August 2006

There are some budding investigative hacks among my fellow Timberers, I see – Jim having concluded from my reading of a free Daily Mail that I must have traveled ‘a step above steerage’ on my BA flight from London to NY. Spot on! I actually flew premium economy (World Traveller Plus), having been upgraded (probably due to the frequency of my flying) from the steerage ticket which is all that The Economist allows its journalists to have (except on flights of more than 11 hours, I think, which none of us ever take. Genius). Premium economy means more leg room, which is frankly all I want, but is otherwise identical to the steerage service – with the one great advantage that you get off the plane sooner, and so have to spend less time queueing in US immigration.

Compared to that of, say, an Arab, my experience of US immigration is admittedly a doddle. But standing in line for an hour after a long flight is no fun, with the only entertainment being celebrity spotting. Sir David Frost delighted us steerage types by trying and failing to get to the front of the queue – though a small lady mysteriously appeared (perhaps from steerage?) to carry his bags. I also saw John Porter, the son of Lady Shirley Porter, the famous Tory jerrymanderer and Tesco heiress, who has controversially just returned from exile to England. I have met John before, and had hoped for a chat – but he was led off into the dreaded private room by immigration officers. His traveling companion said that this is the fifth time this has happened, as he has a name similar to someone on the US watch list. Presumably not a terrorist – but maybe the director of a British online gambling firm or an investment bank that did business with Enron? The US really does itself no favours on the PR front.

Anyway, to my point. I tried to use my mobile phone while waiting in immigration, and was soon ordered to stop. The same happened on the plane, as we were taxi-ing to the terminal. Can anyone explain this intolerance of phones? Perhaps the immigration officers prefer silence in their halls, but there is no ban on conversation per se. As for mobile phoning on a plane, surely it is time for a consistent policy for all airlines, which clearly have no idea why they have the policies they do. Most US airlines allow phones to be switched on as soon as the wheels hit the ground, which surely makes sense if you buy the main justification offered for banning the use of mobile phones in the air – namely that they might interfere with the plane’s electrical instruments. However, my science and technology colleagues tell me that there is no way that a mobile phone can interfere with the electrics in this way, and that it is perfectly safe to use phones in the air. Indeed, several phones are usually on, inadvertently, during a typical transatlantic flight, and do no harm. Surely it is time to free the mobile phone for use in flight – though if it happens, I bet the first flight I’ll be sat next to a teenage girl from California who spends the entire flight, like, gossiping, like, to, like, her, like, friends.

Via “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/archives/002661.html , I see that the Bush administration “is now proposing amendments”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/08/AR2006080801276.html to the War Crimes Act in order to protect CIA operatives and former military personnel from prosecution for violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions. The proposal is to replace general protections against degrading treatment with a list of specific offences. Guess what gets excluded:

bq. … humiliations, degrading treatment and other acts specifically deemed as “outrages” by the international tribunal prosecuting war crimes in the former Yugoslavia — such as placing prisoners in “inappropriate conditions of confinement,” forcing them to urinate or defecate in their clothes, and merely threatening prisoners with “physical, mental, or sexual violence” — would not be among the listed U.S. crimes, officials said.

I’ve been reading Steven Poole’s Unspeak and he observes that having introduced a five-level color coded terror alert, the government has never used the top level (red) or the bottom two levels (blue and green). The obvious reason is that a red alert would require some specific action, while a move to a blue or green level would imply that there was some prospect of the War on Terror actually ending.

I’ve noticed much the same phenomenon with 5-point grading scales for worker performance, such as those used in the Australian Public Service for a while. A top score suggests a requirement for some kind of substantial reward, so these are rare, while a score of 4 or 5 implies a need for counselling and a possibility of dismissal. So just about everyone gets a 2 or a 3, yielding, in effect, a two-point scale.

I imagine someone in psychometrics must have studied this kind of thing in general. Any pointers?

