“The Economist”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1907893 has a long article asking whether or not companies are too risk averse to take proper advantage of new opportunities and a changing marketplace. Explaining the roots of corporate advantage is tricky stuff; conventional economic theory isn’t very good at telling us when efforts to innovate are going to be successful, and when they’re not. Economic sociologists do a slightly better job, but they still have difficulty in providing useful lessons for business people. Which opens the way for all sorts of cranks and quacks, who offer dubious nostrums for business success, with all the fervid enthusiasm of a 19th century medicine show charlatan. I’m referring of course to management “theorists.”
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Henry
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40912-2003Jul10.html?nav=hptoc_eo
Grumpy US readers, who would like Congress to push the administration harder on what it did and didn’t know about WMD, should breeze over to “Brett Marston’s”:http://marston.blogspot.com/2003_07_06_marston_archive.html#105786196538842848 blog for a nice example of how to bother your Congressperson, by framing the problem in terms of Congress’s powers and responsibilities. Tho’ readers with Republican congressional representatives may want to skip the bit on Republican hypocrisy and Clinton-bashing in their own letters.
The WP’s “review”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=style/movies/reviews&contentId=A29898-2003Jul8¬Found=true of _Pirates of the Caribbean_ has some useful insights into the scriptwriters’ authorial intentions. It informs us that in the “production notes”:http://laughingplace.com/Info-ID-Movie-Pirates-ProdNotes.asp to the movie, one of the film’s authors says:
bq. We wanted it to be a very classic, Jane Austen-style, bodice-ripping romance.
This is, I have to say, a rather lovely idea, which should be developed further. We already have “Jane Austen’s Terminator”:http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&selm=3E7FC19F.55ED%40wizvax.net&rnum=87 (courtesy of “Making Light”:http://www.nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/). Surely it can’t be difficult to sex up, say, _Pride and Prejudice_ a little bit? If Alastair Campbell can make weapons dossiers sound lascivious, Jane Austen should be a cinch. And why not include a congeries of cutlass-waving undead pirates too, while we’re at it. Friends, I hand the task over to you.
The NYT has a very interesting “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/10/technology/circuits/10poke.html today on AI and poker. A group of researchers in Alberta are using game theory to create automated ‘bots that can take on and beat most players. Now this was a little worrying for me; two months ago, I wrote a “couple”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000064.html of rather confident “posts”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000068.html suggesting that game theory wasn’t very helpful in solving complex and open-ended games like poker. Indeed, as Chad Orzel “notes”:http://steelypips.org/principles/2003_06_29_principlearchive.php#105708829647353420, human beings sometimes have difficulty in dealing with this sort of stuff too.
Spooky. In an effort to explain to my wife precisely who Daniel Davies is, and why we’re now co-bloggers, I fired up my browser, and hopped to a “random spot”:http://d-squareddigest.blogspot.com/2002_12_29_d-squareddigest_archive.html in the D^2 Digest archives. It turns out that the prophetic Mr. Davies did a long post on December 31, 2002 on a list of topics, starting with (a) a discussion of fridge magnets and, (b) thoughts on how digital video recorders allow you to skip ads. Which subjects have been dealt with by Kieran and me in loving detail in the first 24 hours of this blog, as you’ll see if you bother to read down a bit further. Your guess as to how Mr. Davies has done this is as good as mine. I’m leaning towards a Manchurian Candidate type scenario myself – quite possibly Kieran and I have been pre-programmed without our knowledge to blog on certain topics. Assuming that Mr. Davies’ prophetic powers/subliminal commands hold good, expect this blog to cover the following subjects in order over the next several days.
* Shania Twain
* Robert Mugabe
* The politics of Malawi and Brazil
* Corrupt Irish-American pols
* Ann Coulter
* Defining the left v. right dichotomy
* JK Galbraith’s maxim that “the project of the conservative throughout the ages is the search for a higher moral justification for selfishness”
* The singular of Weetabix
* More meat in pies
* File-sharing confessionalism
A diverse agenda, you’ll agree.
“Ed Felten”:http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/archives/000414.html points to an interesting aside in a recent Richard Posner “opinion”:http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/op3.fwx?submit1=showop&caseno=02-4125.PDF on a lower court injunction against Aimster. The interesting nugget is mostly irrelevant to the case at hand: Posner argues that if someone videotapes a TV show and fast-forwards through the commercials, they’re breaking the law.
bq. commercial-skipping, [amounts] to creating an unauthorized derivative work …, namely a commercial-free copy that would reduce the copyright owner’s income from his original program, since “free” television programs are financed by the purchase of commercials by advertisers.
This may seem like so much legal pie-in-the-sky. Even if Posner’s opinion were to become the accepted interpretation of the law, nobody expects the copyright-police to come knocking on the door asking about your video-watching habits. But it actually touches on some important issues for owners of digital video recorders (such as TiVo).
As happy TiVo owners testify, one of the joys of the machine is that it allows you to speed through obnoxious ads with alacrity. TiVo owners (myself included) wax evangelical on the subject. There’s even an “undocumented hack”:http://www.bigmarv.net/how/tivo30secondskip.html that allows you to skip through the ads 30 seconds at a time. But ad-skipping threatens to eat TV networks’ revenues. One of TiVo’s competitors was sued by various networks for including a more advanced ad-skip option on its boxes; the case was never decided, because the company went bankrupt. The new manufacturer has “dropped the feature”:http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=38045, most likely in order to cosy up to the content providers. TiVo itself isn’t being sued – but it’s also keeping rather quiet about some of the more advanced features of its product. If a Posnerian view of the law prevails in future cases, it’s fair to expect nifty ad-skip features and their like to be declared illegal, unless they have substantial non-infringing uses.
