From the monthly archives:

March 2005

Blog panel in DC this Friday

by Eszter Hargittai on March 14, 2005

The Eastern Sociological Society annual meetings will be in Washington, D.C. this weekend at the Wyndham Hotel. I organized a mini-conference on Sociology and the Internet for it that includes a session called “Can Blogs Influence Public Policy?”. This session will be held at 8:30am this Friday. If you’re in the area and inclined to be up and about at that hour, please stop by. Panelists are as follows:

* Tyler Cowen, George Mason University (Update: Unfortunately, it turns out that Tyler Cowen won’t be able to make it.)
* Henry Farrell, George Washington University
* Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
* Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly and Princeton University
* Discussant: Jeff Weintraub, Lehigh University and University of Pennsylvania

See information about the other panels in this mini-conference below the fold. [click to continue…]

Torture

by Kieran Healy on March 13, 2005

Two good posts on the continuing slide towards routinized and euphemized torture by the U.S., one at “Body and Soul”:http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/the_beast_in_us.html and one at “Respectful of Otters”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#111068506853331238. Jim Henley “notes”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/11/4026 a couple of recent domestic crime cases where the obvious suspects turned out not to have done it, asking “Couldn’t we have tortured the “right” people into confessing to both these crimes?” (That “real-estate arson”:http://www.jrrobertssecurity.com/security-news/security-crime-news0013.htm last year in Maryland was in that category, too.) Meanwhile, “Juan Non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_06-2005_03_12.shtml#1110426704 might be trying to talk himself into it through the “latest version”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html of our old friend, the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power.

Propaganda and advertising

by John Q on March 13, 2005

This NYT report shows how the Bush Administration has been producing covert propaganda, which is then shown on US TV stations as news, with actors posing as reporters. It would take much more than this to surprise me in relation to the Bush Administration, and in any case, the practice apparently began under Clinton.

What did strike me was that, while the NYT went in for plenty of handwringing about the government manipulating the news, the report showed no concern about the fact (news to me) that corporations have been doing this for years, more or less openly, to the extent that those involved in producing “video news releases” have their own association, annual awards and so on

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance.

Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But the standard press release story opens with what is presented as a paraphrase of a quote “In Washington today, Senator X criticised the neglect of problem Y …” or whatever. Even if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there’s no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer’s key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion.

But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with “advertisement” in small print at the bottom of the page.

I don’t know anything about the legality of all this. Here in Australia, radio commentators got into a heap of strife over “cash for comment”, accepting money from corporations to say nice things about them. But this was advertising presented as opinion. Presenting advertising as news seems far worse to me.

The issue of paid-for or sponsored political comment has already arisen in relation to blogging. It seems unlikely that commercial PR can be far behind, if it isn’t here already.

Wonderful photographs

by Chris Bertram on March 13, 2005

This post contains a valuable commercial opportunity for someone, but I’m giving the advice for free. If I were a publisher of art-books, a commissioner of programmes for a channel like BBC4, or the editor of an art magazine or a Sunday supplement, I’d be desperately trying to do something on the photographs of Gustav Szathmary. Szathmary was the lover of the well-known German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the “Modersohn-Becker Museum”:http://www.pmbm.de/ in Bremen, Germany currently has an exhibition of his work. (He was a composer and an inventor of photographic equipment too.) I toured the exhibition yesterday with another academic (and anonoblogger) who, like me, was there for the “Social Justice Conference”:http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/socialjustice/ at the GSS at the University of Bremen. We were both stunned by the Szathmary’s portraits of his friends. The pictures, from about 1905, are so natural and lively that — allowing for changes in clothing in some cases — they could have been taken at any time up to last week. There’s hardly anything about Szathmary on the internet (8 hits on google and 9 on allthweb) and the only way you can see any of the photos is by “downloading the German catalogue”:http://www.cupere.de/pdf/gustav_szathmary.pdf (only a small selection, right at the end of this enormous PDF) or by visiting Bremen. There’s also “an html-page on Szathmary”:http://www.cupere.de/gustav_1.htm , linking to the catalogue, but without any of the relevant pictures.

