December 2004

Back in September, 2003, the U.S. Treasury ruled that the U.S. trade embargos against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Sudan meant that U.S. publishers had to apply for a special license in order to edit scholarly works produced by citizens of those countries. Violations could result in fines of up to $1 million and 10 years in prison. The ruling allowed the publication of those works, but only if they were not edited, since that would be providing a valuable service. The Office of Foreign Assets Control wrote that trade policy prohibits “the reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, grammar, and replacement of inappropriate words by U.S. persons.”

The Chronicle reports (subscription required) that the decision has been reversed. Now U.S. persons can provide Iranian authors the service of replacing inappropriate words.

I am teaching an undergraduate class this Winter called “Internet and Society”. [1] I am going to require each student to maintain his/her own blog. This poses some challenges from keeping up with the amount of written material to assuring a certain level of privacy for students (as per related federal laws). I still have a few weeks to think about the specifics and thought would see what experiences and wisdom others may have accumulated in this realm.

The course is a social science course (half the students will be Communication Studies majors, half of them Sociology majors) with a focus on exploring the social, political, economic and cultural aspects of the Internet. I do plan to teach students some technical skills, but that won’t be the focal point of the course. I will provide basic installation of WordPress and then will work with students to tweak the layout and style to their liking. Those who are especially interested in this aspect will have the opportunity to personalize the blog considerably, but that will not be a requirement.

The closest analogy to requiring blogs seems to be classes where students are required to keep journals. I have only seen this done once so I am curious to hear about additional experiences (or, of course, any experiences people may have with blogs by students in particular). The idea is to ask students to comment on their readings and class discussions on their blogs. They would be required to write a certain number of entries (I am not yet sure how many). They would also be required to comment on other students’ blogs (I am not yet sure how often).

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I’ve been wanting to post some observations on the British government’s proposal to criminalize incitement to religious hatred. The issue may be now be moot, thanks to the departure of David Blunkett, but there were assumptions made in the standard blog critique (SBC) that I wasn’t happy with. There were also considerations omitted that I thought should have been given some weight. Let me stress that I don’t think that this bill should have passed. Nevertheless the arguments in the SBC were seriously defective and/or incomplete.

So what was wrong with the SBC?

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It’s my birthday so I’ll take this opportunity to talk about something dear to my heart: chocolate. A friend who clearly does not realize how little time I spend working out gave me two pounds of some very good quality chocolate for my birthday. (Maybe the idea was that this way even after sharing with him I’d still have enough left for me.:) Another friend – whose wife and I have a monthly ritual of giving each other Belgian truffles on random holidays – sent me a link to a New York Times article about some of the best places in Paris for quality chocolate. One of the most intriguing gifts I’ve gotten recently came from Paris and was chocolate related: chocolate perfume. The scent is very real, and I don’t mean of some cheapo imitation American candy bar. The aroma resembles very high quality chocolate. Surprising as it may be, smelling the perfume can have healthy repercussions. A whiff of that scent will nullify any craving for poor quality chocolate (the type most likely to be around one’s office where such cravings often arise). Before completely dismissing all American chocolate, I should note that at a chocolate party where the hosts had us guests sampling and rating unidentified milk and dark chocolates from all over the world, some American chocolates actually came out quite highly ranked (including something as generic as Hershey’s dark chocolate).

I think a sophisticated chocolate enthusiast has cravings for specific types of chocolate, not just chocolate in general. So sometimes it is that M-azing candy bar you crave while other times only a Cote d’Or hazelnut dark chocolate bar, a Ritter Sport Marzipan bar or a Sport falat will do (just to name some of my favorites).

For those in the Chicagoland area, I highly recommend the Belgian chocolatier Piron in Evanston (the source of my monthly chocolate truffle ritual mentioned above). I welcome pointers to other great chocolate stores wherever they may be.

Via “Slashdot”:http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/12/16/005256&tid=126&tid=193, news that the FCC has “voted to allow”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&e=2&u=/ap/20041215/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/fcc_air_travelers wireless internet on flights, something that’s been available outside the U.S. here and there (e.g., on Lufthansa, I think). On the upside, this is one amenity that they’ll have a hard time restricting to first and business class. But the realm of Court Cases You Will Hear About Soon on the Volokh Conspiracy now includes the one about the guy who started browsing pornographic sites a couple of hours into the flight. My prediction is that the first offenders will be in business or first class, where they’ll think they have enough room to chance it.

Two posts sit side-by-side at “the Volokh conspiracy”:http://volokh.com at the moment. In one, Eugene Volokh updates a post “making fun of some women”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_12_14.shtml#1103132740 protesting about not being picked for parts in a production of _The Vagina Monologues_:

Auditions Are So _Patriarchal_: Early this year, I blogged about a controversy related to The Vagina Monologues, in a post titled “Life Imitates The Onion.” An excerpt:

… In flyers handed out to audience members at the show, University graduate Nicole Sangsuree Barrett wrote that while there was “diversity” in the show, it was minimal. Women of “a variety of skin colors, body sizes, abilities and gender expressions” were not adequately represented, she said. …

… It turns out that variety of abilities really did mean variety of abilities …:

… Pete said the committee will select people who are “not necessarily drama-oriented” in favor of “people who work (toward) ‘The Vagina Monologues’ mission of ending violence against women.” … “The fact that they had auditions means that some people are automatically excluded,” [Women’s Center spokeswoman Stefanie Loh] said.

