I’ve just realised that as well as the new academic year for PhD programs, it’s also graduate intake season in the world of proper jobs, and thus a new generation of CT readers will be entering the workforce. And thus, my “Advice to a Young Person”. I only actually have one tip.
Basically it’s this. If you are a young man or woman of fair-to-middling ability, or even a borderline dullard, but you want to get a reputation as an uncommonly bright and perspicacious thinker, it’s really not that hard to do. The secret weapon is this: take an interest in what happens in other countries.
It’s really quite unusual to find an important issue on which international comparisons aren’t worth knowing about. Even in situations which look purely domestic, you can often get an entirely new perspective on things by looking at your fundamental assumptions in the light of what happens overseas. There are few sights sweeter than the look on someone’s face after they’ve confidently proclaimed something to be impossible, only to be informed that they’ve been doing things that way in Australia for the last twenty years.
It’s also a great way to generate ideas; it’s both easier than coming up with something yourself, and more likely to succeed, to plagiarise something that’s already worked well in a different time zone. So few people bother to keep up with the international news that one doesn’t even need to be an expert in these things; simply reading the relevant pages of your daily newspaper will probably do, whereas reading the superficially more “relevant” domestic or business pages will usually just tell you a load of crap you know already, and tell it wrong.
So my advice to a young businessperson is to save ten minutes a day by not reading the domestic news, and spend them on reading the international news properly. Within six months of the graduate program you’ll see I’m right, not least because at least once or twice you’ll quite likely be asked to prepared an analysis of international comparisons by a senior executive who got where he is by following my method.
I just caught the last chunk of David Petraeus’s statement. As Kevin Drum predicted the other day, the Chaos Hawkery was strongly to the fore at the end. I haven’t seen a transcript yet, but the bottom line — after a Westmoreland-like catalog of investment projects and advisory teams — was, “This is a hard road, I can’t assure success, but if we leave I guarantee failure, regional chaos and the rise of Iran and other neighbors. Also, there’s no end in sight.” All of this was well forseen by Petraeus-watchers, of course. But it’s worth going back to this month four years ago when the logic of this approach, now fully articulated in Petraeus’s statement, was becoming clear.
Fred Thompson provided a couple of hours worth of legal advice to the people who blew up were charged with the Pan-Am 103 bombing. Bear in mind that it’s OK if you are Republican, for any value of “it.”
What’s annoying, though, is the way something quite trivial like this — a mere curlicue on the ear of a minor gargoyle on a single buttress of the immense gothic Cathedral of WTF Has Happened Since 2001 — could have the potential to bother a Presidential campaign, whereas the ongoing renovations to said Cathedral are more or less settled doctrine, dirty fucking hippies excepted.
Imhotep IV takes refuge in the shop of an antiquarian, before resuming pursuit of his beloved – Lillian, daughter of renowned Egyptologist, Professor Bowell, who is owner of Imhotep IV. As the defense attorney sincerely declaims, a few pages on: “It was love that caused Pharaoh Imhotep IV to cross the centuries and attempt to breach the west wall of the central police station, and it was hastiness that caused Miss Bowell to confuse arsenic and chamomile.” Further complications ensue upon arrival of Imhotep III, who kidnaps Queen Victoria. Love conquers all, the watercolors are lovely.
You can read the first dozen pages at First Second books – purveyors of fine comic product all-around. (But Amazon will give you a better price. But maybe it’s better to buy from the publishers.)
Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted cast of a human skull has been bought by a group of anonymous investors for its asking price of £50 million, the artist’s representatives claimed yesterday.
It is, by a huge margin, the most paid for a work by a living artist.
Entitled For the Love of God, the skull was first displayed at the White Cube Gallery in Mayfair, Central London, in June where thousands queued for a two-minute viewing in a high-security darkened chamber.
Studded with more than 8,500 ethically sourced diamonds, it has been variously described as “an anthropomorphised disco ball”, “the first 21st-century work of art”, “a cosmic wonder”, “the vulgar embodiment of modern materialism” and, by Hirst himself, as “quite bling”.
