November 2005

Following up on the last post regarding dissertation completion, I thought I would acknowledge the role of paper that came up as a theme in the panel this morning. There were two of us recent PhDs on the panel and it turns out both of us turned to playing with paper as a way to take breaks from our dissertation writing. I picked up papier mache the Spring of 2003. Given the results, it is not surprising that I gave it up after the dissertation was complete. The other recent graduate on the panel, Ted Striphas said he was doing lots of origami at the time. Go figure.

All of this relates to keeping healthy during the process. It is important to take breaks. In fact, I do not believe it is possible to do good work without taking breaks. So what is your preferred break activity? I am especially interested in responses other than “blogging”.;)

If you are or were at some point in a doctoral program then you have probably heard the following before: The best dissertation is a done dissertation. But how to get it done?

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Support Bloggers’ Rights!

The EFF is running a campaign to support bloggers’ rights and to encourage new members. Over the next few years, bloggers are likely to be hit with both lawsuits and regulations, as blogging becomes normalized as a form of speech and political activity. The EFF is as close to a trade union supporting bloggers’ interests as we’re likely to get. It’s worth supporting, by clicking on the button.

In the leadup to the Iraq war, we were repeatedly told that anyone who disagreed with the rush to war, or criticised the Bush Administration, was “anti-American”. It now appears that the majority of Americans are anti-American. A string of polls has shown that most Americans now realise that Bush and his Administration lied to get them into the war and that it was a mistake to go to war. The latest, reported in the NYT is this one from the Pew Research Centre.

It has a lot of interesting statistics on the views of Americans in general, and various elite groups. The truly striking figure is Bush’s approval ranking among leading scientists and engineers, drawn from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In Aug 2001, it was 30 per cent – not strong but not negligible either. In Oct 2005, it’s fallen to 6 per cent, with 87 per cent disapproving. I’d guess that the scientists in the sample are even more hostile than the engineers (though, obviously, the engineers must be pretty hostile).

It would be interesting to know how much of this hostility relates to specific anti-science policies (stem cells, Intelligent Design and so on) and how much to the Administration’s thoroughgoing embrace of the view that reality is socially constructed, and that the most powerful get to do most of the construction.

John Murtha says “get out of Iraq now”:http://www.house.gov/apps/list/press/pa12_murtha/pr051117iraq.html. C&L has “the video”:http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/11/17.html#a5913, which has a lot more powerful commentary in addition to the content of the statement. Personally, I’d like to see Dick Cheney tell Murtha (who spent 37 years of his career in the Marine Corps) to his face that he’s “losing his memory, or his backbone”:http://edition.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/11/17/cheney/.

So there’s this ad for Guinn– never mind. Check out this “ad for Sony TVs”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/, filmed last July in San Francisco. It consists of an awful lot of bouncy balls — about a “quarter of a million”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/index.htmlavailable, in fact — bouncing their way down a hilly street. It looks great and is much more soothing than “high-speed drives through the streets of Paris”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/11/10/sacre-bleu/. There’s a sixty-second version for “high-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviacommhigh.html or “low-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviacommlow.html speed connections, and a three minute version, also for “high-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviaextcommhigh.html or “low-“:http://www.bravia-advert.com/commercial/braviaextcommlow.html speed connections. You need Quicktime 7 for the high-speed versions. [Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com/.] If you prefer your lunchtime entertainment to take the form of puns on my surname, read “a brief interview with me”:http://blogometer.nationalJournal.com/archives/2005/11/1117_the_source.html on The National Journal’s “Hotline”:http://blogometer.nationaljournal.com/.

A few months ago I posted an entry called Google World in which I talked about the amount of information Google and other companies such as Yahoo!, MSN and AOL are amassing about their users.

This week’s launch of Google Base is another step in the direction of building elaborate profiles of users. Moreover, it is an interesting move by the company to get users to fill up Google’s own Web property with lots of valuable material for free.

Google Base is a collection of content submitted by users hosted on Google’s site. Let’s say you have some recipes (I mention these as that part of my own Web site seems to be one of its most popular sections and Google Base already in this early stage has a section on that), instead of simply hosting the recipes on your own site and having Google (and other search engines) drive traffic to it, the recipe can now live on Google’s own Web property. Other types of content range from classifieds about housing and jobs to course syllabi. Some have suggested it is like a gigantic expanded version of the popular Craig’s List, which I mention in case that is a service with which you are familiar. Google Base will be a collection of information that users provide for free, but for which Google gets credit when people find it.

It is hard not to wonder how much more prominent Google Base content will be in Google’s search results compared to other content on the Web.

