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

Political philosophers/theorists may be interested in the latest issue of “Social Theory and Practice”:http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/STP/index2.html , which is a special issue devoted to the debate on ideal and non-ideal theories of justice. This special issue is a selection of papers from a wonderful ECPR workshop which Adam Swift and I organised in Helsinki in 2007. There has been quite a bit of debate on this topic in recent years, and Harry and I have been mentioning in some of our posts that we should have that debate here too – Well, I wait till my copies have arrived. The journal sells single issues for a mere ten dollars (plus shipping for outside the USA); scroll down on “the journal’s homepage”:http://www.fsu.edu/~philo/STP/index2.html for instructions in case you’re interested.

Henry has written about Wendt and Duvall’s “Sovereignty and the UFO” at The Monkey Cage. And my column yesterday lauded both the timely urgency of the paper and the aesthetically satisfying way it resists counterarguments.

But after thinking it over a little, I believe a critique from outside the poli-sci orbit is necessary.

Wendt and Duvall seem to mount a radical challenge to the anthropocentrism of contemporary ideas of sovereignty. But in so doing, they are complicit with the lingering effects of Cold War ideology — for nowhere do W&D consider the work of Juan Posadas, who proved four decades ago (to his own satisfaction anyway) that flying saucers demonstrate the existence of communism elsewhere in the galaxy.
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Over at the Guardian website, I have another piece up about my general scepticism of both big government IT projects, and the possibility under our current political and economic system of not being deluged with big government IT projects. I filled it full of jokes because I’m not yet really sure what I believe about the underlying causal mechanism. There’s a half-joking suggestion that the business development offices of the major IT consultancies probably ought to be considered as a material interest group in any analysis of British politics; we’ve not yet reached the levels of a “consultancy/government complex” but we’re not far off.

But on the other hand, I might be committing a version of fundamental attribution error here. The sales process is an important part of the procurement of big, failed IT projects, but the proliferation of big failed IT projects isn’t really a result of successful selling – it’s a result of the fact that nearly anything new that the government does is going to require an IT element, and that government projects tend to only come in one size, “big”, and to very often come in the variety “failed”.

And a lot of the reason why these projects screw up so badly has to do with the fact that they have to reinvent a lot of wheels, duplicate data collection exercises, and integrate incompatible systems (useful rule of thumb: whenever you hear an IT person use the word “metadata”, as in the sentence “all we need to do in order to make this work is to define suitable metadata”, you can take it to the bank; this project is fucked). In Sweden, for example, they have a working education vouchers system not unlike the one I discuss in the article, but in Sweden they have a big central database linked to the national identity card system.

In the UK, we don’t have a big central identity card database, and the main reason for that is that we don’t want one. And so I find myself entertaining the hypothesis that the constant parade of halt and lame IT projects which is British administrative politics, is actually an equilibrium outcome.

I am also rather pleased that, after two years of removing my bad language, the website editors actually introduced a swear-word into this piece that I hadn’t originally put in there.

UPDATE (8/13/08 11:04am CST): Google’s cache of the original Information Age piece makes it clear that the report had been altered considerably without any indication of this. (See screen shot here in case link no longer works.) Take-away: Information Age made considerable changes to its piece without indicating this anywhere in the post. That seems problematic. [Thanks to Bigcitylib for finding the cached page.]

Have you heard?! Google removed cities in Georgia from Google Maps! Or so were the claims that started making rounds on the Interwebs yesterday so you may well have heard it. But did you believe it? This incident has been a fascinating example of how quickly some folks will believe and spread something without further reflection. To be fair, random tweets were not the only means by which this information started spreading, more established outlets posted about it as well (see some links below with additional context). Still, how likely was it that Google would do something like this?

