Philip Gerrans argues that there is a bubble in the humanities, and that all kinds of people are holding stock at an artificially inflated value, often on the advice of people who have a vested interested. (h/t Darius Jedburgh)
Various Timberites had a discussion some time ago about having a semi-regular Sunday photo on the blog. I think I probably take more pictures than the others, both digital and film, but, looking through my Flickr stream, I don’t tend to take pictures that illustrate grand social or political themes. Still, this one might be of interest. It is the interior of St Vincent’s works in Bristol, now the headquarters of a sustainable development consultancy, but once the offices of a Victorian factory. The building dates from the 1890s and the decoration, mainly ceramic, is extraordinarily ornate. Like many British cities, Bristol has an “open doors” day once a year, when buildings that are normally closed to the public are open to visit. Is this just a British thing, or do other countries do the same? This was taken on one of those days.
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In August, the Erasmus University Rotterdam fired Professor Tariq Ramadan. Well, strictly speaking, they didn’t fire him, but rater withdrew the invitation to be a guest professor. Since December 2006 Ramadan had a contract with the City Council of Rotterdam to advise the City Council on civic integration & multicultural policies (about half of the population in Rotterdam is not from Dutch origin and the city has enormous socio-economic-cultural problems). At the same time he was invited as a guestprofessor at the Erasmus University for the same period (allegedly he had asked for this affiliation himself when he was asked to work for the City Council). So legally speaking in August the City Council fired him, and at the very same moment the University withdrew its invitation to be affiliated as a guest professor. Yet for what follows, I don’t think this legal quibble is very relevant. From an ethical-political point of view it remains a dismissal. The question is: was this dismissal justified?
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Via a FB friend:
As of April 1, 2006, out of a 2004 Census estimated population of 18 in Teterboro, there were 39 registered voters (216.7% of the population, vs. 55.4% in all of Bergen County).
Sadly, the answer may be prosaic. From earlier in the same Wikipedia entry:
The 2000 census failed to count any of the residents of the Vincent Place housing units who had moved into the newly built homes in 1999. The uncounted residents, including the Mayor and all four Council members, would help make up a projected tripling of the population enumerated by the census.
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Handing a rightwing media don and author of pop ev psych books commission to wrote 500 words on the subject of “Lust” for a start of term humour article has to pretty much go in the “what could possibly go wrong?” column. But I think even the THES editors must have been a little bit surprised at what they got. A classic example of the sort of thing where having shown a draft to a single close female friend might have saved the day, and in the process offered a useful insight into the distinction between the concept “refreshingly un-PC” and the concept “creepy”, and perhaps the Pleistocene conditions on the veldt which might have given rise to it.
I am more or less diametrically opposed to Dr Kealey’s point of view, which I consider wrong on two counts. On the one hand, this “look but don’t touch” stuff is guff; students and lecturers are both adults and don’t need to be protected by special rules not imposed on the rest of us against their own occasional tendency to have bad sex. On the other hand, it’s perfectly possible, if you actually are an adult man, to have a conversation with an attractive young woman and interact with her professionally without leching over her all the time. In fact, it’s not only possible, it’s the law (specifically the law with respect to sexual discrimination in the workplace). Sheesh.
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Some amazing time lapse sequences of glacier retreat and a spectacular ice-shelf collapse:
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I was at a conference on uncertainty and climate change in Berkeley last week, and gave the wrap-up panel discussion with Geoffrey Heal. We’d discussed a wide range of uncertainties and ambiguities, from future emissions scenarios to model uncertainty to perception and communication issues, and we were asked to comment on how, with so much uncertainty, economists can make useful recommendations.
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Do you find yourself considering the financial crisis and thinking “well, neoclassical economists have certainly come through this one with their reputations enhanced! Anyone with a world-class heterodox economics department should certainly be thinking about closing it down right now, there’s no interest in that sort of thing!”. Well, if you do, then you’re almost certainly working as an administrator at Notre Dame University (or for that matter, the University of Notre Dame, thanks Ben in comments), because nobody else does.
I mean, what the byOurLady heck do they think they are playing at. Back in April 2008, the decision to place clear fresh water between the nice professional efficient market types in the “Economics and Econometrics” department, and the dirty f**king hippies in “Economics and Policy Analysis” might have made some sort of sense, in that while cynical and not very academic-freedom-y, it would have improved students’ chances of getting into prestigious economics graduate programs where they could write “counterintuitive” and “fascinating” job market papers about penalty shootouts and speed-dating (these being the only remaining social or anthropological questions not thoroughly answered by neoclassical economists, cf “Freakonomics”).