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In the Media and Culture journal M/C, Lelia Green has an interesting piece on self-plagiarism, linking referring to a site called Splat which asserts

Self-plagiarism occurs when an author reuses portions of their previous writings in subsequent research papers. Occasionally, the derived paper is simply a re-titled and reformatted version of the original one, but more frequently it is assembled from bits and pieces of previous work.
It is our belief that self-plagiarism is detrimental to scientific progress and bad for our academic community. Flooding conferences and journals with near-identical papers makes searching for information relevant to a particular topic harder than it has to be. It also rewards those authors who are able to break down their results into overlapping least-publishable-units over those who publish each result only once. Finally, whenever a self-plagiarized paper is allowed to be published, another, more deserving paper, is not.

Splat also refers to

textual self-plagiarism by cryptomnesia (reusing ones own previously published text while unaware of its existence)

(I know all about this).

Green takes a more nuanced view and has some interesting discussion.

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Rick Perlstein “writes”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n22/perl01_.html in the _London Review of Books_ about how the American right constructed a mythology around Jane Fonda in order to delegitimize opposition to the Vietnam war. As Perlstein says, Fonda wasn’t a saint, and indeed represented a particular form of starry-eyed liberal masochism. But that isn’t the point – the Nixon administration and its supporters engaged in a systematic campaign of misinformation to make Fonda and anti-war veterans into hate-figures.

bq. The urinal stickers would not be far behind. Every time Nixon ratcheted down the US commitment to the war, he launched an attack on the people who called on him to ratchet down the commitment. Che Guevara spoke of creating a New Socialist Man. The president’s upright vanguardists in the Operation Homecoming travelling circus did a much more effective job of inventing a new sort of capitalist subject: New Republican Man, willing to believe anything to preserve some semblance of faith in American innocence.

While Perlstein doesn’t draw an explicit parallel with what’s happening today, it’s lurking just beneath the surface of his argument. The current efforts of “various right wing propagandists”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/16/witchfinders-general/ to tar the anti-war left as traitors smack of Nixon’s smear campaign in the 1970’s. Perlstein’s account is also an important cautionary tale for the left. Then, as now, there was a widespread perception on left and right that the war was a disaster. Nonetheless, Nixon succeeded in using it as a wedge issue to split voters from the Democratic party, and to generate a set of pernicious myths that last to this day (not only Hanoi Jane’s treachery, but bogus stories about “anti-war protesters spitting on veterans”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/redirect?link_code=ur2&tag=henryfarrell-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&path=tg/detail/-/0814751474?v=glance). While the public is beginning to accept that the Iraq war was a disaster, few people want to acknowledge that the US has been responsible, as it has been, for systematic abuse of prisoners and civilians, for outsourcing torture to its allies, and for itself directly engaging in torture. People are going to be looking to create scapegoats to preserve the image of American innocence, and to turn this to political gain. It’s important that they’re not allowed to get away with it.

I’ve been meaning to post on the issue of abortion and the European Union. Not to discuss the substantive merits of the case — I’m pro-choice, since you ask — but, rather, to get some reactions. The Portuguese constitutional court has now decided to “block a referendum”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4387406.stm to liberalize the law until September 2006. Naturally, I hope that the referendum, when it is eventually held, produces a majority in favour of reform. But I got to thinking about how outrageous it would be if the EU centrally, or the ECHR, decided what the law in Portugal should be rather than the Portuguese people themselves. It seems, though, that “not everyone agrees with me”:http://217.145.4.56/ind/news.asp?newsitemid=23897 :

bq. Finding ways to force countries such as Ireland, Portugal and Malta to liberalise their abortion laws was the focus of a meeting of 17 members of the European Parliament and representatives of various NGOs who gathered in Brussels on 18 October, LifeSiteNews reported.

bq. At a conference entitled, Abortion – Making it a right for all women in the EU, attendees heard testimony from abortion advocates from countries with restrictive abortion laws.

bq. Held at the European Parliament building, participants strategised about ways to make a right to abortion mandatory for all member states of the European Union. They discussed ways of arguing that guaranteeing the right to abortion falls under the European Union’s mandate because it is a human rights and public health issue.

The EU isn’t structually similar to the US (despite what some commenters at CT appear to believe), but there are obvious parallels here to the Roe v. Wade issue. Personally, I think that the right of a demos to decide these things after intelligent public debate should not be sacrificed lightly in favour of empowering a bunch of (foreign) judges, just to get the substantive result one likes. I would also imagine that if the EU starts to impose a view then that will have very damaging effects on the cohesion of the Union. But I’d be interested to get the views of others.