When I saw the post about it on the social news site Reddit yesterday (a post supported enough by readers of that site to make it onto a top page), I clicked through to look at the map. While interesting to note that the amount of information on Georgia was much less than many other countries, looking around on Google Maps made it clear that some parts of the map are simply less detailed than others. I also thought about the assertion for a moment. It didn’t sound very plausible. While Google may do all sorts of things that annoy various constituencies, it has been quite consistent in not wanting to block information even when people’s preference is that it would do so suggesting the claims to be unlikely. (Yes, I’m fully aware of some blocking in some specific cases on search engine results pages depending on local laws across the globe. Those are not incidents of this type though.) Short wrap-up: the details from the maps hadn’t been removed, they were never there to begin with. Interestingly, that idea did not occur to the many folks who reposted the information.

Here is an additional intriguing aspect to all this that I came across as I was looking at sites while writing this blog post. Might one of the reports about the incident been updated without any indication of an edit to the original report? I’m not making any accusations (it would be pretty ironic to do so in this post in particular), I’ll just post what I have found and welcome feedback. This Foreign Policy blog post about the Google Maps Georgia depiction references this piece in Information Age about the incident as follows:

As if Georgia didn’t have enough to deal with, yesterday the country’s cities and transportation routes completely disappeared from Google Maps. Reportedly wanting to keep its cyber territory conflict-neutral, Google removed all of Georgia’s details from its maps, making the war-torn nation look like a ghostly white blob flanked by Russia and Turkey. Georgia, though, isn’t the only country going blank on Google: neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan–who have their own ongoing terrorital dispute over the Nagorno-Karabakh region–are coming up empty too.

An NYTimes Bits post also links to that IA piece. [UPDATE: Just to clarify so people don’t misunderstand, NYTimes Bits linked to this as an example of incorrect reports.] (So you can see what these sites looked like when I linked to them, I have posted screenshots of the FP post, IA piece and NYTimes Bits post.)

However, curiously, the IA piece doesn’t refer to tinkering with the maps, rather, it suggests that such reports were incorrect:

Meanwhile, reports that the company removed details of Georgian civil infrastructure from its Google Maps were inaccurate, it said today.

“We have never had local data for those countries and that is why local details such as landmarks and cities do not appear,” a company statement said.

But would writers at both the Foreign Policy blog and the NYTimes Bits blog have linked to this piece as a source for the tweaking if all it had stated was that the reports were inaccurate? Curious. I’m left wondering if an update had been made to the IA piece without any indication of it.

In the end, the ruckus about Georgia’s depiction on Google Maps was big enough that Google decided to respond with a post not only on its LatLong blog, but also the Official Google Blog (with about half a million feed subscribers).

Martin O’Neill has “a characteristically interesting piece”:http://www.newstatesman.com/health/2008/08/life-nice-treatment-nhs-health in the New Statesman, this time on QALYs (Quality Adjusted Life Years) and their role in the National Health Service decision to provide or deny expensive drugs to patients. Read the whole thing, as they say.

I had one quibble with Martin’s analysis. He writes:

bq. Littlejohns [the clinical director of NICE] has released a preliminary ruling, denying access to the drugs Sutent, Avastin, Nexavar and Torisel to patients with advanced metastatic kidney cancer. These patients will, on average, die months earlier than those with the same condition in other countries in Europe where such drugs are available.

But then later in the same piece:

bq. … if such decisions are made locally rather than nationally, we are thrown into the familiar problems of the ‘post-code lottery’. A patient in Nottingham may find herself denied treatment that is provided to someone in Newcastle. Allowing matters of life and death to depend on the good or bad luck of geographical location seems like the very opposite of finding justifiable policies.

Hmm. So in the first-quoted paragraph, Martin presents the supra-national geographical variation as a troubling datum, to which the adoption of a sensible national drug-evaulation policy is a response, whereas in the second, he presents sub-national geographical variation as a decisive reason for rejecting local discretion. But why not say that local variation is OK, just so long as it is backed up by good reasons, or, alternatively, that we should have European (or even global) standards that treat like cases alike?

bq. “The absence of war between major established democracies is as close to anything we know to a simple empirical regularity in relations between peoples.”