Larry Lessig “talks up a storm”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000074.html about how copyright law and restrictive content management systems hobble artistic creativity. And he’s doing a good job of it. But the war is as much about consumption as production. Important set-battles are being fought over our TV remote controls, digital video recorders, and DVD players (those bloody “unskippable commercials”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17791-2003Jun20.html?nav=hptoc_tn on new DVDs). I suspect that more and more people will get upset about this, as these technologies spread, and as content providers become ever greedier. Couch potatoes of the world unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.
Update: “Larry Solum”:http://lsolum.blogspot.com/2003_07_01_lsolum_archive.html#105784887890316026 has a good take on the technical misunderstandings behind Posner’s aside – it hinges on the difference between a performance and an unauthorized derivative work. Convinced me in any event. But does Posner’s interpretation apply to digital video recorders? I invite TiVo owning IP lawyers and former IP lawyers (yes Michelle, that means you) to comment.
Update 2: “Derek Slater”:http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cmusings/2003/07/10#a258 has a good critique of Posner’s argument.
Via “Harry Hatchet”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2003/07/07/talking_bloggocks_2.php, this “piece”:http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/003862.html#003862 by Libertarian Samizdata‘s Andy Duncan on the new European Union (EU) requirement that all businesses with more than 50 employees have work councils. Duncan (and Perry de Havilland in comments) see this as a step on the path to compulsory workers’ Soviets, and the subjugation of employers to their paid employees. Compare this however, with the Socialist Worker Party’s rather different “take”:http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/1853/sw185312.htm on the EU. The SWP claims that the EU is all about creating a “bosses’ Europe,” which allows “market forces to let rip.”
Now clearly, both can’t be correct. Either the EU is a worker’s paradise in the making or it’s a playground for global capital. So who’s right? In one sense, of course, neither; they’re both exaggerating for effect. But the Socialist Worker crowd are probably closer to the truth than the British libertarians. Like it, or like it not, the European Union’s driving force is market creation.
Wolfgang Streeck provides a good account of the reasons why, in this “paper”:http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp98-2.pdf on industrial relations in the EU (readers be warned: Streeck has a distracting fondness for italics). As he says, major changes within the European Union require the consensus of all fifteen member states, especially when they touch upon sensitive issues such as workers’ rights and the organization of companies. It’s rather difficult for all fifteen to reach agreement on any but the most anodyne proposals in these areas (the workers’ councils in the Directive are rather limp by comparison with their German equivalents). In contrast, member states do usually agree that market integration is a good thing; they’re more likely to reach consensus quickly on measures that promote liberalization. Thus, proposals for works councils and the like get trapped in the legislative pipeline for decades, and finally emerge (if they do emerge) as pale and stunted things, blinking in the sunlight. Proposals to liberalize markets, in contrast, are usually (though not always) easier for member states to reach agreement on; they come out of the process as altogether beefier creatures. The bosses don’t have much to be worried about.
A.S. Byatt is “splendidly caustic”:http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/07/opinion/07BYAT.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position= in the NYT about the success of _Harry Potter_. It’s rather an interesting piece. Byatt rips into the Potter phenomenon, which she sees as part of a dumbing-down of fiction.
bq. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.
But she does so without dismissing either good popular culture or children’s literature. The problem with _Harry Potter_, as she sees it, is that it’s too comfortable. It’s unoriginal, “a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature.” And it has no mystery about it – the Potter books are remarkably prosaic for all their emphasis on magic. In Byatt’s view, the books don’t have any counterbalancing concern with the serious things of life. Byatt contrasts Rowling with “children’s authors”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000163.html like Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, who convey a real sense of mystery and danger in their books. Magic should bite.
Now Byatt is going a bit far – comfort books aren’t necessarily bad, even if they don’t have a scintilla of seriousness. First witnesses for the defence are the wonderfully scruffy _Molesworth_ public-school comedies (for a Molesworth-Hogwarts collision, read the wicked parody “here”:http://www.alice.dryden.co.uk/ho_for_hoggwarts.htm). And silly adult books can be good too; Wodehouse’s _Jeeves and Wooster_ stories are utterly frivolous, but they’re undeniably works of genius.
Still, Byatt puts her finger on something. _Harry Potter_ has been so successful because it feeds into two sets of fantasies. It gratifies children, who dream of being popular, good at sports, and possessed of spiffy magic powers. It gratifies adults, who fantasize about the uncomplicated joys of childhood. It has very little to say about the awkward in-between stages in which children become teenagers and then adults. Talking about messy and complex stuff like this would break the spell. This is why _Harry Potter_ doesn’t have the sense of mystery that Byatt is looking for. Magic is dangerous and exciting for the young adults in Garner and Cooper’s books precisely because it’s tied up with their burgeoning sexuality. Here be dragons. If Byatt’s right, the Potter series is likely to become increasingly awkward and dissatisfying as the protagonist moves further into his teenage years. Rowling won’t be able to pull off the balancing act for very much longer without looking silly.
Update: interested parties, pro and con, should read Ruth Feingold’s bit in the comments section to this post, as well as John Holbo’s “response”:http://homepage.mac.com/jholbo/homepage/pages/blog/blog22.html#9