Books

BoingBoing links to a Safari Books Online special offer: pick a free book for a month , plus 10% off a subscription to the full version of the service. Looks good. In the basic package, Safari gives you generous (not total, unless you pay more) access to a truly vast range of titles from “O’Reilly Media, John Wiley & Sons, Addison-Wesley, Peachpit Press, Adobe Press, lynda.com and many more top publishers.” It looks like you can have 10 books ‘checked out’ per month. You have ‘slots’. Plus there are extras and goodies of various sorts. Yearly rate: $252. Monthly rate: $22.99. For me it doesn’t quite make sense, but almost. I’m sure for a lot of people, and institutions, this makes total sense. Often when you are learning something new you would like to have not just one but five books (because you aren’t sure which Photoshop book will be best). And 18 months later there’s a new version and you would like new books. (How many thick, obsolete technical titles do you have on your shelf? I have: enough.) It might make sense to subscribe for a few months when I’m learning something new, then unsubscribe for a year and subscribe again when the next bout of learning hits.

But mostly I’m thinking how nice this would be for academic books in the humanities in particular (in the social sciences, too, but the humanities seems more monograph-driven – or ridden.) JSTOR for books. Your institution subscribes, or you subscribe individually. You get access to everything from all the major publishers. It would make a good deal more economic sense than what we’ve got, and would be a lot more functional. Also, it would be good for independent scholars and ordinary citizens who don’t have the privilege of institutional access, which I think is a real problem. It’s bad that the (often tax-subsidized) productions of academics get locked in university libraries. If you could buy a month-long library membership for $22 – maybe Joe the Plumber gets it in his head to read all the latest scholarly work on Plato – that would be reasonable. Free culture is best, but affordable culture is second best. Of course it won’t happen. JSTOR for scholarly books in the humanities. Damn, that would be nice.

After McCain refrained from saying anything about NCLB at the Republican convention Laura challenged me to write about McCain’s education policy. So I dutifully tried, but found it hard not to seem more partisan than I actually am. However, I had a good look at both candidates’ websites, so I was more or less unsurprised by McCain’s answer to the final question in last week’s debate. (Just in case that sounds like a complaint that it was not until the final, rushed, question in the final debate that education was asked about, it isn’t: I can’t imagine anyone’s vote hinges on what a presidential candidate says about education; given how little influence presidents have over what happens in schools that is probably sensible; and anyway all candidates have proven extremely adept at not answering questions).

[click to continue…]

Expanding my unsystematic researches into early 20th Century German typography and book design, I recently stumbled across this gem (click for larger):

It’s the George Salter designed cover for a 1930 German edition of Dos Passos’ The 42nd Parallel.

It’s a perfect example of ‘vague sense of a foreign land‘ phenomenon. He’s got a cowboy in Georgia. A line of Dusenbergs to represent Tennessee, just north of the skyscrapers of New Orleans. A boxer guarding the Mexican border. And we’ve all heard those dreadful stories about trains through Utah menaced by baseball players employing the classic overhead swing. And I dunno what army is invading Chicago. Other examples of this sort of thing?

Like Kevin Drum, I have been sorely tempted to take a poke at the poor Cornerites in their misery – especially Andy McCarthy – but Hilzoy got there first. You can follow her links. it’s all-Ayers, all-the-time, if you’ve been missing the show. Here’s my analytic contribution on top of the straight mockery: this lot have been reduced to arguing that the problem with Obama is that he doesn’t believe the stuff he’s saying, won’t do anything like the things he’s proposing. Or, in the 10% less crazy Frum version, he’s just got to be an incredibly corrupt Chicago pol. Because he’s from Chicago.

