualify my argument, not refute it. Perhaps beyond the stage lights, a new group of younger intellectuals has taken shape. That is what one of my angrier critics, the New York-based freelancer Rick Perlstein claims. "A well-stroked three-wood aimed out my Brooklyn window could easily hit half a dozen" bright, talented, gutsy public intellectuals, he claims. But who are they? He doesn't say. ...
Rick didn't have to. We all know who they are. Rick Perlstein leads the list, in fact!
Also on that list would be Scott McLemee. And those are just the freelancers, the non-academic public intellectuals. The academic list of significant public intellectuals under 50 is probably a couple dozen people long by now.
Academia rewards public work, relevant work, folks. It actually rewards good writing and broad thinking. That's not to say that one does not have to resort to undignified, specialized, jargon-filled writing along the way to success. But please. Check out the book ads in the NYRB and see all the publicly relevant work being published by academics writing for Yale University Press, W.W. Norton, or Basic Books. There are too many to mention. How many academics had op-eds in the NYTimes, WaPo, or WSJ in 2007? Again, too many to count.
In fact, I would say that today the biggest problem a public intellectual has influencing public debate is that there are too many damn public intellectuals competing for too few outlets! That's why Crooked Timber and the Volokh Conspiracy exist.
Alas, it looks like Scott drank the Jacoby Kool-Aid as well:
But this seeming consolidation of the market for the public intellectual’s wares (however compromised it might be, however permeated by the mores of infotainment) was hardly a fulfillment of the longing that had suffused The Last Intellectuals. The professor with a publicist was not, after all, operating outside either academe or mass culture, and it was not as if rents had gone down or as if carving out a freelance life had become any more plausible.
An individual might still pursue such a career, here or there. But no generational cohort had emerged to do so. And one of the defining emphases of The Last Intellectuals had been precisely that of generation: the way common patterns of life shaped, and were shaped by, the shared structures in which young intellectuals thought and felt and (when necessary) yelled at one another.
So one could only pity any obtuse soul who, at the age of twenty-five, had taken The Last Intellectuals as a guidebook to the promised land. By forty-five, he might be yelling only at himself—for who else would want to listen? Indeed, whom else could he blame? Jacoby had made it quite clear, after all, that the material conditions sustaining the possibility of an unattached intelligentsia did not exist and were unlikely to return.
I have said it before. I will say it again. There has never been a better time to be a public intellectual.
January 13, 2008
Now You See It
As debate continues about what happened in the Strait of Hormuz, Iranian and U.S. policy makers hold press conferences and release digital videos that seem to support their competing versions of the story. Of course, both sides also accuse the other of selective editing and perhaps even altering the digital file by adding fictional elements or computer generated effects. According to Informed Comment, it at least appears that the audio and video were recorded separately in the American version and later combined.
To settle the whole controversy, I am releasing my own version of the confrontation between Iranian and American naval personnel in the Persian Gulf, which I have included below. Note the presence of the Loch Ness Monster and the Flying Spaghetti Monster in addition to the "Filipino Monkey" who is now being blamed by many for this episode of aquatic abuse.
Convincing, isn't it?
Cross-posted at Virtualpolitik.
Vote Supression In South Carolina, Illustrated
Many polling places closed on primary day
Many South Carolina voters will be sent to new polling places on presidential primary day, as one-fifth of regular state polling places will be closed.
The closed polls are the result of a state law passed last year turning control of the Jan. 19 Republican primary and Jan. 26 Democratic primary over to the South Carolina State Election Commission.
About 400 of 2,200 polling places will be merged, according to Chris Whitmire, spokesman for the State Election Commission.
The change was meant to ensure a professionally run election, with the use of state resources and electronic voting machines. But in trying to limit costs, the Legislature required local election officials to merge some precincts into one polling place.
This year’s changes have been approved by the U.S. Justice Department, and local officials said they have worked to limit the inconvenience. But the result, many observers said, is that voters will be surprised to find their normal polling place closed on primary day. ...
