The journal First Monday started publishing IT-related articles on the Web in May, 1996. The entire archives of the journal have remained freely accessible to the public over the years. First Monday will be celebrating its 10th anniversary this coming May in Chicago with a conference appropriately focusing on issues concering open collaboration on the Internet. In line with the journal’s history and the meeting’s topic, the program and related materials will be available online for all to see. Submissions are due February 6, 2006.
From the monthly archives:
January 2006
I’ve been looking again at data from the “Philosophical Gourmet Report”:http://www.philosophicalgourmet.com/, “Brian Leiter’s”:http://leiterreports.typepad.com/ reputational survey of philosophers. Here are a couple of scatterplots showing the relationship between the size of a University’s endowment and the reputation of its philosophy department, as measured by the PGR, broken out by Private and Public universities. The red regression line in each panel shows the general association between the two variables. Only data for the U.S. are shown, and not all departments in the PGR are included. (Also available as a PDF file.)
The relationship is pretty strong for Private schools, and weaker for public ones. I believe this is because endowments better index the overall wealth of private than public schools, given that the latter get more money from the state. Of course, much as they would like to, philosophy departments don’t get to spend the whole endowment. But in a way this makes the strong tie between the two more interesting, both when it does obtain and when it doesn’t. NYU stands out. It’s a pretty rich university, but not spectacularly so. Yet it has the top-ranked philosophy department , which we would not expect at all based simply on its endowment. (Rutgers, the top-ranked public school and #2 overall, is also a very interesting case.) When it comes to investing in prestige, philosophers may be a good bet for an urban university. Occasional foodies notwithstanding, they do not take up much space compared to, say, particle accelerators or engineering labs. Also unlike particle accelerators, philosophers are fueled mainly by coffee, beer and small pastries. Rather than reflecting some conscious strategy at the university level, the strong performers might represent the existence either of substantial department-level resources accumulated over time, or the presence of entrepreneurial chairs or administrators who have managed to get their hands on extra money. Conversely, schools like Texas A&M and Yale do not do as well as we would expect on the basis of the overall wealth of the university.
*Update*: Here’s a plot of reputation against per capita endowment (per FTE student). I’ve only shown the private universities because I don’t think the endowment numbers for public schools are that informative. Once again, you can see NYU is a big outlier. Rice also appears as a distinctive observation with this measure. (A “PDF version”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/endow-percap-priv-pgr.pdf is available as before.)
“Mad” Melanie Phillips continues to be a source of amusement. Since she’s never slow to lecture her readers on the evils of ganja, I guess it can’t be anything she’s smoking, but last week she treated us all to “a stern lecture”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001557.html on the “tree-hugging” scientists behind the global-warming “scam” (as she calls it). It is worth reading right down to the end where the on-line text carries a correction:
bq. The version of this article published in The Daily Mail said in error that water vapour formed most of the atmosphere.
It reminded me a little of “Mr Pooter”:http://www.authorama.com/diary-of-a-nobody-13.html :
bq. I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.
The NYT reports the victory of Socialist Michelle Bachelet (briefly a refugee in Australia) in the Chilean presidential election under the headline “What Is Missing in This Woman’s Victory? Coattails”
I would take this to mean that there were also Parliamentary/Congressional elections at the same time, and that Ms Bachelet’s party had lost, but the body of the report implies the opposite saying her win “assured another four years in power for the [centre-left] coalition, which has governed Chile without interruption since Gen. Augusto Pinochet was forced to step down in 1990. ” Has anyone got any idea what the NYT sub-editor who chose this headline was thinking? As pointed out by Jon in comments, this is a reference to the point made about halfway through that other female elected presidents in the region have been the widows of political leaders this seems a strange choice of emphasis to me.
In other news from the Chilean campaign, the much-vaunted privatised pension scheme introduced under Pinochet is in serious trouble. Even conservative candidate Sebastián Piñera, brother of José Pinera who introduced the scheme, described it as being in crisis.