This is funny, first, because it converts Obama’s rather pedestrian characteristic of not seeming to be something radically different than what he seems to be into a maddening sort of rope-a-dope achievement. (How does he do it? That ‘appearing to be the sort of person that he probably is’ thing.) Lowry glowers: “he’s a kind of genius at appearing plausible. If the Nobel committee had a prize for appearing plausible, he’d win it every time.” But Lowry isn’t talking about the power of making implausible ideas sound plausible. He’s talking about the power of making it seem plausible that you believe basically plausible things. [click to continue…]

I’m sure there’s nothing to this so-called ‘financial crisis’ that wasn’t explained adequately in that classic Sutherland instructional video, “The Wise Use Of Credit”. If not, then in that companion volume, “What Makes Us Tick”.

We have a friend who travels on business to India a lot. He was discussing how maybe next week isn’t the best week to be away from home because if the whole system melts down he’ll get stuck in Bangladesh, with the airlines unable to buy gas for the planes because money has seized up globally. Getting back to Singapore would be like a cross between Burmese Days and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Not that he really thinks that. It’s just that everyone is thinking that. I mean: it almost definitely won’t happen.

I’ll just talk nonsense for a while. Because: what do I know? I praised Scott Morse’s art a couple weeks ago. Since then I bought a new collection of his stuff, Scrap Mettle [amazon]. You can check out this preview from his upcoming Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! . (If you missed my first post and don’t know who Scott Morse is, you can read his wikipedia entry, or check out this site. I linked to his blog above. He’s done animation stuff and other stuff.) [click to continue…]

Ingrid’s post below (plus a couple of other events) prompted me to look for G.A. Cohen’s new book: Rescuing Justice and Equality (UK) is apparently already out in the US despite being published on November 1st. I bought several copies (so my students can read it with me), and hereby promise that I’ll have some sort of review here in January (January, because, unlike Richard Arneson, I need time to review books that haven’t officially been published yet).

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.

Finally and “long overdue”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/05/20/care-talk-blog/, here is my book review of Valuing Children, Nancy Folbre’s latest book. The overall goal of this book is to show how and why children matter for economic life, to provide estimates of the economic value of family (nonmarket) childcare and parental expenditures in the USA, and to raise critical questions about the size and kinds of public spending on children in the USA.

Folbre formulates four questions which she sets out to answer: (1) Why should we care about spending on the children? (2) How much money and time do parents devote to children? (3) How much money do taxpayers spend on children? And (4) who should pay for the kids (in other words, which share of the costs of children should be borne by parents and by the government)?
[click to continue…]

Hello again, crooked timber of humanity! I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It feels like I’m always saying that, but then, that’s what happens when you move to the once-every-Jovian-year posting schedule.

[click to continue…]

My mother and I have a tacit agreement. It’s the same one she had with her father and that I, already, have with my elder daughter. I believe my grandfather had the same pact with his mother. It’s simply this – to alert the other to thriller and mystery writers that they may not have read.

The rule is that the writer has to be good enough for the other person to like. This does lead to some mistakes. Unlike my grandfather, who loved Ovid and Pope (in one of his many failed attempts to corrupt me — or at least loosen me up — he gave me a wonderful translation of Catullus’s dirty poems) but would read any old crap when it came to thrillers, my mother is moderately discerning. I am somewhere in between. But, of course, good mystery writers generally improve with age (examples abound, but especially striking is Julian Symons, who apparently wouldn’t allow his first effort to be republished but ended his career with several absolute blinders; the obvious counterexample being Colin Dexter, whose work is solid proof that the best TV is inspired by substandard fiction). So I was embarrassed when my mother told me about Peter Robinson, whose books I’ve been reading for years without telling her. I had a good reason – at first they just didn’t seem good enough for her (I know that she is a bit, though not much, more discerning than I am). I didn’t really notice the point at which he got good enough to mention, so didn’t do it, even though I think he is now in the top rank of mystery writers.

So it was funny when she visited the other week that she immediately asked if I had read Mark Mills’s The Savage Garden (UK). I had just ordered both that and Amagansett (UK title: The Whaleboat House — why do they do that, byt the way?) after amazon told me that he is favoured by people who read Robert Goddard (a page turner if ever there was one whose apparent lack of success in the States is baffling to me).