I blogged about vote suppressions issues in South Carolina previously, here.
January 12, 2008
Fox Caught Lying and Cheating Again...
January 10, 2008
Eric Klinenberg on "This American Life"
Eric Klinenberg is a sociologist at NYU and the author of a couple of great books, Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago and Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America's Media (which just came out in paperback).
More importantly, he is a Sivacracy friend.
Eric also commits many acts of great journalism. This week he has a segment on This American Life
Act I. Plot Without a Story.Mary Ann was an elderly woman living by herself in Los Angeles County. She wasn’t married, didn’t have children, wasn’t in touch with any of her family. When she became sick and went to the hospital, the only contact she had was Sue, the woman who delivered her prescriptions from the pharmacy. Then, Mary Ann died. There was a body to be buried, a house full of stuff to get rid of—but no family or friends to deal with it all. Luckily, there was Emily, an investigator for the Los Angeles Public Administrator’s Office. It’s her job to take care of the remains of lives like Mary Ann’s. Eric Klinenberg reports the story. He’s a sociologist, whose most recent book is, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media. (15 minutes)
Advice on academic "job talk" visits
Back in December one of my favorite grad students from NYU went on a successful job talk at a prestigious liberal arts college. She nailed it and will start in the fall. I am extremely proud of her.
When she asked me for advice before departing, I mused about my various experiences with the ritual. I have been on maybe a dozen of these in my brief time in my career. Almost of all of them have been positive learning experiences through which I made good friends and professional contacts. So while my "yield" rate for job offers is as low as anyone's, and I loath the stress that these multi-day affairs generate, I have to say that they have served me well. Failing always does.
Here are a couple of things I did wrong over the years during academic job interview visits:
• I got into an argument over dinner with a grizzled veteran journalist about whether Wikipedia was a worthwhile project. Him: "But every time I read it I find something wrong!" Me: "So I hope you corrected all the errors." Stony silence followed.
• I joked a bit too much during my research talk at an Ivy League university, leaving myself too little time to nail down the "takeaway" of my research. And, as it turns out, a brilliant senior member of the faculty took strong issue with my conclusions. She was right, it turns out. But my flippancy left me unable to make a save.
• At an non-New York university of modest means, I dressed and talked like an NYU professor (which I was). Under questioning by students, I admitted I was a Yankees fan. The chair was convinced he could never get me to come and that I was just playing him. He was wrong. But there was no way to change his mind.
The first thing to realize, for those readers uninitiated with the peculiarities of academic culture, is that "job talk" is a misnomer. One of my wisest professor in graduate school told me back when I departed for my first one that by focusing on the "talk" candidates discount the importance of every other moment of the terrifying 48 hours on the ground with prospective employers. The meals matter just as much as the talk.
So here is an edited list of what I wrote to my student. As many others are about to embark on such visits, I thought it could help. Please weigh in via comments with your own experiences and observations of job-talk visits.
UPDATE AND NOTE: And please remember that this list is rather specific to my student's situation and the institution to which she applied. If you are not, for instance, "a real, cool American," don't pretend to be. If you do not eat steak, do not try it now. If you know nothing about sports, don't study up just to impress people at Nebraska (they are pretty depressed about football right now anyway). Fake interest in football and you will sound like John Kerry. No one wants that.
Just make the appropriate allowances for your particular situation:
1) They are never fun. Never.
2) Often, when you think you totally choked, they loved you.
3) Often, when you think you totally nailed it, they hate you.
4) Sometimes they have already made up their minds and your visit is merely an opportunity to reinforce whatever they have decided. So if you don't get the offer, just trust that they probably had someone else in mind from the beginning. That's almost always the case.
5) You will be so tired from all the unreasonable number of visits and face-to-face interviews, fake smiling and adrenaline from your talk that you will want to sleep for a couple of days after. This whole experience will kick your ass. It does that to everyone. Don't expect anything else.
6) Dress as conservatively and stodgily as possible. Don't let anyone think you are younger than you are. Wear glasses if you have them.