The success of the Chilean scheme was always illusory. It was introduced not long after mismanagement of the exchange rate had generated an economic crisis and stockmarket crash. So early investors got the benefits of above-average returns as the market recovered. These were enough to hide the high administrative costs (between a quarter and a third of contributions) and poor design of the scheme. Once returns fell back to normal the problems became apparent. The government is still footing a huge ‘transitional’ bill, and coverage is patchy at best.
Someone is sure to say that this will lead to this. I mean: this thing has been tried in Rome before. Oh never mind, I already missed it by six months. Man, it’s like there aren’t any bad arguments about this left to make.
Amazon just slapped a 35% off sticker on Battlestar Galactica
Lots of folks have declared this the Age of HBO, admitted to watching Lost on the train (their eyes were watching pod.) Beauty is all well and good, but after my crassly commercial lede, let’s talk economics. Jim Henley has a post about an article about a BSG-inspired BitTorrent ad epiphany. The proposal: producers could embed a tiny ad where the broadcaster’s station ID usually squats, then let the stuff run free.
Seems relevant to Henry’s bleg for P2P-is-bad stuff; except it’s yet another P2P-is-good piece. Henley’s post didn’t garner so many comments, but I’m genuinely curious what people think. It sounds like a pretty good rebuttal to the ‘yes it works for music, but couldn’t it kill TV and film?’ One possible objection is that "the simple fact that people do not expect to pay for television programs" is not so simple. (See first paragraph.) Does anyone know how significant the revenue from DVD sales is for TV series? (If you check out DVD bestsellers, it seems about half are for TV.) Maybe BitTorrent giveaways would kill that.
Anyway, please feel free to enrich me by buying TV through the above links.
Britain’s Chancellor (and PM-in-waiting) Gordon Brown seems to have succumbed to a serious degenerative condition (dementia blunkettia?), symptoms of which include giving “speeches promoting Great British patriotism”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4611682.stm and commending Americans for flying flags in their gardens. I’m all for cheering on England and football and cricket, but the Britishness stuff is taking things a bit far chaps. Anyway, as it happens, I read “a few lines from Tocqueville”:http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/DETOC/ch3_16.htm last night on the difference between American and English patriotism. The English don’t exactly come off well in de T’s text, but if forced to choose between complacent Podsnappery and flying the union jack in front of my house (something only done by loonies and fascists), I’d have to plump for Podsnap:
bq. If I say to an American that the country he lives in is a fine one, “Ay,” he replies, “there is not its equal in the world.” If I applaud the freedom that its inhabitants enjoy, he answers: “Freedom is a fine thing, but few nations are worthy to enjoy it.” If I remark on the purity of morals that distinguishes the United States, “I can imagine,” says he, “that a stranger, who has witnessed the corruption that prevails in other nations, would be astonished at the difference.” At length I leave him to the contemplation of himself; but he returns to the charge and does not desist till he has got me to repeat all I had just been saying. It is impossible to conceive a more troublesome or more garrulous patriotism; it wearies even those who are disposed to respect it.
bq. Such is not the case with the English. An Englishman calmly enjoys the real or imaginary advantages which, in his opinion, his country possesses. If he grants nothing to other nations, neither does he solicit anything for his own. The censure of foreigners does not affect him, and their praise hardly flatters him; his position with regard to the rest of the world is one of disdainful and ignorant reserve: his pride requires no sustenance; it nourishes itself. It is remarkable that two nations so recently sprung from the same stock should be so opposite to each other in their manner of feeling and conversing.
bq. It is the fashion, as much in France as in Britain, to focus on Bernard-Henri Levy’s celebrity lifestyle and friends, his designer clothes, his “sumptuous” apartment in Paris, his palace in Marrakech, his celebrity, his beautiful girlfriends, even the immortal headline to an article about him which began “God is dead but my hair is perfect” – and so endlessly on, because neither country (how different from the US) can tolerate anyone who is simultaneously too clever, too successful and too good-looking.