Update James Joyner at Outside the Beltway made the same point a couple of years ago. BTW, I saw a fun movie clip with an earnest PR type talking about the creation of the color code, maybe posted by Eszter. I couldn’t find it on a quick search. Can anyone remember this?

Yet further update One day after I posted this, the Red Alert level has finally been used, but apparently only for commercial flights from Britain to the US, in response to the announcement by British authorities that they have detected a terrorist threat to blow up planes.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I was going to be on Warren Olney’s “To the Point” show, which is syndicated to a variety of public radio stations. The topic was the effects of blogs on the Lamont-Lieberman contest – my less-than original take on it was that they weren’t having much effect on the ground, but that they were certainly shaping national perceptions of the competition. I did get in a few digs at Martin Peretz’s “lunatic screed”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008760 in the _Wall Street Journal_ yesterday, which another of the guests, notorious WSJ ideologue John Fund, was touting as a sober reflection on how the Democrats were going to the dogs. If anyone’s interested, the show should be available “here”:http://www.kcrw.com/show/tp (I don’t do the RealPlayer thing, so I haven’t verified that the feed works).

I’m looking to outsource some work and could use some advice on:

1. what to call the work I need done
2. what service to use
3. what pitfalls to avoid

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Thanks for that generous intro, Maria. Wiping my drool from my chin, I will see if I can get into this blogging thing. I’ve noticed one or two provocative comments on this site about the rag where I ply my trade, so I’d better make it clear that I’m blogging in a personal capacity, and in the best Falstaffian traditions, I will use my discretion and not engage in any debates about The Economist position on this or that.

The Daily Mail is another matter. I’ve just flown back to NY from London, and BA kindly gave me the chance for free to read about Britain through the strangely coloured lens of that venerable tabloid. Various staples leap out: a hatred of the soon to be ex-Lady McCartney; stories of feeble pensioners confronting teenage yobs who harass them – only for the parents of the yobs to complain to the police, who arrest the pensioners; unflattering pictures of Cherie Blair on the beach. But two stories seemed worth drawing to the attention of Crooked Timberers (if that is the collective term? maybe Crooks for short?).

First, apparently Mr Blair’s policy advisors reckon that downgrading the criminality of using cannabis in Britain has led to an increase in the use both of cannabis and of other harder drugs, thus seeming to confirm the controversial theory that cannabis is a gateway drug.

I believe that legalisation is the only workable solution to the horrendous problems associated with such drugs, ranging from the wrecked lives of abusers to the wrecked economies of the suppliers. So, what to make of these findings from Britain? First, assuming the Mail has accurately reported the conclusions, I suppose that supporters of legalisation should not be all that surprised that reducing criminal penalties increases drug use. That is clearly a risk. The case for legalisation is that the benefits of that policy change outweigh the downside of greater use.

First, users should suffer less harm, because the quality of drugs is likely to be more consistent and better in a legal market and because users should be better informed about the risks they run when they use the drug (which of course, as with booze, will not stop some taking excessive risks). Second, the supply side should be removed from the criminal underworld into the glorious light of transparent modern capitalism, where the twin effects of brand and legal liability (among other things) will work their magic. (Compare the modern booze industry with the prohibition era speakeasies, or consider the product info provided by your local drug dealer with the amount and quality of information now provided by cigarette firms to their customers.)

The problem in Britain, from my perspective, is that its policy has been so feeble – driven I suspect more by the fact that the police hated getting involved with the middle-class families whose kids now routinely use cannabis than by any more serious intent to tackle the global problems of illegal drugs. What is needed is the sort of full scale legalisation which allows customers to buy cannabis in Tesco or WalMart, from respectable purveyors like Philip Morris. Not sure the Mail will buy that, though.