7) Be enthusiastic about the town and job. Half of what they want to know is whether they would really get you if they offered you the job. Seriously. They will be nervous about someone from the Big City coming to scope out their grubby little upstate town. Ease their minds early and often. Talk about how expensive NYC is. Talk about how you love the hills and forests. Talk about how you want to buy a house and settle down. Ask about local politics. Make it clear you would be a good citizen of the campus and town.
8) They will be hunting around for hints about your family/relationship situation. They are not allowed to ask you outright. But they want to know whether your partner is an academic, which would mean major headaches trying to generate another job. So if you see an opportunity and feel comfortable about it, talk about him/her and what he/she wants to do for a living. They should be relieved.
UPDATE AND NOTE ON THIS POINT: What I wrote in point number 8 is specific to my students' family situation and the rather conservative place to which she was seeking a job. It is not generally true that candidates should hint about family situations. In fact, the more I think about it, the less I like this advice. It lets straight couples in which the other partner is a non-academic get an unfair advantage in the hiring. I will add something about my experiences here. One chair asked me straight up if I were married and if he would need to find a job for my wife. I was stuck. This is an illegal question. But my marital status and my wife's professional success are well documented. So a few clicks and a visit to Sivacracy would have answered his question. Still, I was alarmed at his question. His tone revealed that he would consider such a challenge a burden. Needless to say, I answered him and did not get the offer. Alas, many chairs will ask younger candidates this question. Often the question is motived by classic sexism ("She is not going to need maternity leave soon, is she?") or heterosexism ("I hope he does not bring his 'partner' to department functions!"). But more often it is about the spousal hire challenge. Now, Melissa and I just went through a nationwide senior search in which we were very clear up front that we were married, needed two jobs, had a child, and needed to move somewhere we could afford to buy a house and raise our kid. So all that information worked to alert some schools to avoid the dance if they could not envision coming up with two jobs. It also sent a strong signal to a couple of schools that do partner hires rather well that they could definitely get us both if they could make two offers. But for most newly minted academics this is not the case. I don't think there is a general rule for handling partner situations. Maybe Ted has advice on this. He did the partner thing at the junior level. Ted?
9) Their number-one concern will be whether they like you. They already have opinions about your scholarship. They already know you can teach. So you can relax a bit. Just be funny and comfortable with them. If you have a chance to lament the losing ways of the football team with someone, by all means do it. Show them you are a real, cool American. Order steak at dinner. Enjoy your meal and complement them on the restaurant choice. Most of all, act like you could be buddies with everyone for a long, long time. They are considering hiring someone who would work there for 30 years. So they don't want someone snotty, snobby, or whiny. It will only take a few minutes to show them that you are none of those things.
10) They think that you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. They expect you to ask important questions about life in the town and university policies. Ask about how the tenure clock works. Ask about whether you get a semester off for research after third-year review. Ask about the last few people who went up for tenure. Ask what sort of research profile and teaching portfolio you would need to get tenure. Every single person will ask "So do you have any questions for me?" Ask a couple of questions, even if you already have the answers. Never, ever say "No, I think I know everything after having this exact conversation six times today."
11) Ask MANY questions of and about the students. Getting the students to like you would be a major plus. Spend serious time with them and ask them serious questions about the curriculum and their job prospects. Ask them which courses are their favorites and why. The students can kill your chances if they think you are talking past them or above their heads. Show sincere concern for them and you will demonstrate that you are the kind of prof who would thrive at this place.
12) Talk about your role models, inspirations, influences, and what sort of scholar you want to be known as in ten years or so. What sorts of accomplishments would please you when you look back on your career? Teaching awards? Administration? Pulitzer prize? Mentoring accomplished Ph.D. students? Teaching in a local prison program?
13) Drink lots of water and very little coffee.
14) Check your teeth for spinach etc. before every meeting.
15) Be especially nice to the secretaries and staff. Thank them for making all your arrangements. Good mojo from them can mean a lot. Plus, it's good Karma.