A fine piece by Michael McPherson and Morton Schapiro in the Chronicle of Higher Education (registration and possibly subscription needed). They start by pointing out that for the most part college officials treat ‘values’ as pieties to be brought out when the parents and dignitaries visit, and not very seriously dealt with the rest of the time; and then demonstrate the moral dimension to a a range of management and leadership issues: enrollment management, early admissions, student aid, college rankings, and admissions decisions. It’s an agenda setting piece, not a series of answers. I’d like to see philosophers giving more detailed thought to these issues (so, I know, would McPherson and Schapiro); I hereby encourage bright philosophy PhD students out there to take their agenda and base a dissertation on it. (You might want to look at Levelling the Playing Field before you start). To give a flavour, here’s what M&S say about early admissions:
Early admissions. Last year both Harvard and Princeton Universities made high-profile announcements that they would no longer admit students early. What are the arguments against early decision? You can’t expect a needy student to commit to attend a college or university before knowing the price. Asking a student to decide where to attend college by early November, the typical deadline for early application, increases the frenzy accompanying selective admission. Students admitted in December of their senior year may take the rest of that year less seriously than one might hope. And, given that economists calculate a sizable admissions advantage to applying early, certain students are able to game the system.
After the first weekend’s matches, I’d say that the Southern Hemisphere big-guns haven’t been tested yet (though South Africa had a hard 40 minutes of fighting against the Samoans), and of the IONA countries, only Scotland have any reason to be happy. England were boring and stuck. Ireland looked uncoordinated. Namibia scored two tries against them in four minutes, which is ridiculous. Having beaten France and seen Ireland’s performance today, Argentina must be feeling pretty good right now — and the French are probably feeling better as well.
Thinking about getting a Ph.D? Try lying down until the feeling goes away. Didn’t work? Try (1) Tim Burke on how to tell whether you really want a Ph.D. (Short answer: probably not.) If you persist anyway and find yourself starting a program somewhere at the moment, then (2) Total Drek provides 22 Unhelpful Hints about making the best of it. They’re very good. And so are (3) My co-blogger Fabio Rojas’s Grad Skool Rulz.
Christopher Caldwell is a columnist whom I usually find quite annoying, but his “attack today”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7fe5cc9a-5d75-11dc-8d22-0000779fd2ac.html (unfortunately behind the paywall) on Bill Clinton’s forthcoming book on charitable giving gets to the crux of the issue. [click to continue…]
So which Republican candidate will be first to match or beat bin Laden’s 2.5% flat tax proposal? I wonder what his plan for health care reform looks like.
The Rugby World Cup starts this weekend, with France vs Argentina tonight. I haven’t been able to keep up with the form this time. I think Ireland are looking slightly shaky in the run-up. They’re in the same pool as France and Argentina, so that’s going to be tough, with France having home-field advantage and Argentina being the dirtiest team in Europe. England are hoping for a revival. I would, ideally, like to see them semi-revived and then re-crushed, but I’ll settle for straightforward humiliating defeats. Thanks to their crap form they may have a helpful underdog status, however. As for the Southern Hemisphere, all the Kiwis I know are in their usual frame of mind, viz titanic self-confidence combined with a desperate fear that the All Blacks will choke yet again.
This “FT piece”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5f67d75a-5cdb-11dc-9cc9-0000779fd2ac.html on GWB’s magical market pony plan for preventing mortgage foreclosures by handing the problem over to “an opaque part of the financial system normally associated with moves to evict families from their homes” is tough and on-target.
An estimated 6m high-risk subprime loans, worth a total of more than $1,000bn, are outstanding, which will in many cases reset to higher interest rates in the next 18 months, putting more than 2.5m Americans at risk of foreclosure. … The response to this crisis outlined by the president places considerable faith in the ability of mortgage servicers to mitigate this blow by helping distressed borrowers to stay in their homes. … Edward Lazear, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, said: “I believe, and I think the president believes, that markets are very good at finding ways to solve problems.” But many experts claim that the mortgage service sector is not fit for this purpose. They argue it does not have the capacity to perform this role, and lacks the personnel, financial resources, technical tools, experience, incentives and oversight to deal with an economic crisis of this scale. “Theoretically, it makes sense, but not in the real world,” said Scott Syphax,a director at the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco. “These institutions are not built to handle this scale and volume of problems.” … as more service companies fall into the hands of vulture investors, the task of co-ordinating a national response is likely to become complicated. “The fixes being proposed by the president are not going to result in Americans being rescued from their homes, quite the opposite,” said Richard E. Gottlieb, a lawyer who specialises in mortgage servicing.
