August 2003

Actually, more like Conference Rock’n’Roll. The American Sociological Association’s annual meeting got off to a decent start last night, with a performance in the main ballroom by a band called Thin Vita. It’s made up of, amongst others, John Sutton (guitar/vocals) and current ASA President Bill Bielby (bass). So I think Bill easily tops the list of Heads of Social Science Associations That You’d Want To Have A Beer With. Towards the end of the night, my Ph.D adviser Paul DiMaggio appeared onstage as guest vocalist. Bielby and Sutton are at UCSB, which is a pretty relaxed place, and I’ve seen Paul perform before. But I have to say I got a fresh perspective on the Midwestern tradition of occupational mobility and stratification studies by watching Bob Hauser and other Wisconsinites tear up the dance floor.

Now it’s time to consult the brick of a program and figure out what sessions I’m going to go to.

One of my favorite silly science fiction novels from the 1960s, Fred Hoyle’s _Ossian’s Ride_, has long descriptions of the remote part of Ireland where I’m staying. Hoyle was Britain’s Astronomer Royal, and the main proponent of the now unfashionable Steady State theory of the universe’s origins (or, more precisely, lack of origins). He also wrote a few bad sf novels; _Ossian’s Ride_ is probably the worst of them. However, it’s interesting for what it says about attitudes to Ireland in the period when it was written.

_Ossian’s Ride_ presents an Ireland which has been transformed by a new industrial revolution. Irish firms have suddenly and mysteriously started to manufacture new super-light, super-strong materials, and the world wants to know how they’re doing it. But Irish authorities have declared large parts of the countryside off limits to foreigners. The hero of the novel (who’s British, if I remember correctly), goes through a series of sub-39 Steps adventures before finding his way to the Ring of Kerry, where he discovers that aliens have landed beside Caragh Lake, and have been giving the locals a helping hand.

For all of the novel’s hokey plotting, it’s fun to read if you know the places that Hoyle is writing about – he gets the geography right, so I imagine that he took a few holidays around here himself. And it’s interesting to note that a 1960’s UK scientist thought that a tech-savvy Ireland was a suitably outrageous starting point for a sf thriller. And that he presumed that the Irish would need help from space aliens to do anything about it. Ireland was then regarded (with some justification) as a bucolic, pre-industrial backwater. Of course, Ireland has since developed a world-class technology manufacturing and software sector, skipping past the industrial revolution without any alien intervention worth talking about (unless Bill Gates is from outer space).

!http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~farrell/kerry.jpg!
Insert alien manufactory here

In my neighborhood, power was out for less than an hour. A few blocks away, it didn’t go out at all. In parts of New York City, it’s still not back. This morning, New York governor George Pataki said: “If you have power now, in addition to looking out for your neighbors, making sure everyone is OK, conserve energy. Don’t turn on the dishwasher, don’t use the air conditioner unless it’s absolutely essential.”

Now I’m all in favor of conserving energy, and pitching in to do one’s share is certainly a good thing, especially during a crisis. But I can’t help feeling some resentment, here. After all, we’ve decided to rely on market mechanisms and profit-making corporations to supply electricity. I’m not necessarily opposed to deregulation – frankly, I don’t know enough to say either way. But once that decision has been made, I do resent being told that my civic duty requires certain market behavior. After all, in this case, it’s the power companies that are not living up to their end of the bargain, not the consumers. It’s not that they are now making a windfall profit from the blackout – they’ve already done that by sticking with an “old and antiquated” infrastructure and not investing in the necessary upgrades that would have prevented this in the first place.

Instead of admonishing consumers to modify their behavior, why not force the power companies to adopt a market-based solution? When the power companies are unable to meet demand, force them to offer consumers an incentive to conserve – say, a voucher for each kilowatt hour they use below their average that can be redeemed for free power when the crisis is over. Otherwise, appeals to one’s civic duty smack of being just another marketing ploy.

I’m on holiday in Kerry in South West Ireland, where the official history of a local golf club tells us that

bq. [xxxx Golf Club] has a proud history of equality, with Lady Gordon a full Captain in 1921 …

Here’s an odd little fact about philosophy and linguistics, my two areas of ‘expertise’.

In linguistics, or at least in semantics which is what I mostly read, it is quite common to see PhD dissertations cited in research articles. This is true even when the dissertations have been turned into books. (Which they often are, and which are often widely cited.) To take one prominent example, I think the canonical work on negative polarity items is still William Ladusaw’s 1980 PhD dissertation, which is cited in just about every paper on negative polarity.

In philosophy this kind of thing is very rare, at least in the areas in which I work. I can’t remember the last time I saw a dissertation cited that wasn’t written by one of the authors of the citing paper. (Perhaps there were some were the dissertation was by a student of the citer, but I can’t even remember one of those.) And this isn’t because dissertations are published so the books that come out of them are cited. In the areas I work in, many if not most people do not publish their dissertation as a book, and those that do are often much less widely cited than the journal articles by the same authors. (There’s one prominent recent exception.)