16) And, as Tenured Radical told me many years ago when she led me around Zenith during my very first academic job interview, "always get your shoes shined at the airport on the way to your interview." The very act will make you feel sharp and together. Plus, people actually notice. Seriously. They don't tell you that in gradual school. But shined shoes matter.
BTW, despite wearing smudged black wingtips, Tenured Radical managed to convince Zenith to give me my first real academic job and set me on my way to a lovely and satisfying career.
UPDATE: Some nice and interesting reactions and comments to this post are here.
January 9, 2008
Can photography and CC work together?
Photographer Dan Heller has doubts:
I have never contributed the songs I've written and published, and yes, sold (which can be heard as the background of my time-lapse photography videos I've posted on youtube), nor have I ever contributed my photography to the Creative Commons.
The reason is because the Creative Commons—and the entire concept of "free access"—simply doesn't work for photography as it does for other things. In fact, it is such a bad fit, that the deteriorative effects harm everyone it touches, including the objectives (and the credibility of) the Creative Commons itself. Explaining why involves understanding how copyright law works, where liability and culpability lie for infringements, and how photographs can be easily and massively misappropriated in ways that can catch someone unwittingly off guard. This all can happen in very large proportions that become far too unmanageable to maintain integrity of the system.
Here is a very simple example:
1. A pro photographer places a copyrighted photo on a website for sale (his own, or a stock photo agency's).
2. A random 12-yr-old internet surfer finds the photo and places it on his Flickr photo stream, removes the copyright text, and gives it a Creative Commons attribution.
3. A photo researcher at Big Company Inc. sees the photo and the Creative Commons license, and uses it in an ad.
4. The original photographer sees the ad, files an infringement claim.
5. Even though Big Company Inc believed it was acting in compliance with the license, the law doesn't allow for this defense. It is still culpable, and is subject to fines ranging from $750 to $30,000.
6. The 12-yr-old is technically liable for Big Company Inc's misfortune, but let's face it—no one's going to go after him.
7. Big Company Inc's lawyers now institute a policy of never trusting a photo having a Creative Commons license.
I have two quick thoughts on this. First, this hypo depends on the 12-year-old misappropriating the original photo. That's an infringement regardless. If the kid is savvy enough to apply a CC license to the photo, he would have to explicitly choose terms that allowed commercial exploitation.
The thing is, the same result occurs if CC did not exist. Copyright is a messy, imperfect, clumsy regulatory system. That's its weakness and its virtue. CC cleans it up a lot by clarifying and formalizing authorship and intentions.
So if people behave properly and obey the law, CC makes copyright work so much better. If rabid 12-year-olds go to all the trouble of downloading hi-res photos (and what dumb pro photographer is posting those?), stripping metadata, adding more metadata, and posting to Flickr (why post someone else's photograph?), then CC does not help. But it does not hurt.
I don't want to detract too much from this long and interesting essay. There is much to think about in it. Heller clearly means well. But I don't think he appreciates the fact that clarity and simplicity are needed virtues in the copyright system. Before any other, those are CC's greatest contributions to culture and commerce.
January 8, 2008
Why I Avoid Businesses With "Ron Paul" Signs In Their Windows
Stuff like this.
January 7, 2008
"Recut, Reframe, Recycle"
That's the name of a new study by American University's Center for Social Media, which "shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving and of course, pastiche or collage (remixes and mashups)—all of which could be legal in some circumstances." Much more here.
Need To Make A Formal Apology?
Try this.
Racist Disney Characters, Illustrated
Here.
Saturday night's Presidential debates
It was enlightening to watch the ABC News/Facebook/WMUR Presidential debates this past Saturday night, for many reasons. I was aware of Obama and Huckabee's having won the Iowa caucuses, but honestly, I hadn't kept up much in terms of who-stands-for-what. The Indiana primary (where I live) doesn't occur until May, which is about two months after the Democratic and Republican nominees will have all but been determined. (The states with primaries later than ours are Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, and West Virginia.) I lived in New Hampshire many years ago, home of the nation's first primary, and was I born in New York, a state teeming with electoral votes. It's strange now living somewhere that barely registers in Presidential elections, other than as a place that can be counted on to go red literally within minutes of the polls closing.
