I’ll be at the MLA this year – will I see you there? – delivering a paper that is basically a major rewrite of my inaugural Valve post about the crisis in humanities publishing. (Other bloggers you know are on the same panel.) Here’s a bit from the old post: [click to continue…]
From the category archives:
Blogging
Last night I mentioned to my wife — a reference librarian at the Library of Congress whose areas of concentration include e-commerce and information technology — that the BBC website had just run a story headlined “Blogging ‘set to peak next year.”” Here it is.
Her response to this was a sound (one I cannot quite transcribe) conveying a subtle blend of disbelief, disgust, and world-weariness. It was not at all a matter of pro-blog parti pris; rather, it reflected a deeply informed disdain for the methods and presumptions usually involved in making such predictions. As usual, I payed close attention to her opinion in the matter. (Reference librarians have amazing powers.)
[click to continue…]
This week I’m blogging only work-related things and from deep inside a hotel (which I’ve not left for days) on the outskirts of Sao Paulo. Sounds fun, eh?
ICANN staff are generally held to be defensive, secretive and to have a bunker mentality. So in a bid to be more open, or just to arouse some sympathy, we’re making an effort to blog our AGM. (Anyone can actually blog it, it’s just that staff are being encouraged to.) If you’re interested in how the meeting is going, e.g. issues, meeting reports, web references and local colour, please come to a site that lets people not in Sao Paulo to participate in the meeting. There are web chats, links to video, audio and real time transcription, and a blog. It’s called the ICANN Sao Paulo Participation Website.
It’s all been set up by journalist Kieren McCarthy, and the idea is for us to use this whole Internet thing a bit more to let people be part of how it’s actually run.
A quick question about the Social Security debate last year that CT readers may be able to help me with. I remember some newspaper somewhere publishing an article in which un-named Democrats thanked bloggers like Josh Marshall for helping corral the mavericks during the Social Security debate. Does anyone remember where that article is? More generally, actual evidence on whether bloggers did or didn’t influence this debate would be helpful (I’m pretty sure that they did, but hard evidence on this is difficult to come by).
An experiment is underway over at Acephalous to test the velocity at which a meme spreads across the blogal landscape. As Scott Eric Kaufman explains the hypothesis being tested:
Most memes, I’d wager, are only superficially organic: beginning small, they acquire minor prominence among low-traffic blogs before being picked up by a high-traffic one, from which many more low-traffic blogs snatch them. Contra blog-triumphal models of memetic bootstrapping, I believe most memes are — to borrow a term from Daniel Dennett’s rebuttal of punctuated equilibrium — “skyhooked” into prominence by high-traffic blogs.
I’m not sure where CT fits in this particular schema, though probably we are of the middling sort. Anyway, please check out the rest of SEK’s entry. Here’s that link again.
And if you have a blog — be its traffic high or low — please consider joining the experiment with just the short of (otherwise content-free) entry you are now reading.
Remember, it’s all for Science, albeit of the MLA variety.
I’m up on Bloggingheads again, “this time”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=163 with Dan Drezner, for those as wants to watch.
A few people have emailed me in the last few weeks saying that they’ve been unable to comment here (or, more precisely, that they have been commenting here and that their comments have been disappearing into the ether). If you’ve been having this problem, well … don’t comment here obviously, but email me with info about what has been happening, what your browser version is, what your internet service is, IP address if you have a fixed one, and anything else that might be helpful. If anyone has any idea what might be going on (we’re using WordPress 2.0.4) feel free to let me know either in comments or by email.
I was going to post this in a comment to John’s post below, but it’s just so funny that I have to put it up here. From the the one, the only Hugh Hewitt’s post-election reverie:
President Bush will not flag in the pursuit of the war, and Senator Santorum is now available for a seat on the SCOTUS [em. mine] should one become available. GOP senators will have the chance to select leadership equal to the new world of politics which, as the past two years have demonstrated, does not reward timidity.
Justice Santorum. That’s plausible (I mean, he’s got K-Lo’s vote, right?). Excuse me for a moment while I apply a Tiger Balm plaster to my side, which aches from laughing–but this is the man who went to the mat for Harriet Miers, after all.
While we’re linking to blogs that focus on the economic aspects of life, here is a plug for Credit Slips, a group blog focusing on “all things about credit and bankruptcy”. Not only does this blog have a great list of contributors, but they also bring in some star guests.
This week, Viviana Zelizer from Princeton’s Sociology Department has been guest blogging on topics ranging from the importance of personal ties in economic transactions to economic exchange across generations in families, the gendered aspects of spending and the intersection of economic transactions and intimate relations. (The latter is also the topic of her most recent book on The Purchase of Intimacy
Full disclosure, Viviana was one of my mentors in graduate school. However, I think that makes me particularly qualified to comment on how helpful her work is in understanding questions about how social relations and cultural context influence economic processes. Be sure not to miss out on this treat.