The second interesting Mail story was a report that injections of stem cells are the new hot beauty therapy for the super-wealthy, apparently helping ageing organs and skin to regrow, and generally rejuvenating the bod all over. A few weeks ago, I was talking to some friends from Moscow, who told me that the oligarchs are regularly getting their stem cell shot at $10,000 a go, and that Boris Yeltsin is rumoured to be a big fan, now dancing the night away on a regular basis and looking a couple of decades younger. What this news will do for the stem cell debate in the US, one can only wonder. But can the crude use of stem cells really be such a powerful elixir of youth – or is it the latest snake oil for the rich? Is there a scientist out there who can tell me, before, in search of a full head of hair and the fresh face of youth, I hop on a plane for Moscow and one of the 50 clinics that the Mail tells me have opened there in the past three years to offer this wonder cure?

I am very pleased to be introducing a dear friend, Matthew Bishop, as CT’s guest blogger this week. Matthew is a fellow Fellow of the Twenty First Century Trust (Henry and I are also fellows.). His biog at the Economist tells us that, apart from being ‘Chief Business Writer/American Business Editor’ of that newspaper, Matthew has written several worthy sounding books. I can add to the official blurb that while Matthew was on the Advisors Group of the United Nations International Year of Microcredit 2005 he met and briefed Angelina Jolie on micro-finance. Rmphf!

Also, and perhaps this is where the professionalism of journalists trumps us amateurs, Matthew is a consummate hack (in a good way). Several years ago, Matthew and I were at an after-dinner speech by a former prime minister of a slightly out of the way country. The PM’s heavies all wore Pele style mullets and insisted that the drink stop pouring during his speech. The speech went on and on. Several people nodded off. I believe Matthew snored, but maybe that’s embroidery on my part. I mostly stared into the middle distance and fretted about the lack of booze. The speech abruptly stopped. Our devilishly handsome chair thanked him and asked desperately for questions. Our minds were blank. The silence was painful. Someone gave Matthew a dig. He spluttered awake, took instant stock, and asked a very clever and well-backgrounded question on the politics of that country. What a pro. While others are asleep with drool on their chins, the hack is awake (just) and parlaying a little knowledge into a lot of kudos. That, I said to myself, is a man born to blog.

Not surprisingly this is the kind of topic that spreads like wildfire across blogland.

AOL Research released (link to Google cache page) the search queries of hundreds of thousands of its users over a three month period. While user IDs are not included in the data set, all the search terms have been left untouched. Needless to say, lots of searches could include all sorts of private information that could identify a user.

The problems in the realm of privacy are obvious and have been discussed by many others so I won’t bother with that part. (See the blog posts linked above.) By not focusing on that aspect I do not mean to diminish its importance. I think it’s very grave. But many others are talking about it so I’ll focus on another aspect of this fiasco.

As someone who has research interests in this area and has been trying to get search companies to release some data for purely academic purposes, needless to say an incident like this is extremely unfortunate. Not that search companies have been particularly cooperative so far – based on this case not surprisingly -, but chances for future cooperation in this realm have just taken a nosedive.

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Two “very”:http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7252974 “interesting”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7258534 articles in the _Economist_ this week on disinformation and the Internet From the first:

bq. Russia’s interests are once again being promoted by information sources that look plausible, at least until you look closely at their antecedents. Take, for example, the International Council for Democratic Institutions and State Sovereignty (ICDISS), a grand-sounding outfit that says it works on “result-oriented nation-building for new and emerging states”. … the ICDISS … has no address and no telephone number. Although its website, and an entry on a write-it-yourself encyclopedia, Wikipedia, claim that it was founded in 1999, there is no trace of its activities, or of its supposed staff members, in news databases or the internet before January this year. Since then, it seems to be solely involved in promoting Transdniestria. …One plausible conclusion is that the Kremlin is engaged in a new push to support Transdniestria and three similar statelets.

The second goes into more detail about this mysterious organization, which claims to run conferences involving well known diplomats and academics, but only appears to exist in references from web pages.

bq. The Wikipedia entry’s history shows that some unkind person has tried to change it, to say that the ICDISS is based not in Washington, DC but in the Transdniestrian capital, Tiraspol, and is made up not of 60 diplomats and specialists, but four officers of the ministry of state security there.