John Rawls, _The Law of Peoples_, pp. 52–3.

Well, obviously it depends on how much you pack into “major” and “established”, but, since both Russia and Georgia rate as 7, “fully democratic” on the “Polity index”:http://www.systemicpeace.org/polity/polity4.htm, there’s at least some case for saying that there’s just been an exception to that lawlike generalization.[fn1]

Also under pressure in the past few days has been the claim that, since the United Nations was established, no member state has invaded another state, taken over the entireity of its territory and annexed it (successfully). The one unsuccessful attempt was Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Happily, it looks as if the Russians aren’t going to take over Georgia, but I guess they now have to be the favourites to be the first power to do this somewhere.[fn2]

1. I seem to remember reading, maybe in something by Michael Mann, that various native American peoples had democratic constitutions, and that wars waged on them by the United States were also counterexamples.

2. Hat-tip to Leif Wenar, who has a paper co-written with Branko Milanovic on the Rawls-Doyle generalization forthcoming in _The Journal of Political Philosopy_ .

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…]

This morning I was out for a walk and I found a twenty dollar bill lying in the street.

Mild-mannered Professor of History by day, Eric Rauchway emerges at night other times of the day in an altogether different guise.

He’s going to swim a mile for charity (presumably in just a few seconds, and while wholly underwater). You can go ahead and donate some money to his cause. Comments are open on the topic of the Rauchfish’s origin story, his unique powers, his faithful sidekick, and the special properties of his suit.

It’s not every morning I’m sipping my coffee, click onto BBC news, and the first thing out of my mouth is “oh, f**k!”. Absent any deep analysis, it is just horribly, horribly worrying that Russia has invaded South Ossetia. We can spend any amount of time on the rights and wrongs of it, and whether the Saakashvili has brought this on himself. But as the news is filtering in, I have a couple of very superficial observations to make.

The current level of hostility has been bubbling towards the boil all year, but I truly thought the Russians would wait for a more obvious excuse to send the tanks in. But why wait when you can slip quietly into an obscure part of the Caucasus on the monster news day that follows the Olympics opening ceremony?

A couple of weeks ago, Russian planes were blatantly flying over Ossetia and the Georgians sent in more of their troops. The Western powers called for restraint. Fat chance. Russia claims to be protecting the Russian minority in Ossetia, but really wants to show the Georgians who’s boss. ‘Restraint’ may be appropriate with two equally sized belligerents. It’s irrelevant when you’re sleeping beside someone big enough to roll over and crush you without waking up. I can’t help thinking that if we’d heard a bit less about restraint, and a bit more to remind Russia that joining the international system means you have be a less obvious playground bully, Putin might have thought twice before he sent the tanks in.

Another observation, this is part of the long pay-back for Kosovo. When Russia was strong-armed on the UN Security Council into accepting Kosovan independence, they made it clear that the precedent would ring out in the Caucasus and indeed any where else the Russians want to destabilize. Again, the rights and wrongs of springing Kosovo free of the Serbs can be argued, and so can the means of doing it. But the outcome is that Russia believes it has a free hand to prop up Russian or other minority nationalities anywhere geopolitically convenient within its Near Abroad.

Finally, to NATO. Georgia’s application was recently put on ice, but not placed sufficiently in the deep freeze to placate Moscow. NATO’s failure to either fully accept Georgia into the family or to expel it into Russia’s brawny arms may have created the moment and the motive for Russia to move. Russia was just as offended by the extended promise of membership to Georgia as it would have been by the real thing, but Georgia was effectively left to fend for itself.

Saakashvili has not played a smart game, that’s for sure. Perhaps thinking the west would stand behind him, or just trying to distract attention from his government’s unpopularity, he has willfully provoked Moscow whenever he had the chance. But here’s the thing; wanting to join NATO is not a provocation. As Russia’s actions have clearly shown, joining NATO was the only sensible thing to do.