I made my “debut”:http://bloggingheads.tv/video.php?id=151 on Bloggingheads TV yesterday, arguing (well, actually, mostly agreeing) with Bob Wright about Iraq, North Korea, the netroots and other stuff. I’m billed as “a pale imitation of Mickey Kaus” (Bob’s usual sparring partner). As you’ll see from the video, the ‘pale’ bit at least is right on target …
Shorter Oliver Kamm (for the benefit of those who don’t want to wade through “5000 words of Kamm’s unique prose”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/10/in_defence_of_t.html ):
bq. Many thousands of people have died, Iraq is a mess, and the war was completely mismanaged. Some other war supporters have therefore changed their minds about whether it was a good idea in the first place. Not me! Thanks to the war we in the West no longer have to worry about Saddam having WMDs. So the war was justified.
Internet legend Gary Farber is going through a really rough patch right now and needs lots of medicine he can’t afford to buy. If any of you fine CT readers could kick him a few bucks that would be great. Gary tends to run hot and cold, but when he’s fired up about a topic he’s a prodigious blogger. Also, he can be kind of a prickly fellow, as he would be the first to admit, so don’t let the fact that he pwn3d you with unnecessary harshness one time in a comments thread hold you back. (Remember that time, when you said something interesting, and then Gary said he’d already blogged about it like two months ago? Yeah, that time.) You know what they say: charity begins at blog.
Blog: Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark has set up a new group blog-journal, “Qahwa Sada”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/qahwa_sada/.
Why a new blog-journal by Middle East experts? Because Middle East studies specialists have a phenomenal amount of quality knowledge about the Arab and Islamic world… Many are out there in the region, seeing things happen and talking to people over a sustained period of time. But they often have trouble getting that knowledge out into the public realm. Part of the problem is that there just aren’t nearly enough of the right kind of outlets. Academic journals are not well suited to getting information and analysis out to a wide public, and many have yet to adapt to the internet era. Blogs are wonderful, but not everyone wants one or has the time to run one. … That means that debate is too often dominated by people with, shall we say, a less empirically rich or theoretically sophisticated understanding of the region. Qahwa Sada aims to fix this market failure by providing a public forum for Middle East studies specialists to talk about what they know.
Manifesto: Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have written a forthright (and in my view, excellent) “manifesto”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12124 for liberalism in the US, as a response to Tony Judt’s accusation that US liberals have been supine in the face of the conservative onslaught over the last several years. Those who aren’t allergic to signing these things on principle should seriously consider signing it – it isn’t the usual pablum. A lot of people whom I respect have signed up already (Yochai Benkler, Josh Cohen, Robert Dahl, Margaret Levi and Charles Tilly to name a few).
A magazine called Cognitive Dissidents came online several weeks ago, so its long past time that I link to it. The contributors include a core of philosophy grad students from UW Madison, plus other philosophers and intellectuals. It has a magazine rather than a blog format, and promises regular issues rather than the chaotic and teasing semi-regular updating of the blog format. The current issue has several interesting essays on topics ranging from ethical eating through fair trade, global responsibility for poverty and the distinction between war and terrorism to reflections on the relationship between philosophizing and political activism. Worth keeping an eye on.
Look, can we knock these two on the head, please, gang? I realise that we have no chance of stamping out these fallacies all over the internet – it’s almost as if there were a whole network of right-wing talking points sites out there all taking in each other’s washing! – but we can at least stop regurgitating them ourselves.
1. Iraq is a young country. Therefore, it has a low “crude” death rate. “Crude” in this case means “not adjusted for demographic structure and therefore not meaningfully comparable across countries”. Therefore, it is not surprising that pre-war Iraq had a crude death rate similar to that of Denmark, any more than it is surprising that any other two completely non-comparable statistics might happen to be the same number.
2. When someone dies, you get a death certificate from the hospital, morgue or coroner, in your hand. This bit of the death infrastructure is still working in Iraq. Then the person who issued the death certificate is meant to send a copy to the central government records office where they collate them, tabulate them and collect the overall mortality statistics. This bit of the death infrastructure is not still working in Iraq. (It was never great before the war, broke down entirely during the year after the invasion when there was no government to send them to and has never really recovered; statistics agencies are often bottom of the queue after essential infrastructure, law and order and electricity). Therefore, there is no inconsistency between the fact that 92% of people with a dead relative could produce the certificate when asked, and the fact that Iraq has no remotely reliable mortality statistics and quite likely undercounts the rate of violent death by a factor of ten.
Go on and sin no more, or at least not on our Lancet comments threads.