Since the publication of the article, the relevant “Wikipedia entry”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Council_for_Democratic_Institutions_and_State_Sovereignty has been put under consideration for deletion; the _Economist_ journalist who wrote the expose (or, if you want to be careful, someone who appears to be the _Economist_ journal who wrote the expose), is engaged in a “debate”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:International_Council_for_Democratic_Institutions_and_State_Sovereignty on the Talk page with a veteran Wikipedia contributor (who appears to have been highly active on the Transdniestria page) who claims to have been at one of their conferences. Curiouser and curiouser.

I’m teaching ‘Recent Continental Philosophy’ this semester, and I’m curious about the origins of the term – ‘continental philosophy’, that is. I’m tempted by the quite feeble joke that all continental philosophy is of very recent origin because the term is of very recent origin, even though it names something that is approximately 200 years old (if you want to start with Kant, as I do.) Or at least 100 years old (if you want to start with Husserl.) I don’t see much evidence of regular usage of ‘continental philosophy’ before the 1980’s. I think I more or less agree with what Simon Critchley says in the following passage from the Blackwell Companion to Continental Philosophy [amazon]:

Although there is no consensus on the precise origin of the concept of Continental philosophy as a professional self-description, it would seem that it does not arise as a description of undergraduate and postgraduate courses in philosophy before the 1970s. It is clear that this happened in the USA before Britain, where the first postgraduate courses in Continental philosophy were offered at the Universities of Essex and Warwick in the early 1980’s, although undergraduate courses in the Continental philosophy were available at Warwick from the mid-1970’s. in the American context, and to a lesser extent in Britain, the term “Continental philosophy” replaced the earlier formulations, “Phenomenology” or “Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy.” These terms are preserved in the names of the professional associations most closely associated with Continental philosophy in the English-speaking world, the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy founded in 1962 and the British Society for Phenomenology founded in 1967. it would seem, then, that in the postwar period, Continental philosophy was broadly synonymous with phenomenology (often in an existential garb), a fact that is also reflected by certain introductory American book titles from the 1960’s: An Invitation to Phenomenology (1965), and Phenomenology in America (1967). It is perhaps indicative that the latter title is both mimicked and transformed in 1983 with the appearance of Continental Philosophy in America. The reason why “Phenomenology” is replaced with “Continental Philosophy” is not absolutely clear, but it would seem that it was introduced to take account of the various so-called poststructuralist Francophone movements of thought that were increasingly distant from and often hostile towards phenomenology: to a lesser extent Lacan, Derrida, and Lyotard, and to a greater extent Deleuze and Foucault.

So, to summarize, Continental philosophy is a professional self-description that overlays a prior and more pernicious cultural opposition between the “British” or “Anglo-American” and the “Continental” and which has been pragmatically refined over the years. (p. 4)

Critchley thinks the perniciousness is the fault of the Anglos, for being close-minded. I am inclined to think that there is probably equal close-mindedness to be found on both sides, if it comes to that. But setting the question of blame aside, does anyone have anything much to add to the above?

Joe Conason has a short but interesting review of a biography of Eliot Spitzer. He nicely summarizes what Spitzer did that “earned him the enduring fury of the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the conservative Federalist Society and every other exponent of an unfettered marketplace”:

He exposed widespread corruption, cronyism and immorality at the commanding heights of the American economy, exploding the myth of the self-regulating market. And he refashioned the conservative version of “federalism” into a weapon for liberal elected officials in the states, while the Bush administration was letting lobbyists write legislation and run regulatory agencies.

And he rightly points out the new challenges that Spitzer will face if elected governor:

Rather than policing business executives, he will need to persuade them to invest in the depressed upstate region. Instead of filing lawsuits and indictments, he will have to pursue his laudable goals within the constraints of a balanced budget and a bipartisan culture of legislative inertia.