*Update* A far more thoughtful piece about the invasion is at commentisfree, though the comments are pretty depressing. If anyone wants to reference a piece explaining things from the Russian point of view (that does more than the recently deleted comment “U ARE A US STOOGE. GEORGIAN ARE WRONG AND STALIN WAS GEORGIAN ANYWAY” etc.), please go ahead and I’ll be happy to link to it.

*Update 2* In that vein, Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money is worth a look. My cousin Daragh McDowell has a far more knowledgeable take than mine on today’s developments. Also, Daragh points to an excellent backgrounder on Ossetia that the redoubtable Doug Merrill posted back in March. Doug is based in Tbilisi as of last week and posted this morning. Le Monde is practically live-blogging.

*Comments closed*

I thought I’d get this rant out of the way before the season hits. Watching the Olympics in the US is no fun, because the only thing you can watch is Americans winning. You’d think the U.S. is the only country ever winning from the coverage. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for Americans to win, but I’m happy for other people to win, too. In fact, in some ways it’s much more interesting when you have a diversity of folks competing and this is portrayed clearly in the coverage. It gets boring fast when all you can hear is the U.S. national anthem.

Growing up in Hungary, I remember watching all sorts of sports competitions – and I don’t just mean the Olympics – where people from all over were taking home the gold. Sure, Hungary is a small country (population 10 million, that’s like Chicagoland having its own team) and its athletes are only going to win so many medals so you could argue that by definition coverage would have to feature other competitions as well. But actually, for a small country, Hungary ranks very high on the all-time medals list (whoa, I actually had no idea how high before writing this post) so it’s not as though there aren’t opportunities to feature its own. Also, TV could just show less of the event if there were not enough Hungarian nationals to feature. But that’s not what happens as featuring one’s own doesn’t seem to be the point. I remember hearing plenty of other national anthems and seeing lots of different flags.

This approach of showcasing athletes from all over doesn’t seem to be restricted to small countries. I was in Italy (pop ~ 60 million) recently flipping through channels and noticed the Hungarian national anthem playing on one of them. The station opted to show the end result all the way despite the fact that Italians were not the winners. Then they played another anthem (the Russian one so I could sing along in Hungarian, hah) for another winner, again, not Italians.

I wonder how this works in other countries, especially the ones winning lots of medals (e.g., for 2004, Russia, China, Australia, Germany, Japan, France, etc.).

A “study”:http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/dp/2008080601 conducted by sociologists from Cambridge University seems to suggest that the support for working mothers is weakening. The researchers compared survey results from the 1980s till recently, and found “growing sympathy for the old-fashioned view that a woman’s place is in the home, rather than in the office”, caused by “mounting concern that women who play a full and equal role in the workforce do so at the expense of family life.”
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Having just agreed to review a manuscript for a journal, I was greeted with this message:

When viewing the article online we recommend that you view the HTML version of the article. If the author used EndNote (or, beginning in the fall of 2007, Reference Manager) for reference management, the article HTML proof will have its references linked directly into Web of Science. This linking will save you time when ascertaining the accuracy and validity of the references. Web of Science is now also available as an ”External Search” option.

I think I’m a reasonably conscientious reviewer, but I’ve never tried to “[ascertain] the accuracy and validity” of an author’s references in my life. I just assume that either (a) they’re accurate, or (b) if more than a few are inaccurate, the author will get a flea in her ear when the proofing process commences (I’ve been on the receiving end of this). Nor do I imagine that a few iffy referenpces in the bibliography would make me change my mind about the worth of a piece (perhaps if the biblio was obviously hopelessly incompetent, but I suspect that when this happens it is one of a multitude of sins, and bad referencing is likely to be the least of the author’s problems. But am I unique in this – do others scrupulously check the endnotes etc? I suppose that this is hardly a matter of world historical significance, but I’ve always been fascinated by the details of the reviewing process.