Henry

Via “David Levine”:http://www.againstmonopoly.org/index.php?perm=1253, it appears that George Mason University is “being sued”:http://www.courthousenews.com/2008/09/17/Reuters_Says_George_Mason_University_Is_Handing_Out_Its_Proprietary_Software.htm for over 10 million dollars by the owner of EndNote (which happens to be Thomson-Reuters).

The complaint states, “Dr. Daniel J. Cohen, Associate Professor, Department of History and Art History, and the director of GMU’s Center for History and New Media, developed Zotero, which is a freely distributable, open-source software based research tool that allows users to gather, organize and analyze sources, including citations, and freely share the results with others.” The Center for History and New Media release “a new beta version of Zotero to the general public” on July 8. Reuters adds, “A significant and highly touted feature of the new beta version of Zotero, however, is its ability to convert – in direct violation of the License Agreement – Thomson’s 3,500 plus proprietary .ens style files within the EndNote Software into free, open source, easily distributable Zotero .csl files.”

Now, I’m obviously not an intellectual property lawyer (fwiw the “Wikipedia article”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering on reverse engineering, which may or may not be reliable but is certainly more reliable than me, suggests that suits over interoperability are of dubious legal merit). But I am an academic, and thus part of EndNote’s core end-user market. And I say that, regardless or not of whether it’s legal, this is a bullshit move on Thomson-Reuters’ part. There are a lot of academics out there who have used EndNote in the past and created styles for the journals that they submit to etc. EndNote’s owners are clearly worried that these academics will be tempted to move their styles from EndNote to a software package which in my view (and I’ve used both) is clearly superior. This is a no-brainer. There is _no significant innovation or value-added_ to EndNote’s specific file format. Nor is there reason to believe (given the existence of Zotero) that protecting this file format and EndNote’s purported intellectual property rights over it will encourage innovation in this particular marketplace. On the broad social merits, Reuters’ attempted shakedown is indefensible.

Nor is this as trivial an issue for academics as it might seem. As Scott has “suggested”:http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/26/mclemee “in the”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/09/26/zoteromania/ “past”:https://crookedtimber.org/2007/12/12/archival-zotero-fication-or-possibly-vice-versa/#more-6498 Zotero and projects like it are at the heart of an effort to bring something like the semantic web to academia. Zotero combines bibliographical database management with social tagging and other fun stuff – it is gradually becoming a platform through which academics can share metadata and other interesting things with each other. Which means that this battle is likely to have long term consequences in determining whether or not new forms of academic collaboration are likely to be controlled by academics themselves, or take place through some kind of commercially controlled intermediation, with all the forms of stupidity that are likely to go along with that.

For my part, I’m going to refuse to use Reuters’ software in future, strongly discourage graduate students from buying EndNote, and try to get this message out to my colleagues too (at least those of them who aren’t using Zotero or some BibTex client already). If I taught any classes where Thomson printed relevant textbooks, I would be strongly inclined not to use these texts either. I encourage you to do the same (and, if you’re so minded, to suggest other possible ways of making it clear to Reuters that this kind of behaviour is intolerable in the comments). People have argued that the music industry has screwed up badly by suing its customers – whether that’s true or not, makers of academic bibliography software should be told that suing universities for what appear to be entirely legitimate actions is not likely to do their reputations any good.

NB- post corrected shortly after publication for bone-headed error.

Obituary “here”:http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/movies/AP-Obit-Newman.html?_r=1&oref=slogin/.

Scott is probably too self-deprecating to point to this excellently “funny and devastating review”:http://www.thenation.com/doc/20081006/mclemee of Bernard-Henri Lévy’s latest effusion, but I’m not him, and hence have no compunctions. It’s impossible to pick out a favorite bit so I won’t.

According to “CNN”:http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/09/24/mccain-camp-to-propose-postponing-vp-debate/, McCain may be a no-show on Friday.

Graham says the McCain camp is well aware of the position of the Obama campaign and the debate commission that the debate should go on as planned — but both he and another senior McCain adviser insist the Republican nominee will not go to the debate Friday if there’s no deal on the bailout.

This reminds me of the famous episode of ‘Have I Got News For You” where the Right Honourable Roy Hattersley failed to turn up for the third time. They replaced him with a tub of lard.

Now McCain, unlike the RHRH, is pretty spry for a guy in his seventies. So a tub of lard probably isn’t apropos. But nominations are now open for objects, creatures or persons that might suitably replace the presidential-candidate-in-absentia. Keep it clean please.

Update: I just saw on MSNBC that David Letterman has already put in his entry for this competition. When McCain cancelled his appearance on Letterman tonight, phoning Letterman in person to tell him that he was rushing to fix the financial crisis (he lied; in fact, he was in a different CBS studio recording an interview with Kate Couric), Letterman invited Keith Olbermann instead. Awesome – I hope that the Presidential Debates Commission follows suit.