The author of these words? “A.C. Grayling”:http://www.acgrayling.com/ in the “Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2d3cef2e-7dc4-11da-8ef9-0000779e2340.html (behind a subscription firewall).
While cooking dinner tonight I was doing my usual intuitive translation between celsius and fahrenheit (i.e., roughly correct and I can’t be bothered to go look at the computer), and I thought, “I wonder if the US is ever going to go metric?” When I was a kid I assumed it was just a matter of time, since everyone had to learn about it in school. Now, though… Still, it would seem really stupid if in the year 2642 people were saying things like “that asteroid is nearly 1,000 miles away”, and then the robot would be like “I think you mean 1,609 kilometers, sir”, and then the captain would get all mad and start muttering about Euro-weenie AI’s. Then again, that whole French revolutionary 100 minute hour never really caught on (though the watches are amazing(scroll down)). Will the US never capitulate to the one-world-government types pushing the metric system? We eventually submitted to the flouridation of water, after all, and that was a threat to our bodily fluids. What would the Englishmen of the 19th century novels, caught up in the mysterious minutiae of l, s, d, and guineas (none of which I have ever bothered to fully understand), make of the looming euro?
I’m updating the syllabus for my Politics of the Internet course, and looking, as I have been looking since I began teaching it, for an academic article/policy paper that makes the case _against_ filesharing and P2P services. There are plenty of articulate pieces written by pro-P2P types, but nothing from the other side, apart from RIAA press releases. When I’m teaching a controversial topic, I like to have good pieces written by people on both sides. Anyone have any pointers?
I made this last week, from Jacques Pepin: Fast Food My Way, and it was more crazy delicious than Mr. Pibb + Red Vines. The sweet-tart raspberries and the melted chocolate go together beautifully. The recipe is very fast, very easy, and it doesn’t get much of your stuff dirty. You do, however, need little oven-safe ramekins or custard cups. They’re not hard to find, though; I bought a pack of four 10-ounce Pyrex dessert cups at the supermarket for $8.
Commenters, have you got a dessert for which you’d like to testify?
Chocolate-Raspberry Gratin
Serves 2
1 cup frozen raspberries
4 store-bought chocolate chip cookies
2 tablespoons sugar
1 tablespoon butter
Sour cream (optional)
Preheat oven to 375 degrees.
Pour 1/2 cup of frozen raspberries into each cup. Hand-crumble two chocolate chip-cookies over each cup. Sift 1 T sugar over the cookies. Cut up the butter and dot it over the top.
Bake for 16-18 minutes; the raspberries should be gently bubbling and the top should be a little browned. Let cool until warm, then serve with a dollop of sour cream if you have it.
UNRELATED UPDATE: As long as I’m Fun Threading, please enjoy: A Selection From George W. Bush’s Eavesdropping Tapes: Matthew Barney and Björk Place an Ikea Phone Order.
When the eminent sociologist Orlando Patterson says that someone is “a sparkling new talent with all the boldness and intellectual self-assurance necessary” to pursue “critical reflections on African-American identity”, it makes sense to pay attention. This is how he describes Tommie Shelby in his review of Shelby’s new book, We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity. (Shelby and I went to graduate school together.)
Here’s Patterson’s description of the book:
Although black Americans have led the way in practical matters, insightful theoretical reflections on identity politics are still wanting. Shelby’s “We Who Are Dark” is respectful of such politics, but severely critical as well. His book contests the movement’s central claims at a level of sociophilosophical sophistication that one rarely encounters….
He maintains that the black power call to collective action based on exclusive black organizations is now inappropriate because of the economic and regional heterogeneity of the black population. It is also, he says, politically counterproductive since it risks alienating badly needed progressive allies among the nonblack population….
