“Arthur Goldhammer”:http://artgoldhammer.blogspot.com/2008/10/france-inc.html (whose blog on French politics is one of the treasures of the blogosphere).

Sarkozy has announced the creation of a French investment fund with a capital of $200 billion. He is also temporarily suspending the taxe professionnelle. Call it an investment fund or sovereign wealth fund. Call Sarkozy a socialist in wolf’s clothing (as one MEP did the other day). Mock his inconsistency or praise his political versatility. In fact he’s merely doing what leaders of all the advanced industrial countries will be doing shortly, if they are not doing it already: trying to minimize the damage of the recession by turning on massive government investment. This can do a lot of good, especially if it is seen not solely as countercyclical spending but as a chance to do something about decaying infrastructure and make foundational changes with a chance for long-term impact. In France it’s hardly unprecedented for major capital spending to be directed by the state, whether under the Commissariat au Plan, through state-controlled-or-influenced enterprises, or directly by the Ministry of Finance. Sarkozy always danced nimbly between the neoliberal and state-capitalist camps. If the last two decades were the neoliberal decades, the coming two are likely to consecrate the hegemony of state capitalism. Sarkozy has been quicker than most to draw that conclusion and try to get ahead of the tsunami. Let’s see what happens next.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve been very interested in the relationship between technical and cultural innovation. Among other things, I make the point that this is now a two-way street: the development of the Internet is driven as much by cultural innovations, like the manifold uses of blogs, as by technical innovation, and in many cases it’s hard to distinguish between the two.

I gave a presentation on this at the Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) Conference a few months ago, and was invited to turn it into a paper for a special issue of a new journal, Cultural Science.

I was very favorably impressed by the issue when it came out, and also by the interval between submission and publication, which was quite a bit shorter than I’ve experienced in the past. To be precise …

[click to continue…]

I’m on my way to UC Irvine to participate with some very cool folks in a meeting called Public Spheres, Blogospheres hosted by UCI’s HumaniTech. I’m on a panel about Blogging and the Academy.

I suspect the question of whether or how junior faculty should blog will come up. While it’s a topic we’ve gone over numerous times around here and it may make some people yawn at this point, I believe it’s still worthy of discussion with some points that haven’t been considered sufficiently yet. More on that when I get around to organizing my thoughts about it (this conference would be a good opportunity for that, hah). Academics from different fields will be represented at this meeting, which may lead to different takes on the topic. I look forward to the conversations.

UPDATE (11/6/08): Podcasts of the sessions have now been posted, they are available here.

Charles Doriean has written a new and topical paper with Scott Page seeking to measure the maverickyness of John McCain as a senator. They’ve asked me to publish it on CT – the PDF version is “here”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/mccain_maverick.pdf and a Flash embedded version is beneath the fold. In the authors’ description:

A maverick, … can be defined as someone who surprises us by voting against their party as often as they do, given their ideology. To determine whether a senator is a maverick (and how much of a maverick they are,) all we need to do is figure out how often we expect that senator to support their party, and then see how often they actually do support their party. The difference between the expectation and the reality can be called a “maverick measure.”

Under this definition, John McCain is very definitely a maverick. Indeed, he’s the seventh most mavericky Senator since 1877. However, he isn’t the most mavericky Senator in recent history; that honour goes to Lincoln Chafee, who comes in at number three. Also, McCain-ites who want to embrace this result should note that it is based on the same kind of measures of ideology (DW-Nominate scores) that have been “used to show”:http://voteview.ucsd.edu/Clinton_and_Obama.htm that Barack Obama, _contra_ the _National Journal_ and Republican mythology, is not (for better or worse) the most liberal Senator by a significant stretch.

Cross-posted at “The Monkey Cage”:http://www.themonkeycage.org
[click to continue…]

From a short “NYT piece”:http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/21/mccains-camp-shaves-its-ad-targets/ on the shrinking McCain advertising budget in swing states.

But the McCain campaign also needs the extra money to keep up with its current plans, due to a quiet decision it has made that most voters will hardly notice. Until now, the campaign has been teaming up with the Republican National Committee to jointly produce a large percentage of its advertisements. By sharing the costs down the middle, Team McCain has been able to basically double the amount of advertisements it can run for its money. This is all legal: campaigns are allowed to split the costs of their ads with their affiliated parties. But there’s a catch: The spots must serve not only their campaigns but also the collective agendas of their congressional colleagues.

Such advertisements – known in the political business as “hybrids” – tend to garble a presidential candidate’s message. So, for instance, a spot attacking Mr. Obama also has included references to “liberals in Congress’’ and figures like Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, who is not as well known to everyday voters.

The campaign has started to phase out those ads in these final days, deciding to stick to advertisements it can devote fully to Mr. McCain’s campaign message. That will greatly disadvantage Mr. McCain as he struggles to keep up with the far better funded Mr. Obama. But Mr. McCain’s aides have clearly decided a trade of volume for greater clarity is worth it.

