I learned today that Otis Dudley Duncan, sociologist and anatomist of the “American Occupational Structure”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0029036704/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/, has died at the age of 83. Duncan was a major figure in mid-20th century sociology, a pioneer in the theory and practice of social measurement, the analysis of stratification, “occupations and prestige”:http://cloud9.norc.uchicago.edu/faqs/prestige.htm, organizations and urbanism. He taught at the “University of Arizona”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/ for many years. Bloggers may know his name because — well into his retirement — he was one of the first people to notice and analyze “inconsistencies”:http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/guns/duncan1.html, “errors and omissions”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/guns/files/duncan3.html in John Lott’s claims about defensive gun use.
From the monthly archives:
November 2004
“Kai von Fintel”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar links to one of the newest (and coolest) toys in the toolbox.
bq. “Google Scholar”:http://semantics-online.org/blog/2004/11/google_scholar
It returns academic papers matching a search phrase you look for, ranked by number of citations. Hours and hours of fun to be had!
I realize this topic has been discussed here (e.g here, here, here, here, here, here) and elsewhere (e.g. Brian Leiter, but also in the mainstream media: e.g. The Guardian, Chicago Tribune) numerous times already. I am bringing it up because I have been asked to speak to a campus-wide audience about academia in a digital world and I have picked as my topic: “Can blogs revive academic debate?” I only have about fifteen minutes to talk and I want to touch upon several points. What better way to prepare for such a talk than to try out some of the ideas on a blog? There are two main points I want to address and thought I’d discuss here a bit. I welcome your feedback. First, I want to talk about blogs as a great medium for debate of all sorts that does not always seem possible in one’s immediate physical surroundings. Second, I would like to consider how the material posted and discussed on blogs relates to published material and whether there is any potential for such contributions to count toward one’s academic achievements and service. I elaborate on the second point below. There seems to be some amount of disagreement in the blogosphere on this issue and I wanted to bring it up for some more discussion.
John Allen Paulos has “a useful piece in today’s Guardian”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1353369,00.html on the meaning of the US election and the tendency people have to draw sweeping conclusions about the US electorate from the numbers:
bq. Excuse my mathematician’s obsession with coin flips, but consider this. There is a large bloc of people who will vote for the Republican candidate no matter what, and a similarly reliable Democratic bloc of roughly the same size. There is also a smaller group of voters who either do not have fixed opinions or are otherwise open to changing their vote.
bq. To an extent, these latter people’s votes (and thus elections themselves) are determined by chance (external events, campaign gaffes, etc).
bq. So what conclusion would we draw about a coin that landed heads two or three times out of four flips (or about a sequence of two or three Democratic victories in the last four elections)? The answer, of course, is that we would draw no conclusions at all.
Scandals surrounding the Oil-for-Food program and postwar reconstruction in supply contracts, particularly with respect to Halliburton just keep on going. So I thought I’d repost this piece from six months ago, pointing out that it’s silly to try and score political points out of either of these.
I may be the only Timberite who was both able to watch last night’s “Spain–England football”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/internationals/4013477.stm (soccer to you guys) “friendly” international and who also had the inclination to do so. It was a miserable spectacle on nearly all fronts (the only mitigating factor being the brilliance of some of the Spanish passing). There was petulant violence from the England players, especially the child Rooney who was subsituted before he could be red-carded. Rooney threw the black armband he was wearing for Emlyn Hughes to the ground as he left the pitch (a gesture which won’t be forgotten when he visits Anfield next). England’s footballing display was miserably inept, but though I admired the Spanish on the pitch I was willing Jermaine Defoe or Sean Wright-Phillips to score at the end (they didn’t) as every touch of the ball by one of England’s black players was met by loud monkey-chants from every corner of the ground. Anyone who deludedly believes that the population of Europe consists largely of liberal sophisticates would have received an education from last night’s game.
Most readers will have seen the footage of the American soldier in Fallujah killing an insurgent who was either unconscious or pretending to be unconscious. I’m not prepared to judge the guy, who deserves the presumption of innocence.