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Just catching the news about the power outage in New York and — reportedly — also in a number of major cities along the east coast, up into Canada and even into the midwest. I wonder why this is happening, especially if the early reports of outages in other major cities are accurate. Apart from the obvious (but I imagine unlikely) explanation that we all don’t want to jump to because we’re responsible people, the other thing that springs to mind is the network structure of the national grid. This is a topic of which I of course know nothing. But in his book Small Worlds I seem to remember (it’s a pain not having access to my library) that Duncan Watts has a discussion of power grids and the potential for serious cascading failures under certain conditions. The idea is that small failures can spread rapidly through networks with the right properties. Here’s the Google cache of one of his working papers on this topic, that treats power grids as a sample case. I wonder if this is what’s happened.

I guess I’ll just have to keep watching the news (like all the other bloggers who are reminded of their dependency on primary media sources).

Update: CNN is now reporting that the Niagara/Mohawk power grid may have become overloaded and then failed. Score one for CT analysts over that jumpy guy on CNBC that I just saw. He was clearly hoping for terrorists. You could see the hungry gleam in his eye. So, although the Sociology Department isn’t at the top of your list of places to call for comment on events like this, someone should give Watts a ring. Except they can’t, because, um, he teaches at Columbia and there’s a blackout.

Does anyone know who was John Rawls’s PhD dissertation advisor? This question came up in discussion around here (a propos of nothing much at all) and no one knew, but I imagine at least one reader, if not a fellow Timberite, will know.

Le Monde ran a story yesterday about the ‘Russians’ in Guantanamo who are begging NOT to be extradited. The Russian government is trying to have 8 prisoners – including Chechens and Tartars – sent to Russia to face trial on terrorism charges. Meanwhile, the mothers of two of them are begging the US not to send their sons to Russian prisons where they could face torture and death.

America has certainly fallen well below its own standards of justice and fair treatment in Guantanamo. But to a prisoner who’s already known jails in Chechnya, Russia and Afghanistan, the prison camp evidently measures up to the best of Russian sanatoriums.

Radio Free Europe ran a piece on this last week. The story was then picked up and a further corroborating interview added by a Russian tv station, and that seems to be where Le Monde’s reporter saw it.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had only one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Jacob Levy hits it with his thoughts on Daredevil:

“I’m also, finally, ready to stop taking on faith that Affleck is a good actor. I’ve cut him years of slack based on Chasing Amy, but I think his talents run to hammy comedy. His looks mean that he’s not going to get cast in those sorts of roles as a matter of course, unfortunately.”

I toddled over to IMDb to see just how long it is since Ben’s been convincing in any half decent film. For my money, that would be Shakespeare in Love where he played, ahem, a hammy over-actor. And that’s 5 years ago. In Chasing Amy and GWH, he played very affecting losers. I think Ben’s essentially quite goofy, but success means being cast in rather straight, square-jawed, leading man roles.

And while we’re at it, perhaps it’s finally time for me to accept that Keanu Reeves had ony one Prince of Pennsylvania in him…

BTW I think Jacob’s right on target about Colin Farrell too, but I’ve gushed too much on that already.

Maureen Dowd writes today about how bland and trite US political bloggers have been to date, and how it heralds the death of the internet. Right.

It’s true, blogs by Tom Daschle, Howard Dean, John Kerry, etc. are just another outlet for relentless campaign-speak. Even Dean’s guest spot on Lessig’s blog was dull, dull, dull. All that talk about political blogging opening up new opportunities for ‘engagement’, ‘debate’, and creating a truly participatory democracy etc. etc. is a bit of a nonsense when you think of how risk-averse the average candidate is. But before we worry that blogging is being taken over by The Establishment, let’s consider; are these people really bloggers at all?

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So I’m working away this afternoon (not blogging, no sir), getting ready to make a quick trip to Atlanta for the American Sociological Association’s annual meetings and this guy comes in the door…

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Amitai Etzioni has an odd post about the supposedly pernicious effects of The Matrix on impressionable young minds. It’s about four fans of the movie (and presumably its atrocious sequel) who committed violent crimes and talked afterwards about their obsession with the film. One guy shot his parents to death with a 12-gauge shotgun. “[Josh] Cooke’s lawyer characterized his client as “obsessed” with the Matrix, and supported the appointment of a psychiatrist to determine whether Cooke was sane when he committed the murders.”

The post doesn’t have anything in the way of analysis, it just invites you to blame the film for the crimes. Important bits of information (e.g. “whether Cooke was sane”) don’t seem to me to get the kind of weight they deserve. It wasn’t as if the guy beat his victims to death with the the DVD case, either — there’s that shotgun he had.

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The Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry, subscription required) asked Stanley Hauerwas and two other people to comment on the “Brights“. Hauerwas was withering:

Quite frankly, I find the kinds of things that Dennett is saying to be remarkably stupid for such a smart man. He says that what we [sic] brights represent is the denial of all supernatural explanations — well, when did he get the idea that Christianity and Judaism are about supernaturalism? That has very little to do with classical Christian convictions… The brights just don’t know dip about classical Christian theology…. It never occurs to them that we are looking at a 2,000-year-old tradition, and it takes a hell of a lot of study to even begin to think you know what you’re talking about, and yet they think that they can sound off because they’re pretty sure it’s about supernaturalism. Give me a break.

That sounded somewhat reasonable to me, since I certainly don’t know dip about classical Christian theology. But I began to have my doubts when I saw the notable Christian theologian Karol Wojtyla’s solution to the European heat wave: “I exhort all to raise to the Lord fervent entreaties so that He may grant the relief of rain to the thirsty Earth.”