(BTW, if anyone actually is a commissioning editor etc., reads this page, acts on it, and something comes about, I’d appreciate a free copy or an invite to the opening etc.)

Update: See also Gwydion the Magician’s take on “Gustav Szathmary and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler”:http://gwydionthemagician.blogspot.com/2005/03/joys-of-bremen-elfriede-lohse-wchtler.html .

UPDATE: See the link from Andrew’s comment below: Szathmary appears to be a spoof character wholly invented by artist Dirk Hennig. Doh!

Teething Report II

by Kieran Healy on March 12, 2005

Teething continues apace. Right now the main issue is with formatting. More below the fold.

Update: Now we have comment previewing and validation. We aim to please. Seems to be working OK.

[click to continue…]

Request for help

by John Q on March 11, 2005

Although I read quite a bit, one thing I always have difficulty with is suggesting good readings on topics, or knowing who originally proposed some idea. I think this has something to do with the fact that I tend to flit from one topic to another, picking up ideas but rarely doing a proper review of the literature. In any case, I’ve been asked to suggest some readings and so I thought I’d pass this request on to any readers who can help me[1]. What I’d like is either an original/early source for various concepts or a more recent summary discussion, ideally one accessible to an intelligent general reader. Anyone with useful suggestions gets an acknowledgement in my forthcoming Oxford Handbook chapter which is, literally, priceless.

Here’s my list of terms

* Crowding out
* Twin deficits hypothesis
* Shadow price
* Golden rule (for budgeting in UK and elsewhere)
* Globalisation
* Crony capitalism

Thanks in advance for any help

fn1. There is a piece of blog jargon for what I’m doing here, but I refuse to even mention it. As Belle said on this point a while back, if we keep going this way, we might as well just change the word “post” to “smegma” and have done with it.

The front page

by John Q on March 11, 2005

In my first-ever blog post (apart from a Hello World! announcement), I commented on the fact that, whereas trade and current account deficits were big news in Australia, US papers buried them in the back pages. At least in the online edition of the New York Times, this is no longer the case. The latest US Trade deficit ($58.3 billion in January) is front-page news.

Despite this catch-up, it’s still true that anyone wanting coverage of economic issues in the US would do far better to read blogs than to follow either the NY Times or the WSJ, and no other mainstream media even come close. It isn’t even true, as it is in other cases, that bloggers need the established media to get the facts on which they can then comment. The NY Times story linked above is basically a rewrite of the Bureau of Economic Analysis press release which you can get by automatic email if you want.

The competition is much tougher in Australia. Media coverage of economic issues is better, the number of economist-bloggers is smaller and quite a few of us play both sides of the street anyway.

In Good Faith

by Harry on March 11, 2005

My review of In Good Faith in the TES is now on-line (or, at least, it seems to be when I look at it). Its a book by 3 British academics about state-funded faith schools in the UK, and might be of some interest to non-Brits. who want to know how the British system works. My review doesn’t seem to have done much for its amazon sales. Here is a taster:

the authors have researched a large number of Muslim, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Sikh, Church of England and Roman Catholic schools, and their findings make a vital contribution to the debate about faith schooling. They highlight the rise, since 1998, of non-Christian state-funded faith schools, and lay out the controversies, as well as providing a good deal of pertinent data. The authors rightly place Muslim schools at the centre of the debate about faith schooling. Islam is the largest non-Christian faith in Britain, and has the worst press. It is the only religion about which it is permissible to publicly express uninformed hostile opinions. The sagacious Lord Hattersley is quoted as pointing out that “fundamentalism is less acceptable when it is not white”. Islam has been a focal point for the new racism, and remains on the edge of mainstream British life.