I was one of a smallish group of bloggers who met Bill Clinton yesterday at the Clinton Global Initiative.¹ The interview was supposed to be exclusively about the Initiative, but about 70% of the conversation ended up focusing on the financial turmoil. For the benefit of anyone who’s interested, my impression (based on notes – no recording was allowed) below the fold. Dana Goldstein, who was at the event too, has more to say “here”:http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/tapped_archive?month=09&year=2008&base_name=bill_clinton_revisits_his_econ.

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“Tyler Cowen”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/ive-always-want.html points to this “NYT article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/18/business/worldbusiness/18rescue.html on the international fallout from the current market crisis in the US.

Is the United States no longer the global beacon of unfettered, free-market capitalism? In extending a last-minute $85 billion lifeline to American International Group, the troubled insurer, Washington has not only turned away from decades of rhetoric about the virtues of the free market and the dangers of government intervention, but it has also probably undercut future American efforts to promote such policies abroad. [click to continue…]

So it looks as though the PDs, Ireland’s neo-liberal party, are on the “way to the chopping block”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/frontpage/2008/0917/1221599424850.html?via=mr. While I disagreed vigorously with most of their policies, I have mildly mixed feelings about this, if only because an uncle of mine was a founding member (and the person who led them up until the disastrous election that precipitated their current state of disrepair). But mostly, I’m posting so that I can link to this wonderful extract from the current leader’s public statement on their future.

Mr Cannon said it was “far from me to pre-empt what that decision might be”. In his opinion, the party had two choices. It could “limp on” into an uncertain future, while elected members were “picked off the edge of the herd like wounded animals”. The other choice was to dissolve so that the party could say: “We have triumphed and in our triumph we are leaving the field with a degree of grace and dignity.”

Far from pre-empting, indeed …

Part of Alex Tabarrok’s “argument”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/09/why-libertarian.html for why libertarians should vote for Barack Obama:

The libertarian voice has not been listened to in Republican politics for a long time. The Republicans take the libertarian wing of the party for granted and with phony rhetoric and empty phrases have bought our support on the cheap. Thus – since voice has failed – it is time for exit. Remember that if a political party can count on you then you cannot count on it.

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Her story will almost certainly be unfamiliar to non-Irish readers, but “it’s an important one”:http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/ireland/2008/0911/1221039067831.html?via=mr.

The death has taken place of Wexford school teacher Eileen Flynn, who became an important figure in the history of the separation between the Catholic Church and the State. In August 1982 Ms Flynn was dismissed from her job as an English and history teacher at the Holy Faith Convent in New Ross, Co Wexford. At the time she was sacked, Ms Flynn was unmarried with a baby son and was living with the baby’s father, a separated man, Richie Roche. Two months after Ms Flynn gave birth she received a letter from the school manager informing her that following her decision not to resign from the school her position was being terminated. The letter referred to complaints from parents about her lifestyle and of her open rejection of the “norms of behaviour” and the ideals the school existed to promote. It also reminded her of the “scandal” already caused. Ms Flynn sought to be reinstated in her post but lost her unfair dismissal case at the Employment Appeals Tribunal and at the Circuit Court. She finally lost her appeal to the High Court on March 8th, 1985.

A key piece of background information here is that she was sacked from what was, effectively, a state school. The Irish state had farmed out the larger part of the education system to the Catholic Church (albeit with separate schools for the Protestant minority), so that while the state paid teachers, the parish priest was typically the local school manager. This wasn’t all bad, but stories like Eileen Flynn’s remind me why I don’t particularly like efforts by some US religious groups to push the boundaries between church and state. The ability to deprive people who don’t conform to local mores of their livelihood is likely to become a dangerous and pernicious form of social control, as it did in Ireland for most of the last century.

The week before last, I chaired an APSA panel on Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/redirect.html?ie=UTF8&location=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.amazon.com%2FNixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America%2Fdp%2F0743243021%3Fie%3DUTF8%26s%3Dbooks%26qid%3D1221059642%26sr%3D8-1&tag=henryfarrell-20&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325, with responses from Paul Krugman, Nolan McCarty, Paul Pierson and Eric Rauchway. I can honestly say that this was the best APSA panel I’ve ever been at (and this isn’t self-promotion – my contributions were limited to the boring non-creative stuff like organizing questions from the audience); when I finish transcribing the audio of the panel and put it up on the WWW, you’ll be able to decide for yourself. Anyway, one of the key questions that panelists discussed was the extent to which it was true that Nixonland was still with us today, and if so, why? The last couple of days (and today’s nonsense from the McCain campaign about how Obama wants to give comprehensive sex education to kindergarten children, which maps almost perfectly onto similarly nonsensical political arguments that Rick documents in the 1960s) provide pretty good evidence that Nixonland is alive and well. But why?
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Hilzoy has some “word by word analysis”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_09/014585.php of John McCain’s convention speech, which reminded me that I hadn’t seen anyone do any convention speech Wordles. Which doesn’t mean that no-one has done one – just that they don’t seem to be popping up in the blogosphere. So here are yer wordles for Barack Obama, John McCain, Joe Biden and Sarah Palin, in that order (I’ve used different colour schemes for the Democratic and Republican nominees to make it easier to distinguish them).