If you can’t trust Instapundit citing NewsMax citing ten thousand howler monkeys at Free Republic, who can you trust?
The official citations show Kerry was not awarded the Silver Star “for simply pursuing and dispatching” the Viet Cong. In fact, the killing is not even mentioned in two of the three versions of the official citation (see “supporting documents” at right.) The citations – based on what Elliott wrote up at the time – dwell mostly on Kerry’s decision to attack rather than flee from two ambushes, including one in which he led a landing party.
The longest of the citations, signed by Vice Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, commander of U.S. naval forces in Vietnam, describes Kerry as killing a fleeing Viet Cong with a loaded rocket launcher. It says that as Kerry beached his boat to attack his second set of ambushers, “an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from Patrol Craft Fast 94 and fled. Without hesitation, Lieutenant (junior grade) KERRY leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hooch, and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber.”
Two other citations omit any mention of the killing. One was signed by Admiral John J. Hyland, commander in chief of the Pacific Fleet, and the other was signed by the Secretary of the Navy. Both those citations say Kerry attacked his first set of ambushers and that “this daring and courageous tactic surprised the enemy and succeeded in routing a score of enemy soldiers.” Later, 800 yards away, Kerry’s boat encountered a second ambush and a B-40 rocket exploded “close aboard” Kerry’s boat. “With utter disregard for his own safety, and the enemy rockets, he again ordered a charge on the enemy, beached his boat only ten feet away from the VC rocket position, and personally led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy.” In these citations there is no mention of enemy casualties at all. Kerry was cited for “extraordinary daring and personal courage . . . in attacking a numerically superior force in the face of intense fire.”
Nick Confessore makes a self-described “crazy proposal”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/archives/2004/11/index.html#004827.
bq. Imagine an endeavor under which the official Democratic Party sponsored a non-profit health-insurance corporation, one which offered some form of health insurance to anyone who joined the party — say, with a $50 “membership fee.” Since I’m not a health care wonk, I don’t know how you’d structure such a business, or what all the pitfalls might be, or even if such a thing is possible or desirable. But I can think of some theoretical advantages. The Democrats could put into practice, right away, their ideas for the kind of health insurance they think we all ought to have. They could build their grassroots and deliver tangible benefits to members. Imagine a good HMO, run not for profit and in the public interest, along the lines the Democrats keep telling us all existing HMOs and health care providers should be run.
I don’t know enough about health care to comment on whether this would work or not as a policy (I’m somewhat sceptical, but can’t give good reasons for my scepticism). I will note, however, that this is how European Social Democrats (and the Christian Democratic parties who sought to imitate them) generated mass appeal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the days before the welfare state, they provided an enormous variety of services to party members including health, life insurance etc etc. While Confessore’s idea may or may not be crazy, it’s by no means ridiculous.
Alabama’s Amendment 2 is due for a recount on November 29th, because the vote was so close, but most commentators apparently expect it to be defeated. For those who weren’t paying attention, Amendment 2 would revoke the post-Brown constitutional amendment passed to mandate segregated education, impose a poll tax, and, most cruelly, specify that Alabama’s children have no right to a state funded education. Of course, revoking it would not guarantee a right to a state-funded education, but a central, and spurious, argument in the campaign against Amendment 2 was that revoking it would provoke lawsuits claiming that the state’s unequal provision of education was unconstitutional. Leading the charge against the Amendment: the Christian coalition. Russell Arben Fox has a lengthy and excellent discussion of the case and its implications. Although myself an atheist, I have found Russell’s post-election thoughts very helpful. His thesis, which I share, is that progressives would do better to relate to evangelicals and their ilk in new and different ways. The Amendment 2 story is good ammunition for those who disagree with us. Is there an upside? I can’t think of one, though it is notable, that, again, Governer Bob Riley is more-or-less on the side of human decency.
(I’ve turned off comments because you should be discussing this at Russell’s place).