Not just some people — some vaginas! “Not all vaginas are skinny, white + straight,” or, apparently, have acting ability.

But just to show that identity politics is a game anyone can play, Orin Kerr “raises an eyebrow”:http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=http%3a%2f%2fvolokh.com%2farchives%2farchive_2004_12_14.shtml%231103130461 at the “sad tale of an oppressed conservative assistant professor.”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/12/2004121501c.htm Forced to sit through the odd joke about Michael Moore, park his Honda alongside Volvos and Subarus, and endure a “semiotics of exclusion” (i.e., Kerry-Edwards and anti-war bumper stickers on the Volvos) he suffered grave emotional pain when “anti-Republican tenor” at the lunch table “ached its zenith with this vehement comment from one colleague, ‘I’m not even going to watch [the convention]. I can’t stand it’.”

*Update*: The going theory in the comments is that our “oppressed conservative”:http://chronicle.com/jobs/2004/12/2004121501c.htm is a hoax. The internal evidence for this is pretty good.

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So “David Blunkett has resigned”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4099581.stm . I felt pretty sympathetic to him concerning his private life, but let us all hope that his policy agenda departs with him.

Maynard Handley, in comments to my “recent post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002995.html on plagiarism suggests that the recent kerfuffle over plagiarism can be traced back to the content mafia.

bq. Hypothesis: The current rash of stories on plagiarism is not simply a reflection of the fact that digital technology makes certain patterns easier to detect. Rather it is fanned and encouraged by the same media corporations that are behind perpetually lengthening copyright and the DMCA —- corporations whose larger goal is not simply to prevent you from copying a CD from your friend (and thereby avoiding paying them $15) but the construction of a system whereby everything non-material —- ideas, concepts, phrases on up, are owned.

He’s wrong, but in an interesting way – his hypothesis reflects a common confusion between copyright and attribution. Copyright is about the ability to control how your work is copied and disseminated – the granting of the right to make copies usually involves real money changing hands. Attribution is the (much weaker) requirement that any use that is made of your ideas or hard work acknowledges you in some sense as the author of those ideas. There’s no money involved – it’s an informal economy rather than a formal one. Academics usually don’t worry too much about copyright – they usually hand the copyright to their work over to publishers, and rarely receive much in the way of financial reward for it. They do, in contrast, care a lot about attribution, since this is the way that they make their reputation (and perhaps end up with cushy endowed professorships if they play their cards right). Academic publishers (which are a minor branch of the media industry) care very much indeed about copyright since this is their bread and butter, but don’t have much of an incentive to police attribution.

Not only are copyright and attribution different things, but they sometimes point in different directions. Academics would ideally like to see their work disseminated as widely as possible, as long as they retain attribution. They don’t make any money from it – the more readers, the better. Academic publishers, in contrast, clearly have an incentive to restrict reproduction of the work to those who are willing to pay for it.

In short, the informal economy of academic attribution is much more like the kind of alternative economy that, say, “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/ is trying to create than it is like the copyright industry. Academics are usually happy when others rip, remix or even parody their work – as long as the remix artists acknowledge them by name. Similarly, the “Creative Commons”:http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216 licenses now include a requirement for attribution “as standard”:http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/4216 (it used to be optional, but 97-98% of Creative Commons users wanted it in their licenses, so that the CC crowd decided that it was easier to make it the default). The requirement that people not plagiarize (i.e. that they not use others’ work without attribution) presents no problems whatsoever for ‘free culture.’

The latest issue of Education Next has three interesting articles on teacher pay in the US. All three articles attack the uniform salary schedule that is standard in union contracts. Teachers are normally compensated according to three indicators: years of service, numbers of university credits earned, and the welath of their district’s tax base. This means teachers who are better, or in shortage subjects, or work in schools for which it is more difficult to recruit teachers, are not paid more. Gym teachers get paid the same as Math teachers, despite the fact that it is much more difficult to recruit qualified Math teachers; inner citiy teachers get paid less than suburban teahcers even though it is more difficult to recruit to inner city schools.

Al three articles suggest alternatives to the current arrangements, and the first, by Brad Jupp, a Denver union leader, describes the real alternative they have established in Denver. He reports the interesting finding that his own members strongly supported merit pay:

bq. Though Denver had a typical salary schedule (see Figure 1) our data overthrow many of the preconceived notions held by teacher unions, school administrators, policy leaders, and opinion makers about how teachers perceive compensation systems. Since 1998 our union has asked its members what they thought about incentives for “teaching at schools with the highest percentage of high-need students.” By 2003, when the last available survey was conducted, the number of people favoring these incentives had reached 89 percent. The percentage of teachers who favor incentives for “teaching in content areas of short supply” is only slightly less, at 82 percent.