Now this is one possible interpretation of what is going on. But while mixed messages are a significant problem, I (as an admitted naif on these issues) would have thought that getting completely swamped by your opponent’s advertising is a rather bigger one. Isn’t a more plausible interpretation of this decision that the RNC are finally “pulling the plug”:https://crookedtimber.org/2008/10/10/a-bit-of-horserace-commentary/ on their subsidization of the McCain campaign, and the McCain folks are trying to put the best face that they can on it?

Some unkind lefties (including “one of my co-bloggers”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2008/10/nation-of-whine.html) were a little dismissive towards “this post”:http://drhelen.blogspot.com/2008/10/how-much-of-financial-crisis-is.html by ‘Dr. Helen,’ blogger and Instaspouse of Professor Glenn Reynolds.

Why the crescendo of economic collapse right before the election? Why didn’t the media and congress act just as concerned some time ago or wait until sometime after the election to go into crisis mode? The timing of the current financial crisis seems too planned and calculating to be just a coincidence. Polls show that people’s number one concern right now is the economy and that for the most part, voters believe Democrats are somewhat more likely to help with the economy. Could it be that the liberal media and those in Congress, knowing that, is blaring the bad economic news from the rooftops in order to manipulate voters into voting for a Democrat? If so, it won’t be the first time.

But now “Barbara Ehrenreich”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html (via “Cosma”:http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/588.html ) has let the cat out of the bag and it’s _even worse_ than Dr. Helen suspected.
[click to continue…]

Just to be clear, and to head off the accusations of partisanship that the previous post invites, I am usually about as willing to think well of sensible Republicans as of sensible Democrats on education policy. Nor do I mean to criticise McCain for supporting choice. The reason I say it indicates he has no ideas is that everyone is pro-choice now (“we are all pro-choice Georgians!” could be Senator McCain’s slogan); the issue is just what kinds of choice. Choice through the housing market, choice within public school districts, magnets, charters, etc… And, as Laura says:

Vouchers aren’t going any where. Anybody who talks about them really has no clue about the realities of the politics of education.

Vouchers are a very small part of the picture and the only people who doubt this are leftists who see vouchers as some sort of cunning plan to privatise the whole of public schooling. In the next decade, even if McCain were to become President, we might possibly see the emergence of 5 new voucher programs (but I doubt it would be that many, frankly). For readers who care about my own views, not only am I an unenthusiastic supporter of several voucher programs, I’ve even written a whole book expressing my support for school choice (despite the complaint of one prominent academic reviewer I shan’t name, who presumably didn’t bother to beyond the first couple of pages, that I oppose it). Vouchers are a band aid, and I don’t mean that as an insult; I use band aids myself, they’re handy when you have a small cut, and are better than nothing when you have something more serious. But they are only a band aid, and that is the sensible thing to say about them. In policy environments where more comprehensive interventions are not going to happen (Milwaukee in the early 90s, DC in the mid 2000s), sure, go ahead, give vouchers a try (and design the programs so that we can actually study them and figure out what the effects are). But understand that vouchers are at the margins of urban schooling, let alone of the larger policy environment, and talking about them as if they were something else displayed McCain’s lack of interest in education.

Still, I can’t resist correcting McCain on two points.

[click to continue…]

“It’s been there for a few days, apparently”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2008/oct/10/wildlife-conservation . But I first heard this morning. Someone took me round the side of the building where I work and there it was. So big and powerful, I could hardly believe it. Snoozing for now, oblivious to the stream of people passing by to take a look. You almost wonder whether small children would be safe in the vicinity. Not the kind of thing you ordinarily see in the middle of an English city.

Update: I took some pictures this morning ….

Pity Jay Nordlinger: ‘A friend of mine writes this morning with a question: ‘At what point will Americans finally get fed up with voter fraud — with what ACORN is doing in Ohio, for example?’ … If something is in the news, they’ll think about it. If it is not — how can such thinking be triggered?”

In fairness, Republicans have to shoulder a lot of the blame. TPM reports on a conference call on ACORN-related voter fraud with RNC spokesman, Danny Diaz

… When we tried to follow up [on charges of vote fraud], Diaz cut us off and shifted the discussion toward a general attack on ACORN for submitting fraudulent registrations.

Yes, the RNC spokesman apparently cut off attempts by members of the liberal media to discuss the very thing Nordlinger thinks the media needs to focus on, in a conference call set up for that very purpose. Very mysterious, I call it.

As the odds shorten on an Obama victory, the undoubted enthusiasm for Obama is tempered by doubts that a new Democratic Administration, even backed up by strong majorities in both houses of Congress, will really change that much.

However, there’s a case for a much more optimistic view. Given a supermajority in the Senate, or even a win that’s near enough, with some RINO support to override Republican filibusters, some widely respected analysts are predicting marvellous things from Obama including:

* Medicare for all
* Serious financial reregulation
* Union rights
* Ending tax cuts for the rich
* A green ‘revolution’
* Voting rights for all, including DC

In the light of the lame record of the last congress, and of the Democratic Congresses in the 90s, this might seem unlikely. But an article I’ve just read points to a string of quite radical measures passed by the House in the last Congress and blocked only by the filibuster. Furthermore, as the writer observes the conversion of Southern Democrats into Republicans since the 90s means that most Democrats will hold the line on issues like health care.