There’s very little that I find more annoying than the “magic of markets” arguments that various right wing hacks and ideologues spew at the drop of a talking-point. It makes me want to forcibly enrol the responsible parties in an economic sociology program until they see the errors of their ways. Markets can indeed do extraordinary and impressive things, but they rather obviously depend on previously existing institutions, expertise and social conditions if they are to work. Not to mention proper incentive structures. These can’t be whistled out of thin air. The claim that a business sector composed of small firms specializing in foreclosure and themselves terrified of bankruptcy will have the appropriate motivations and expertise to stave off this crisis is self-evidently bogus, if you look at it at all closely. But sprinkle some of that schmeconomics 101 pixy dust on it, and you can get away with it, thanks to the supine US journalism industry (I don’t know of any US publication which has even _mentioned_ this as a problem; perhaps I’m wrong).
This “ZDNet article”:http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-6205716.html on datascraping firm Rapleaf is both interesting and disturbing.
In the cozy Facebook social network, it’s easy to have a sense of privacy among friends and business acquaintances. But sites like Rapleaf will quickly jar you awake: Everything you say or do on a social network could be fair game to sell to marketers. … By collecting these e-mail addresses, Rapleaf has already amassed a database of 50 million profiles, which might include a person’s age, birth date, physical address, alma mater, friends, favorite books and music, political affiliations, as well as how long that person has been online, which social networks he frequents, and what applications he’s downloaded. … All of this information could come in handy for Rapleaf’s third business, TrustFuse, which sells data (but not e-mail addresses) to marketers so they can better target customers, according to TrustFuse’s Web site. As of Friday afternoon, the sites of Rapleaf and Upscoop had no visible link to TrustFuse, but TrustFuse’s privacy policy mentions that the two companies are wholly owned subsidiaries of TrustFuse.
… In other words, Rapleaf sweeps up all the publicly available but sometimes hard-to-get information it can find about you on the Web, via social networks, other sites and, soon to be added, blogs. … Apart from the unusual TrustFuse business, Rapleaf is among a new generation of people search engines that take advantage of the troves of public data on the Net–much of which consumers happily post for public perusal on social-networking sites and personal blogs. The search engines trace a person’s digital tracks across these social networks, blogs, photo collections, news and e-commerce sites, to create a composite profile. … There doesn’t appear to be anything illegal about what these companies are doing. No one’s sifting through garbage cans or peeking through windows. They’ve merely found a clever way to aggregate the heaps of personal information that can be found on the Internet. … Just ask Dana Todd … “It’s my growing horror that everyone can see my Amazon Wish List. At least I didn’t have a book like ‘How to get rid of herpes’ on there, but now I have to go through and seriously clean my wish list,” she said.
This raises all sorts of interesting issues for privacy, going way beyond the dumb-teenager-spliff-smoking-photo-on-MySpace kind of story that get most public attention. If I’m understanding the article correctly, Rapleaf have figured out ways to get at some information from social networking sites that the users of these sites mightn’t have wanted to share with the outside world. This isn’t illegal, but it is fishy. Also, by aggregating together information about people’s networks and tastes across a variety of different websites and networking sites, it’s likely that the firm can draw non-obvious connections that people would prefer not to be drawn. US privacy law is notoriously patchy (your video rental records are heavily protected, thanks to efforts to embarrass conservative Supreme Court nominees, your sensitive financial information … not so much), but I’m not sure what kinds of policies would effectively protect those people who wanted to protected from this kind of widescale data trawling, even in more privacy friendly jurisdictions like the EU. That said, I’m personally quite creeped out by this kind of thing (albeit not creeped out enough to stop blogging or to withdraw my profile from social networking sites, for whatever good that would do me at this stage).
[amazon], by Sfar and Guibert. My favorite panel:
before you start). To give a flavour, here’s what M&S say about early admissions:
The