Barack Obama

John McCain

Joe Biden

Sarah Palin

“Clive Crook”:http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/friedman_and_ignatius_on_georg.php has a post riffing on two columns by Thomas Friedman and David Ignatius which seems to me to get things wrong (or at the least, my interpretation of the relevant history is rather different).

Friedman concentrates on the error of Nato expansion, and the consequent humiliation of Russia, which has now come back to bite us. … The risks of humiliating Russia after the Wall came down were perhaps given too little weight. The dilemma was certainly understood by advocates of Nato enlargement, and there were attempts at outreach through various forms of partnership between Russia and and the alliance, though perhaps this seemed like adding insult to injury. But bear two other points in mind. One, Nato was not enlarged all the way, out of concern for Russia’s reaction: Ukraine and Georgia have been sort of promised membership, but with no timetable. Two, the question was, what were we to say to Poland, Hungary, and then-Czechoslovakia, desperate for release from Russo-Soviet imperium and for the protection of the West? Remember also that the success of their post-socialist transition to market economics was very much in doubt. This was a finely balanced argument.

The real mistake, to my mind, was in taking too long to admit the Eastern Europeans to the European Union–and that in turn owed everything to the fact (a grave mistake in its own right) that the EU had deepened its political integration too fast and too far. A shallower economic union, rather than a United States of Europe in progress, would have been able to embrace Poland and the others more eagerly. As it was, the only fast-acting institutional support for the East European reformers was Nato, a military alliance explicitly created to confront the Soviet Union, and implicitly still aimed at Russia. Friedman accuses the Clinton and Bush foreign-policy teams of “rank short-sightedness” in all this. He makes a good point, but the error was not as clear-cut as he says.

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Hilzoy “comments”:http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2008/08/advisors-claim.html on David Brooks’ latest “column”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/opinion/19brooks.html?ref=opinion about how John McCain is a decent man being forced by the sad realities of the American political system to run a negative campaign.

Compelled? No choice? I don’t think so. For one thing, there are lots of ways in which McCain could campaign without lying or impugning his opponent’s patriotism. Some of them might even win. If McCain’s advisors can’t think of a single one of them, that shows only their limited imaginations.

But let’s pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.

You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.

To enlarge on this point a little: isn’t it _particularly_ incongruous for a self-described conservative pundit to invoke the “Gee Officer Krupke”:http://www.westsidestory.com/site/level2/lyrics/krupke.html defence? You know, all that honor and integrity stuff – how the choices we make reflect our innate character rather than our environment and all that. I imagine that if we saw an actual principled conservative assessment of some of the tactics that have been used by McCain in the last several weeks (flat out lies, claims that his opponent cares more about winning the election than the lives of American troops and so on), it would arrive at rather different conclusions …

So I have a quite different take on the broader geo-politics of the Russia-Georgia conflict than either “Matt Yglesias”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/08/georgia_on_my_mind.php (in “new digs”:http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/ – update blogroll accordingly) or “Steve Clemons”:http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/2008/08/georgiarussia_c/. Clemons:

much of what we are seeing unfold between Russia and Georgia involves a high quotient of American culpability. When Kosovo declared independence and the US and other European states recognized it — thus sidestepping Russia’s veto in the United Nations Security Council — many of us believed that the price for Russian cooperation in other major global problems just went much higher and that the chance of a clash over Georgia’s breakaway border provinces increased dramatically. By pushing Kosovo the way the US did and aggravating nationalist sensitivities, Russia could in reaction be rationally expected to further integrate and cultivate South Ossetia and Abkhazia under de facto Russian control and pull these provinces that border Russia away from the state of Georgia. At the time, there was word from senior level sources that Russia had asked the US to stretch an independence process for Kosovo over a longer stretch of time — and tie to it some process of independence for the two autonomous Georgia provinces. In exchange, Russia would not veto the creation of a new state of Kosovo at the Security Council. The U.S. rejected Russia’s secret entreaties and instead rushed recognition of Kosovo and said damn the consequences.

Yglesias:

In a broader sense Steve Clemons raises the good point that the government of Russia made it pretty clear that if the United States recognized Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence from Serbia over Russian objections that Russia would retaliate by stepping up support for separatists in Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This doesn’t seem to have given any of Georgia’s outspoken friends in the United States any pause. Indeed, strong pro-Georgian views in the U.S. media and foreign policy community correlate heavily with strong pro-Kosovo views. This highlights the fact that the underlying issue here is simply a disposition to take a dim view of Moscow and to favor aggressive policies to roll back Russian influence rather than some kind of deep and sincerely felt desire to help Georgia.

Now I’m not too keen on the ‘brave little Georgia’ crowd myself, but neither of these seems to me to be right. Steve, who’s a realist, doesn’t seem to me to be providing a realist enough take on Russia’s motivations, while Matt seems to be soft-pedalling his liberal internationalism. There are many ways to interpret what’s been happening over the last few days, but one important part of the explanation is an argument over norms, and specifically the relationship between the norms of territorial integrity and self determination, that has been playing out since the end of the Cold War. [click to continue…]