I, for one, am eager to see how Spitzer handles these responsibilities. I have a friend who works in Spitzer’s office, and he tells me that in addition to Spitzer being very driven (obviously), he is also very, very smart. This certainly doesn’t guarantee success, but when you look at the alternative…

In the course of recounting Spitzer’s privileged upbringing, Conason comments that “the most challenging crisis faced by the real estate millionaire’s son [was] a last-minute change in thesis topics (from the philosopher John Rawls’s theory of justice to ‘Revolutions in Post-Stalin Eastern Europe’).” I assume this was his senior thesis at Princeton. I wonder how far he got with that first one?

I had a nice night. Before that, I chased two kids around for six hours (ages 2 and 5). That was ok. Then I went to pick up Indian take-out. Waiting, I … relaxed. A beer. Watch the Australian tourists talk to each other. I’m enjoying Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude. Belle loaded up iTunes with lots of new stuff but nothing seemed quite good enough for the evening. Then I noticed … four Stephen Malkmus tracks: “Baby C’Mon”, “The Hook”, “(Do Not Feed The) Oyster” and “Jenny and the Ess-Dog.” They’re Amazon freebies. Help yourselves.

And/or you can help me understand Kant on “What Is Enlightenment?” I made a long post at the Valve. Input from Kant scholars – and others – would be sincerely appreciated. I’m puzzled by the public/private flip-flop, the ‘argue all you want but obey’ maxim, and especially the weird seed metaphor. And a few other things.

One of the big questions for academics engaged in blogging is whether and how blogs should count towards measures of academic output, like traditional journal articles and book chapters. The obvious answer is to write journal articles and book chapters about blogging. Uses of Blogs edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs is the first edited collection of scholarly articles on blogging (at least so the blurb says, and I don’t know of any others), and includes a chapter from me on economics blogs. With the book coming out of QUT, there’s a strong Brisbane flavour including chapters from Mark Bahnisch (who’s already posted on this and Jean Burgess ditto.

I’ve only had time to dip into a few chapters so far, but it looks very interesting and the opening chapter by Axel and Joanne is available free

Over at TAPPED, it being a Friday evening, Michael Tomasky complains about “receipts”:http://www.prospect.org/weblog/2006/08/post_1036.html#005644.

bq. What bugs me is receipts. In this town, sales clerks everywhere are ceaselessly forcing sales receipts into your hand. What the hell is this about? I go into a CVS (a horrifying experience under any circumstance). I get a couple things. It comes to $4.38. Do most people really want a receipt for $4.38? Who still goes home and enters $4.38 into a checkbook? I simply cannot believe that 51 percent of consumers really want their receipts for small purchases like this.

He wouldn’t want to be “travelling to Italy”:http://www.iht.com/articles/1992/04/10/rece_0.php any time soon.

bq. It was a classic stakeout: for some time government agents had the Bar Venezia in Stigliano, a small town in Italy’s deep south, under surveillance. This February, as Salvatore, oblivious of the trap about to be sprung, came out into the street the team moved in with cool efficiency. … The crime: dealing a 100-lire bag of popcorn without a scontrino (cash register receipt). The penalty: a 300,000-lire (about $240) fine for the bar owner who had sold the popcorn, and one of 33,000 lire for Salvatore – who had to be bailed out by his father, seeing that he is only 7 years old.

In Italy, if you purchase something, you need to get the receipt and keep it handy for a few minutes. Otherwise, you’re liable to be fined if a member of the Guardia di Finanzia asks you to produce your receipt and you can’t. The rationale is that shopkeepers aren’t liable to ring up purchases and provide receipts if they can get away with it; the cashflows from receiptless purchases are easier to hide from the relentless gaze of the tax inspectorate. Thus, the law tries to force the issue by pressganging citizens into demanding receipts under the threat of (admittedly not very large) fines. It’s a bit of a shock to the system for people brought up on Anglo-American notions of the law (certainly, I found it rather surprising when I found out about it myself).

Update: “Bruce Schneier”:http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/aligning_intere.html has an interesting essay on the ways in which receipts help counter fraud.