Shelby’s powerful critique of black cultural particularism incorporates and supersedes all previous discussions of the subject. He identifies eight basic tenets of this tradition: blacks have a distinctive culture; they should collectively and consciously reclaim that culture; they should take pride in conserving and reproducing it; unlike white culture, it provides a valuable foundation for their individual and communal identities; it is an emancipatory tool in resisting white hegemony, providing an alternate set of ideals to live by; it should be accorded public recognition by the state; blacks, as the main producers of this culture, should benefit from it in financial and other ways; and as “owners” of this culture, blacks should be the foremost authorities and interpreters of it.
We hear these arguments all the time, sometimes subtly, often crudely. Most non-blacks are either contemptuous of them or quietly dumbfounded. Many simply turn a blindly patronizing eye. Shelby takes the arguments seriously, and meticulously demolishes them all. He does not deny that there are distinctive forms of Afro-American culture. Far from it. His concern, rather, is with the ways black spokesmen think about this heritage and the chauvinistic claims commonly made about it, beginning with the questionable view that being black means one is, or ought to be, culturally black….
What is needed, Shelby says, is a pragmatic nationalism that encourages “individual blacks to maintain solidarity with one another regardless of the racial composition of the political organizations in which each participates.” Solidarity of this sort – identification, special concern, loyalty and trust – has to be black rather than part of a wider program of color-blind liberal or radical reform, because blacks suffered a unique history of injustice under slavery and Jim Crow, and continue to do so through patterns of institutional discrimination and more subtle forms of personal racism. But it cannot be too black, since this risks entrapment in the manifold errors of thick identity. And it has to be thin because blacks have got to come to terms with the fact that most of the socioeconomic challenges they face in modern America have little to do with their blackness. Yet it cannot be too thin, or it becomes mere shallow rhetoric.
Frankly, I wouldn’t have expected anything less from him – a thoughtful and insightful book written for grown-ups.
Via one of my colleagues, the answer for academics annoyed by RateMyProfessor
“http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/”:http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/
Iraq’s most powerful Shiite leader on Wednesday rejected making major changes to the new Constitution, diminishing Sunni Arab hopes of amending the charter to avoid being shut out of the nation’s vast oil wealth.
Sunnis were reluctant to sign on to the Constitution last fall, fearing that provisions granting wide powers to autonomous regions would leave oil in the hands of Kurds in the north and Shiites in the south. Sunnis dominate in western and much of northwestern and northcentral Iraq, but the oil lies beneath Kurdistan and parts of southern Iraq that one day may be subsumed in a semi-independent region controlled by Shiites…
“We will stop anyone who tries to change the Constitution,” said Mr. Hakim, whose party has close ties to Iran. “Many of the people who voted for us were promised federalism in the south,” he said, referring to the form of government allowing for semiautonomous regions. He said Kurds, who joined Shiites to form the current ruling coalition, “agree with us about this condition, and we will continue our strategic coalition with our Kurdish brothers.”
I don’t have any non-obvious comments, but I thought that this story deserved a little attention.
“Birgit Nilsson”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgit_Nilsson , the Swedish soprano famous, among other things, for her Brünnhilde in Solti’s pathbreaking Decca Ring cycle and her Isolde on Boehm’s Tristan, is dead at the age of 87. Her recordings speak for themselves, but there are also plenty of nice anectotes in the obits. From the “New York Times”:http://tinyurl.com/deo5r :
bq. After a disagreement with the Australian soprano Joan Sutherland, Ms. Nilsson was asked if she thought Ms. Sutherland’s famous bouffant hairdo was real. She answered: “I don’t know. I haven’t pulled it yet.” After the tenor Franco Corelli was said to have bitten her neck in an onstage quarrel over held notes, Ms. Nilsson canceled performances complaining that she had rabies.
The NYT obit has some MP3s (including one of the Liebestod from Tristan). See also the “Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,60-1980878,00.html and the “Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/11/AR2006011102475.html .