[click to continue…]

Comics! That is to say, TopShelf is having their annual $3 sale! You can get some good books, man. I just loaded up. I’m especially looking forward to: Scott Morse, The Barefoot Serpent. (I really like Scott Morse’s art.) Tim Sievert, That Salty Air, and Dan James’ Mosquito (check out the preview.) I loved James’ The Octopi and the Ocean. You should pick that up, too, while you are at it. Hell, you might even buy stuff that’s not $3 but merely on sale! Like Jeffrey Brown’s Incredible Change-Bots.

In other news, the Savage Dragon has endorsed Barack Obama for President. Good for him! But maybe he’s too metrosexual for this to make a big difference.

On the strength of my mighty “Back to the Futura” post, I got an offer from the Prospect Magazine to review Font. The Sourcebook [amazon]. And so I have. Alas, it is not available to non-subscribers, but you could always run to your local news vendor and clamor for it. Or subscribe. Writing the piece was an amusing sort of pin-the-tail challenge because I wasn’t quite sure what the editor wanted. So I just did my usual la-de-da look-at-me Holbo-style thing. Which, of course, was very sensibly stripped away. No, really. It was for the best. (When you write brief journalism about language in that style, you end up sounding like William Safir.)

The review got entitled “Building A Better Futura”, so I’m maxed-out on Futura-future puns for the rest of the month. I concluded the review by squeezing in a quick note on my ongoing would-Obama’s-poster-have-been-illegal researches. (Executive summary: the Nazis were crazy.) Now I’ll just sweep together a few other bits and scraps that ended up on the cutting room floor. [click to continue…]

You might want to check out my colleague Lester Hunt’s excellent new edited collection on Grade Inflation: Academic Standards in Higher Education, which is just out. It originated in a rather well-thought-out conference Lester organized back in 2004. My own contribution arose because he asked me to comment on Valen Johnson’s talk, based on his book Grade Inflation: A Crisis in College Education, and then sneakily inveigled me to contribute a self-standing chapter. The collection is great: genuinely diverse and thoughtful contributions from Clifford Adelman, David T. Beito, Mary Biggs, Richard Kamber, Alfie Kohn, Charles W. Nuckolls, Francis K. Schrag, John D. Wiley and Lester and me. Recommend it to your library, and to your Deans!

In the course of writing my own paper several things happened. I started off assuming (with no real evidence) that grade inflation was real and believing (for no real reasons) that it was bad; I discovered that there is no evidence of grade inflation (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it doesn’t exist) and that the reasons for thinking it would be bad if it did exist are pretty weak. Commenting on Johnson’s book, in other words, convinced me that his subtitle is entirely wrong (even though the book is, actually, terrifically good). It’s not the first time that I have changed my mind as the result of writing a paper, but it is the first that I’ve changed it quite so radically.

I developed, mainly through reading Valen Johnson’s book, a conviction that student evaluations are next to worthless for evaluating teachers. His book also convinced me that grade variation within departments exists and is bad, though not that there is much we can or should do about it.. Finally, I became more and more irritated with Harvey Mansfield’s piece in the Chronicle. So, below the fold, here’s a taster of the book, adapted from my chapter, and arguing specifically against Mansfield:

[click to continue…]

I just had a deliciously sweet cantaloupe. How did I know how to pick it? My favorite* chef, Chef Susan aka Chef Q posted some advice on the topic recently. Not only is she an amazing cook and baker, she is also an excellent photographer so her posts are illustrated with helpful images. I forgive her for all the pounds I gained last year due to her cooking (hey, at least I finally started a regular exercise regime) and thank her not just for all the great meals I’ve had the good fortune to experience, but also the helpful material she shares online.

[*] It’s actually a tie with my Mom, but she’s not officially a chef. Of course, that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a cookbook (see some of her recipes here).

Photo credit: Susan Beach