Lecturing is Dead?

by Harry on March 11, 2005

If you haven’t yet followed any of our numerous links to Scott McLemee’s columns in Inside Higher Education you might want to start by checking out this brilliant little essay about the lost art of the lecture (and no, he doesn’t pay us a cent for the links). Apparently the lecture is not only dead, but is widely regarded as

“another form of child abuse, aimed at nominal adults, of course, but still young people presumably subjugated and entrapped in an environment controlled by an authoritarian leader” — leaving them no self-defense except “to fall asleep to escape the painful environment they have paid so dearly to join.”

Worse, my former colleague Ron Barnett is quoted as saying that the lecture:

“keeps channels of communication closed, freezes hierarchy between lecturers and students and removes any responsibility on the student to respond.”

[click to continue…]

Academic Blogs

by Chris Bertram on March 11, 2005

This list is being maintained for archival purposes only. It is no longer being updated. If you wish to consult an up-to-date list, or add an academic blog, go to to the academic blogs wiki, maintained by Henry Farrell at “http://www.academicblogs.org”:http://www.academicblogs.org

Teething Report

by Kieran Healy on March 11, 2005

So I’ve been experimenting with various “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ plugins for WordPress. The best one so far seems to be “Text Control”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl, which allows for a lot of flexibility. In particular, it’s supposed to support per-post choices about which markup to use. But although I can set global options, no options menu appears when I’m editing a new post. Is this a known bug?

I’ve also been looking at various spam filters. “Spam Karma”:http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ looks comprehensive, but so far has proved a little enthusiastic with the false positives. Sorry to those affected. I’ve turned down the volume on it a bit, so hopefully that will stop being a problem. Any advice on fine-tuning Spam Karma’s options?

Also, if you notice any severe slowdowns or other performance issues, please let me know.

15 days to go

by Harry on March 11, 2005

I suppose that every Brit who reads this site already knows about this, but the rest may not. The die-hard fans seem pleased, but it is very hard to tell whether that is just a function of the relief they feel.

When I first heard about the return I had a conversation with my favourite pop star (no, I won’t tell you who that is) who expressed skepticism: on the grounds that the only way the series can sell is by Americanising it. My skepticism is more based on the fact that the post-war social-democratic consensus is so long dead that a show that self-consciously embodied it would now seem weird; but if the doctor were not a social democrat he would not be the doctor. However, at least the Americanisation thesis seems false, given the star’s disavowal of both sexism (ha!) and RP.

All bloggers are liars

by John Q on March 10, 2005

Slate runs a good debunking of romantic popular misinterpetations of Godel’s theorem. Key quote

The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.”

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen dubious appeals to intuition or claims about chaos theory and the like supported with reference to Godel’s theorem, but I have derived the following proposition:

Quiggin’s metatheorem: Any interesting conclusion derived with reference to Godel’s theorem is unfounded.

Feel free to evaluate with reference to the post title, and your level of interest in the formalist program.

The Great Migration

by Kieran Healy on March 10, 2005

CT has switched platforms from MovableType to WordPress. Thanks to lead WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg for doing the behind-the-scenes work on this. We hope this move will make things easier for our readers.[1] For one thing, it should be the end of double- triple- or even duodecuple-posted comments. These were becoming an embarrassing CT hallmark, thanks to our outdated installation of MovableType and way too much server load. Trackback spam and other blogging bugaboos should also become easier to manage. More generally, it’s good to move over to an open-source platform.

I expect there will be teething problems in the short-term, as we fine-tune the layout and learn how to use the new software. We hope you’ll bear with us. Right now, our main page doesn’t render properly in Safari: the right sidebar text ends up positioned on the left. This isn’t a problem on Firefox or IE. If there are any CSS gurus out there who want to suggest a fix, we’d be very grateful.

fn1. This is a test of footnotes.

It’s a Cookbook!

by Henry Farrell on March 10, 2005

I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee “column”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs__11.

bq. At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used — with very different intentions, of course — at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.

Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.

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