All in all, it’s given me more cause for optimism than anything I’ve read for a while.

[click to continue…]

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…]

“Michael Froomkin”:http://www.discourse.net/archives/2008/10/surveying_the_wreckage.html has a tale of terror.

Recently, the system has been a bi[t] weird, with very slow file access times (windows explorer would take forever to open, ditto with file dialogs in programs), and I also was worried that my copy of Firefox was compromised … First, I decided to take the plunge and migrate to a larger disk, and ordered up a “green” WD7500AACS. (Three quarters of a terrabyte! Whoohoo!) About three or four weeks ago, I copied my files on to it using using XXClone, a nice piece of freeware that basically makes an entire copy of Drive A (including operating system) onto drive B. … But things were still slow sometimes. I decided it was time to kill the trojan, or whatever, that seemed to be infesting my system. I also decided that I should go back to hardware RAID, since I don’t back up my files enough. … When I got back, the files were there, and I ran the first one. It duly called for a reboot and I did it — only to get error messages and a lockup. …at which point the disk wouldn’t boot any more. But no problem, I had my backup, the 160GB version. … But now that the two disks are in the system, with the 750Gb disk on the second pair of SATA ports, which are RAID capable (but were properly set for ordinary non-RAID use in the bios), the Windows system on the first 160GB disk decided they needed to be reactivated. … But the 750GB version worked. So that’s good. But now I’m nervous, things seemed jinxed. So I order up a second WD7500AACS, and plan to RAID mirror them. … Now, time extra backups. I’m a little nervous about hardware raid, in part because I’m a little dyslexic. … So I decided to make a software clone onto the new disk with XXClone, so that whichever way I copied the data would be OK. … I installed the disk, started up the format, and went of to do some stuff. When I got back, I found a blue screen of death, a 0024 failure (that I gather means a loose wire, something version one the sata hardware standard made all too easy). When I tried to reboot, I got a smart drive error – the disk is bad. I flip some disks around. One of the 160GB disks won’t boot either — “Disk error”. When the dust settles I have some very high-tech paperweights. … I’ve lost 3 weeks or more of personal data, only most of which can be reconstructed. . My work files, on the other hand, either on a unix server or on a USB stick, which I religiously back up at home and work, so that’s OK. My personal financial info, which isn’t backed up for the last 3+ weeks, I can recreate

Some life lessons here – the most obvious being the frequently repeated one of backup, backup, backup and _keep non-local copies of your data_ in case of massive system breakdown/fire/nuclear war etc. If it can happen to Michael Froomkin, who is much more technically adept and conscientious about backing up than you are (for most local values of ‘you’) it can happen to anyone. Happily, Michael appears to have lost nothing more than some easily recreatable data (and a lot of time, assuming he can get refunds for non-functioning hardware). If he were someone who didn’t religiously back up his material, he’d be in far worse shape. Non-local file backup is pretty easy to do these days, and relatively cheap. I use “Sugarsync”:http://www.sugarsync.com/ which synchronizes my three Windows machines very nicely ¹ and as a side-benefit provides me with backups against local hardware errors. Kieran discusses a couple of alternatives “here”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf (PDF), but whatever system you use, I really recommend that you institute _some system for doing this_ and that you _do it today_ rather than putting it on the long finger (which will most likely mean, given most people’s heuristics for this kind of stuff, that you won’t do it until you REALLY NEED TO, at which point it will sadly be too late).

¹ I understand that it doesn’t work as well for Macs, which to my deep and everlasting regret isn’t a problem for me. The week before last, my university unexpectedly delivered me a lovely new MacBook Pro, which I had some eight hours to fall in love with before I discovered that it had been sent to me thanks to an administrative error, and that it in fact belonged to one of my colleagues. I’m still bitter, as you can tell (but in the unlikely event that an Apple executive is reading this post, and wants to reach out to the crucial academic-blogger constituency by handing out one of their new machines, they can find an enthusiastic evangelist for their product at this address …) More generally (and to get back from the griping), be aware that Sugarsync is not designed as a back-up product as such, and will do _nothing_ to save you from user generated errors (indeed it may make them more devastating). If you delete the one and only copy of your dissertation datafile from a synchronized folder, you will find of course that it is deleted from the copies of this folder on your other machines too. So caveat emptor.

My department has several positions and given the interdisciplinary nature of our program (hires from the past 5 years have PhDs representing 6-7 fields), it’s important that we distribute the ad widely so that we reach people from multiple disciplines. Thus the posting on CT (i.e., no, we can’t just advertise on a couple of standard academic mailing lists as we’d miss potentially relevant candidates). Although I’m on leave and so not involved with the day-to-day logistics of the search, I’m happy to answer questions about the program. (Related, see my post earlier this year on CV for the academic job market.)

I did a guest post for the blog site of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on the topic of ratings agencies, their quasi-official role in regulating investment, and their recent catastrophic failures. I’ve reposted it over the fold – the examples are Australian, but many of the points are more general.

[click to continue…]