But today? With the whole field blown wide open and all sorts of questions of the role of economic analysis wide open to debate again? With Richard Freaking Posner coming out as a post-Keynesian? I suppose that if you truly believe that it’s impossible to time the market, this is one way to prove it.
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Martin Bright in the New StatesmanSpectator
bq. Incidentally, I now think the invasion was indeed an error: carried out at the wrong time, by the wrong coalition for the wrong reasons. But where I do agree with the “decents” is that those who opposed intervention in 2002/3 were arguing for the murderous Baathist regime to stay in power. This should remain on their conscience just as the murderous consequences of the invasion are on the conscience of those who supported the war.
(via comments at “Aaronovitch Watch”:http://aaronovitch.blogspot.com/ .)
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And I thought only philosophers played games with “general” descriptions like this. Via Think Progress:
And while Republicans have proposed several compromise amendments, most of their provisions seek to delay the mark-up process and undermine the bill. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), for instance, introduced an amendment (Hatch F7 [pdf]) to “add transition relief for the excise tax on high cost insurance plans for any State with a name the [sic] begins with the letter ‘U.’”
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“Scott”:http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/016_03/4337 reviewing David Harvey’s latest at BookForum (free reg. required).
bq. It is unlikely that anyone has ever confused a page of Thomas Friedman’s with one of Immanuel Kant’s, but between them it is possible to triangulate a prevailing sensibility of the past two decades. Call it managerial cosmopolitanism. It celebrates the idea of a global civil society, with the states cooperating to play their proper (limited) role as guardians of public order and good business practices. The hospitality that each nation extends to visiting foreign traders grows ever wider and deeper; generalized, it becomes the most irenic of principles. And so there emerges on the horizon of the imaginable future something like a world republic, with liberty and frequent-flier miles for all.
The core insight here is sufficiently close to the “Forty Days and a Mule”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/09/15/40-days-and-a-mule/ post of last week as to suggest a competition. Winner will get the usual prize (a year’s free subscription to CT). Rewrite some of Immanuel Kant’s _Perpetual Peace_ in the style of Thomas Friedman’s _The World is Flat._ Or, if you prefer, Thomas Friedman’s _The World is Flat_ in the style of Immanuel Kant’s _Perpetual Peace._ Or any contemporary purveyor of bollocks in the style of some more learned and wordy philosopher with whom he or she may be said to have an intellectual connection, however tangential. Or vice-versa. Or plausible and amusing variations on any of the above; you get the idea.
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“Cory Doctorow in the Guardian”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/15/cory-doctorow-3d-movies:
bq. Somewhere in the past year or so, it seems as though every studio exec has decided to greenlight one or more blockbuster in 3D, using a pretty impressive technology that employs polarised glasses to give a reasonably convincing illusion of depth. … And the 3D is … nice. … But I’m sceptical. … Up is a tremendous movie; it made me laugh and cry, and was intended to be seen in 3D … Nothing was obviously missing from the 2D experience that made me feel like the 3D was a must-have.
bq. And of course, that’s true of all 3D movies. Movies, after all, rely on the aftermarket of satellite, broadcast and cable licenses, of home DVD releases and releases to airline entertainment systems and hotel room video-on-demand services – none of which are in 3D. If the movie couldn’t be properly enjoyed in boring old 2D, the economics of filmmaking would collapse … he economics just don’t support it: a truly 3D movie would be one where the 3D was so integral to the storytelling and the visuals and the experience that seeing it in 2D would be like seeing a giant-robots-throwing-buildings-at-each-other blockbuster as a flipbook while a hyperactive eight-year-old supplied the sound effects by shouting “BANG!” and “CRASH!” in your ear. Such a film would be expensive to produce and market and could never hope to recoup.
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Noticing in the school newsletter that 80% of the 7th graders with a 3.75, and 75% of those between a 3.5 and a 3.75 were girls, I asked my daughter why she thought this was. She retorted something like “duh, what do you expect?”. Then, adopting her pre-and-(I hope)-post-teen persona, she said that she thinks it is partly that the teachers like girls better (not because they are nicer — this my daughter rather sensibly doubts — but because they prudently reserve their nastiness for people who don’t control their grades) and partly because the boys just mess around because they don’t care about doing well.
So I was very interested in the findings in Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities
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I just got Masterpiece Comics
UPDATE: Before accusing me of misreading Fish, please consider whether this comment satisfies you.
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Some thoughts, related to Michael’s ‘going pro’ post and Kieran’s recent post on impact factor. To what extent is the whole internet afflicted with the Matthew Effect? “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” If you want to be a bit more specific, to what degree are search results afflicted by it?
Let me illustrate with a couple cases I’ve personally noted, which I suspect are representative. [click to continue…]
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