A request aimed at those out there with halfway decent coding skills – somebody, somewhere, should write an MT-Disemvowel plugin for Movable Type. For those not familiar with the concept, disemvowelling, pioneered by “Teresa Nielsen Hayden”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/, is the most effective troll-repellent yet invented. You leave the troll’s comment up, but remove all the vowels from it. It can still be read by anyone who has a bit of patience, but makes the troll look rather ridiculous. So far, on the very few occasions I’ve had to use it, it’s worked absolutely perfectly. The only problem is that it’s a bit of a nuisance – it takes a couple of minutes to remove the vowels manually from the longer harangues. Seems like something that a not-very-complicated .cgi script could accomplish in a flash – anyone out there up to the task?
Update: gratitude and kudos to Novalis, who within eight minutes of the request reheated some previously existing code to create the “Dsmvwllr”:http://novalis.org/cgi/vowel.cgi.
While we’re “on the subject”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002874.html of essayists and bloggers, I’ve always liked this bit from Samuel Johnson.
I should’ve posted about this earlier, but it’s not too late for those in New York, Milwaukee, Chicago and St.Paul/Minneapolis. The Australian singer Kasey Chambers is touring the U.S. I’ve seen her in concert twice already and it’s an experience not to be missed.
There is nothing obvious about my interest in her music. Less than two years ago a friend of mine asked whether I’d go with her to a concert. I asked her what type of music and when she mentioned “country” in her response (that included references to some other genres as well) I just said “no thanks”. My friend persisted and lent me the CD Captain. I liked it enough to ask for more and then listened to Barricades and Brickwalls. I was sold.
We saw Kasey in Philly in 2003, but she was coming down with the flu so she couldn’t sing all the songs she’d planned. Right after she stopped her tour. As unfortunate as this may seem, we were lucky because this meant that she resumed her tour a few months later in New York. So I got to see her again. And had my dissertation defense not conflicted with another one of her concerts, I would’ve gone to see her one more time.
Luckily, she’s visiting Chicagoland this time around. I’ve even managed to convince five friends to come with me (it actually didn’t take that much convincing). I just bought her Wayward Angels CD so I’m ready for all the new songs as well. Apparently she’s quite a big hit in Australia (others here are better positioned to address that), but her popularity in the U.S. still seems limited. Oh well, that just means better seats for those of us who’re in the know.:)
There seems to be another outbreak of Orwell quotation across parts of the blogosphere (at least I’ve noticed a couple of the usual suspects engaging in this over the past few days). Matthew Turner “commented”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2004/09/renegade-liberals.html on this habit in September:
bq. It’s by now well-established that a man who died over 50 years ago has all the answers to today’s problems (well except when he talks on economic policy, or social policy, or class, or etc).
Still, following a link to his “Notes on Nationalism”:http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html (not one of his better efforts, but anyway) I did find a few words that seemed descriptive of blogospheric “debate” :
bq. Indifference to objective truth is encouraged by the sealing-off of one part of the world from another, which makes it harder and harder to discover what is actually happening. There can often be a genuine doubt about the most enormous events. For example, it is impossible to calculate within millions, perhaps even tens of millions, the number of deaths caused by the present war. The calamities that are constantly being reported — battles, massacres, famines, revolutions — tend to inspire in the average person a feeling of unreality. One has no way of verifying the facts, one is not even fully certain that they have happened, and one is always presented with totally different interpretations from different sources. What were the rights and wrongs of the Warsaw rising of August 1944? Is it true about the German gas ovens in Poland? Who was really to blame for the Bengal famine? Probably the truth is discoverable, but the facts will be so dishonestly set forth in almost any newspaper that the ordinary reader can be forgiven either for swallowing lies or failing to form an opinion. The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world.
The LA Times reports on “an Iraqi doctor’s experiences”:http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-iraq15nov15.story inside Fallujah. (via “Brian Leiter”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ )
The Guardian has “a report”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/careers/story/0,9856,1351765,00.html on what academic life is actually like in the UK today: the pressures of the RAE, invasive management practices, requirements to mollycoddle students, requirements to provide an audited paper-trail documenting the mollycoddlling etc. It also comments on the fact that for many academics there is no clear boundary between home and work. As the report say, we get no sympathy, because the public image is of people giving the odd lecture and reading at the leisure in the library.