When I read a while ago that “Judith Miller”:http://www.buzzmachine.com/index.php/2005/10/31/i-dont-wear-pjs/ was set to give the keynote speech at the launch party of “Pajamas Media”:http://pajamasmedia.com/, I honestly thought it was a joke. (Pajamas Media is soon to be renamed, is set to launch tomorrow, and is kind of holding company for a “large and somewhat varied collection”:http://pajamasmedia.com/pj-profiles.php of mostly conservative bloggers.) But now one of their recruits, Dan Drezner, “confirms that it’s true”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002417.html. He seems a little queasy about it, and I don’t blame him. I’m not sure what Pajamas Media is supposed to be all about (and I’m “not the”:http://rogerailes.blogspot.com/2005_11_13_rogerailes_archive.html#113206774093987333 “only one”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/11/14/bunched-pjs/). It might be meant as a conservative “Huffington Post”:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/, binding its generally conservative contributors into a common online outlet. Or it might be a looser association of independent sites — some sort of syndication network meant to generate advertising revenue. In either case, I don’t quite see where the money is going to be raked in from an initiative like this, but what do I know? I have to say, though, that if I were in Dan’s shoes I think I’d have said no to the invitation, and certainly have hit the eject button by now. They have some smart people on board (like Dan himself), but seeing as Charles Johnson (of Little Green Footballs) is running the show and the likes of “Michelle Malkin”:http://pajamasmedia.com/pj-profiles.php?p=2005/11/michellemalkincom_michelle_mal.php have joined the “Editorial Board,” the whole thing reminds me of an apparently lavish buffet at a dodgy restaurant: there’s plenty on offer, and maybe some of it looks good, but there’s also a rancid smell in the air that won’t go away.

I was at a “talk”:http://obama.senate.gov/speech/051110-remarks_of_senator_barack_obama_at_the_national_womens_law_center/index.html that Barack Obama gave last week at the National Women’s Law Center, and came away very impressed indeed. The speech began with standard politicians’ folderol, but kept on getting better. In particular, it focused on some of the political issues that “Kimberly Morgan”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/kimberly/ wrote about here earlier this year, but that “Democratic”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/03/the_new_new_thi.html “politicians”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_03/005937.php seem to have done a fine job in ignoring. Not only that, but it linked these issues directly to economic inequality.

bq. And so women still earn 76% of what men do. They receive less in health benefits, less in pensions, less in Social Security. They receive little help for the rising cost of child care. They make up 71% of all Medicaid beneficiaries, and a full two-thirds of all the Americans who lost their health care this year. When women go on maternity leave, America is the only country in the industrialized world to let them go unpaid. When their children become sick and are sent home from school, many mothers are forced to choose between caring for their child and keeping their job.

bq. … In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism, every man and woman for him or herself. It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – tough luck. It allows us to say to the women who lose their jobs when they have to care for a sick child – life isn’t fair. It let’s us say to the child born into poverty – pull yourself up by your bootstraps

Between this and John Edwards’ “work on poverty”:http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051128&s=moser, I’m actually feeling hopeful about the US Democratic party. Centrists in the party actually seem to be getting interested in inequality again, and to be finding a language that can link it to moral values. It’s the kind of hope that knows it’s going to be disappointed, if not dashed completely, by experience – but still, that’s more than I’ve had for years.

I’m in Madison Wisconsin for the week and enjoying my first experience of the US away from the east coast. As visitors are, I keep being struck by the micro-details of life and how they differ from the UK. Harry and I just had lunch in a student cafeteria. Having finished our sandwiches we got up to get some coffee from a machine and simply left our coats and bags by our table whilst we did so, even though they were not always in sight. The cafeteria was also organized with the tills at one end and the seating back in the same space as the self-service access to food. Everyone stands in line and pays before taking their seats. All of this is radically different from the UK where (a) one learns from an early age to hang on to all one’s property because otherwise it will be stolen and (b) where given an opportunity to take food from the university, sit down and eat it and not pay, many (even most) students would do so.

(On the downside, the built environment has far too much concrete, especially on roadways and pavements (flagstones would make such a difference) and people eat dinner barbarically early — 6pm!!).

(On the very downside, I tuned into Country Music TV in my hotel room and found no overlap whatsoever with the stuff that gets played by “Bob Harris”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/index.shtml : Emmylou, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch — forget it — it is all wall-to-wall pap by people wearing cowboy hats. Appalling.)

Via Jennifer Marohasy, I found yet another version of one of the blogosphere’s (and, more generally, the anti-environmentalist right’s) most popular doctored quotes reproduced this time by Frank Furedi who writes in the Times Higher Education Supplement

Appeals to a “greater truth” are also prominent in debates about the environment. It is claimed that problems such as global warming are so important that a campaign of fear is justified. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University, justified the distortion of evidence in the following terms: “Because we are not just scientists but human beings… as well… we need to capture the public imagination.” He added that “we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified statements and make little mention of any doubts that we have”.

Schneider’s statement was originally quoted in an interview in Discover magazine (not available online as far as I can tell). Read in full and in context, it’s an unexceptional statement about the difficulties of dealing with the media and their penchant for oversimplication and overdramatisation. However, the history of the quote, and its use by anti-enviromentalists is fascinating and, in many ways, a demonstration of Schneider’s point.

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