So, to put my cards on the table, I’m completely in favour of paying Math teachers more than Gym teachers, and English teachers more than Guidance Counsellors (not only because I’m married to one, either). I’m also strongly in favour of paying inner city schoolteachers more than suburban teachers. But I am very sceptical, not on principled but on practical grounds, of proposals for paying better teachers more than worse teachers. Here’s why:

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It seems that no op-ed piece on the British government’s proposals to criminalize incitement to religious hatred is complete without some reference to Voltaire. So, for example, “Polly Toynbee in today’s Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1373878,00.html (and cf Toynbee “on the same subject”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1285291,00.html in August):

bq. Voltaire would have defended Islamic communities to the death from racists – but not set their beliefs beyond ordinary debate.

From Maurice Cranston’s “The Solitary Self: Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Exile and Adversity”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226118665/junius-20 pp. 100–101:

bq. It was amid these ominous stirrings that the _Letters from the Mountain_ [by Rousseau] arrived in Geneva like ‘a firebrand in a powder magazine’, a phrase used in a letter from Francois d’Ivernois to Rousseau and often repeated. One or two magistrates proposed burning the book immediately, and Voltaire wrote impassioned letters urging them to do so. Posing as a champion of Christianity, he pressed his best friend on the Petit Conseil, Francois Tronchin, to ensure that the government acted against a ‘seditious blasphemer’ and put a stop to ‘the audacity of a criminal’ not simply by burning the book but by punishing the author ‘with all the severity of the law’.

I don’t ask much of you lot, but I’m asking you to read this (yes yes, pdf, they’re not exactly uncommon you know) speech by Mervyn King, Governor of the Bank of England. As well as being one of the UK’s best technical economists, King really is uncommonly thoughtful and insightful when it comes to issues outside his direct area of specialisation (I notice that he thanks Tony Yates in the acknowledgements, who is also a top bloke). This British Academy lecture takes on the concept of risk in the abstract, and illustrates it with a number of examples related to the retirement savings industry. It’s really very good. If you take nothing else away from it, there is one point which is extremely well made; that part of the reason why we have a role for public provision of pensions is that it allows us to spread the burden of longevity risk between present and future generations.

Adam Kotsko has an extremely funny post up. The First Letter of Slavoj Zizek to the Corinthians. "To the academic community that is in Corinth and to all those who are called to get off on knowledge and to enjoy their symptom." It’s part of a St. Paul week series, run to rather good effect.

Adam Anthony Smith also links to this Atrios post from a couple days back which I somehow missed. "A life of plenty, of simple pleasures." The school where the booklet in question is being taught claims to teach as well "the writings of Plato and Socrates." Indeed. WWSW?

A while ago Chris reported that Michael Marmot was the star of one of the Priority in Practice conferences that Jo Wolff has been organizing. Marmot’s book The Status Syndrome has now been out for a few months, and lives up to Chris’s billing: even for those who were aware of the Whitehall studies and have been thinking through their significance for how to think both about egalitarianism in theory and social policy in practice will find it a very valuable read. Bill Gardner, who guested here in the week before the election, has an initial post reviewing the book at his excellent Maternal and Child Health site, and promises more. A taste:

bq. Marmot’s fundamental empirical finding is that there is a social gradient in health, that is, when you group people according to their places in social hierarchies, you find better health and greater longevity in each successively higher class. His classic work studied the British civil service. He placed civil servants into four grades: administrators who set policy, executives who carry it out, clerical staff, and support personnel. There was a four-fold greater mortality rate from ages 40-64 for support personnel versus administrators. This was a large effect, and much larger than the difference in mortality rates related to conventional measures of social class. Why should the gradient in mortality be larger within one organization than within society as a whole? In Marmot’s view, the British civil service organization chart allowed him to measure individuals’ control over their own lives and their subjection to the control of others more precisely than conventional measures of social-economic status.

bq. Marmot argues that the principal explanation for the status syndrome is not relative income, not higher rates of health-risk behaviors among the lower classes, and not status-related differences in genes. Income, heath-related behavior, and genes are all important determinants of health, but their effects are largely independent of the effect of your place in the social hierarchy and only partially explain the social gradient. What matters is autonomy:

bq. for people above a certain material threshold of well-being, another sort of well-being is central. Autonomy – how much control you have over your life – and the opportunities you have for full social engagement and participation are crucial for health, well-being, and longevity. It is inequality in these that plays a big part in the social gradient in health. Degrees in control and participation underlie the status syndrome.

A couple of days ago, I got into a bit of a “back-and-forth”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002980.html with Stephen Bainbridge about his interpretation of a Jonathan Chait piece. While I still think that he should have been more generous in his interpretation of Chait, I was less generous still in my response, and believe on reflection that I owe Prof. Bainbridge an apology. God knows, a bit of snarkiness here and there enlivens discussion in the blogosphere, but it also tends to drive out proper argument in favour of the venting of spleen on both sides. I think we could have had a proper argument here. My bad.