Two things struck me most about the debates themselves. First, I appreciated seeing former Libertarian Ron Paul mix it up with the Republicans. His presence there changed the whole tenor of things, try as the other candidates might to stay "on message" and stick to their don't-let-them-seem-rehearsed sound bites. Though I have no intention of voting Republican, it was still refreshing to hear someone, finally, talking about the implications of the massive devaluation of the dollar that's occurred under Bush 43's watch. My only regret was that ABC News excluded Dennis Kucinich from the Democratic half of the debate. No doubt his presence there would have broadened the scope of the conversation and made it much more interesting.
Second, I was flabbergasted, as was the studio audience at New Hampshire's St. Anselm College, by a comment made by the debate moderator, ABC News' Charlie Gibson. He premised a question to the Democratic candidates about tax cuts by saying, "If you take a family of two professors here at Saint Anselm, they’re going to be in the $200,000 category that you’re talking about lifting the taxes on." Huh? Did I miss something here? Since when did it become routine for professors to make $100,000 per year or more? Apropos, there's a story in today's Inside Higher Education that talks about the public's misperception of the nature of, and compensation for, academic labor by full-time faculty. No wonder folks still can't manage to shake the myth of the ivory tower. Heck--most of what's in my office is made of plastic.
January 6, 2008
2007, The Year in Digital Rhetoric
Sivacracy readers can also check out my 2006 review as well. Siva makes a cameo appearance in both films.
January 4, 2008
More on "Digital Natives" and Generations
When we talk about Digital Natives, are we just talking about privileged kids with access to technology? Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of an upcoming book on Google, thinks so:
"Invoking generations invariably demands an exclusive focus on people of wealth and means, because they get to express their preferences (for music, clothes, electronics, etc.) in ways that are easy to count. It always excludes immigrants, not to mention those born beyond the borders of the United States. And it excludes anyone on the margins of mainstream consumer or cultural behavior."In the case of the “digital generation,” the class, ethnic, and geographic biases could not be more obvious.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth to this. In a recent talk at Berkman, sociologist Eszter Hargittai discussed her finding that “the only statistically significant predictor of engaging in creative activities at all is parental education.” And communication researcher John McMurria has observed that “a glance at the top 100 rated, viewed and discussed videos, and most subscribed channels [on YouTube] reveals far less racial diversity than broadcast network television.”
“It’s not just about access to the technology,” Henry Jenkins explained at the Totally Wired forum. “It’s access to defining skills and experiences. This is the new hidden curriculum.”
Unlike Vaidhyanathan, however, I see this as no reason to throw out the Digital Native metaphor. To the contrary. Unlike Baby Boomers or Generation X, Digital Natives are growing up now. When we use the term, we not only describe the past, but also look ahead to a future we can still change.
So let’s keep using the term, but as an aspiration as well as a description. Rather than pretend all kids are Digital Natives, let’s make that our goal. Because if we don’t act, the problems could get even worse.
Here is what I responded to him:
Hi Jesse.Just to expand a clarify a bit: My problem is not just with the fact that policies and studies focusing on something called "digital natives" exhibit a bias toward the privileged and make the underprivileged invisible (when dealing with education and democracy this is a sin!).
My larger problem is that there is no such thing as a generation. None. There is no sociological or statistical definition of a generation. There are no core or defining traits that exist beyond the colloquial.
The idea of "baby boomers" makes no sense beyond the pure demographic fact that there were a lot of people born between (select arbitrary start date and arbitrary end date). That's all it means. This country -- let alone this world -- is too diverse to distill any shared or core experiences from that long a period (generally defined as 1946 to 1964).
"Generation X" and "The Greatest Generation" are just book titles. And they are not even good books!
If you don't believe me, ask President McGovern how much generations share.