John’s post below reminds me that I haven’t yet noted Margaret Drabble’s well-deserved elevation to Dame of the British Empire. I read The Waterfall in my late teens, just because it was on my parents’ bookshelves, and didn’t like it at all, presumably because I didn’t understand a word of it (my parents’ bookshelves provided a lot of my teen reading, including every single on of Shaw’s plays, and the very weighty Auld report on the William Tyndale affair – I was not very discriminating and even read The Concrete Boot which is, if I remember correctly, truly dreadful). I started reading Drabble’s novels as an adult only after hearing her talk about The Witch of Exmoor on Radio 4 and heard her talk about its foray into political philosophy (I assign chapter 1 in my upper division political philosophy class to be read after we play the original position game). But I liked them so much that I stopped about half way into her ouevre, on the principle that I want to have more available to read for the first time later in my life (the same reason that I stopped reading Trollope and Dostoevsky, and stopped watching the new series of Doctor Who half way through the second season; from which you can tell that have an iron will). Anyway, John’s post reminded me of Lady Drabble’s elevation because she is the author of one of my favourite passages from the whole of literature. It brilliantly the evokes the personality of a middle-aged man whom life has (so far) defeated. It’s on page 11 of The Needle’s Eye which is, I think, my favourite of her books so far. Dour and depressed Simon Camish, enduring an unsuccessful marriage, is about to go to a dinner party hosted by his friends Nick and Diana:

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I’m organizing a book event for Doug Wolk’s Reading Comics [amazon], which is now out in paperback. The event will be nominally hosted at the Valve. I got to know Doug on the strength of mocking him with my masterful New Skrullicism post of yore. Then I read this great book of his, which only made me like him more. I posted about it here. Anyway, this post is mostly a heads-up that the event is going to happen round aboutish July 10. I’ve already got participants lined up, but several people are going to participate just by posting on their own blogs so you are welcome to show up in the usual ‘I’ve got a blog too’ way.

In other news: I’ve really been enjoying a lot of music by people named Finn. The two albums currently on heavy rotation are The Hold Steady’s Stay Positive (lead singer Craig Finn) and Liam Finn’s I’ll Be Lightning. A couple YouTube links: Liam Finn’s “Second Chance” and The Hold Steady’s “Little Hoodrat Friend” and “The Swish”. But the one you really need to listen to and watch is “Stuck Between Stations”. Bruce Springsteen wishes he was as awesome as vaguely Randy Newmanesque Craig Finn. Who is apparently starved for groupies. I’m not really eligible myself.

This “column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f24b5eda-45eb-11dd-9009-0000779fd2ac.html from Wolfgang Munchau is a keeper. “Challenged”:http://blogs.ft.com/rachmanblog/2008/06/expulsion-from-europe/ by Gideon Rachman last week to reveal the theory under which he believed that the Irish could be kicked out of the EU for having had the impertinence to vote ‘No’ a couple of weeks ago, Munchau obliges:

My own hunch is that they will try to find a way to enforce the Lisbon treaty without the non-ratifiers. As a first step, they will try to offer the No-sayers a quit-and-rejoin deal. It would be the least divisive option of all, but unfortunately, it may also be one of the least realistic. … … In Ireland’s case it may require a referendum to get out and another one to get back in. … If this is not possible, there are several other options involving varying degrees of involuntary separation. For example, everybody would formally remain inside the EU on the basis of the Nice treaty, but the ratifiers would organise their areas of co-operation outside the EU and its institutions – on foreign policy, immigration, economic governance, maybe even on energy and the environment. … There is, of course, the ultimate threat; not a trial separation, but permanent divorce. The Lisbon ratifiers formally leave the EU, and re-group under a new rival organisation. In reality, this is not so much an option, but the thing you do when you have run out of options, the strategic choice of last resort. Like a nuclear bomb, it is a useful device to be used in an emergency, not something you plan for.

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I’ve recently had to advise some students who wanted to write papers on the topic of humanitarian intervention. Not for the first time, it brought home to me how strong the disciplinary pressures towards a particular perspective can be. Political philosophy (of the Rawlsian/Kantian variety) isn’t an entirely fact-free zone, but the way we often discuss matters of principle tends to push us towards favouring _policies_ independently of the way things actually are. So we might ask, what should be the foreign policy of a just liberal state and what attitude should such a state have to “outlaw regimes” which are engaged in systematic human rights violations. And, in the light of such thinking, what would the laws of a just international order look like? What rights against interference would states have? When would there be a duty to intervene? And so on.

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The distinction between sociology and anthropology, as I learned it, is the distinction between the study of industrial and non-industrial societies. (Obviously false at the margins, but as a rough and ready definition it seems servicable, esp. as so many people offer this answer to the basic question.)

My interest in tagging has led me to assume that any such label is a social construct mainly held in place by its beneficiaries, rather than being something true about the world (and one of my many crank beliefs is that the ability of academic departments to defend the edge cases of such definitions is going to take a hit in a networked society.) However, since I have posting privileges at CT this week, I’d like to run the thought experiment a different way.

Sociologists and anthropologists of living culture have different outlooks and tools. What would change if they were each dispatched to the other’s research sites? If organizational behavior were the primary tool for understanding hunting raids, or if board meetings were viewed through an anthropological lens?

I think we can all construct a world where interesting results would appear (and obviously some of that work is being done already), but would the results be _better_ than what we have today, or just novel? Is one discipline more transportable than the other? Could one simply disappear, or subsume the other, with little loss of intellectual value, or could they merge as equals?

Put another way, if we strip away the historical bias of the kinds of societies being observed, how different are the core values, tools, and intuitions of the two (one and a half?) disciplines?

Via Teresa. I have to say that I was skeptical for the first fifty seconds or so, what with the new-agey soundtrack and the apparently solo globetrotting, but what comes after is just absurdly sweet in a nerd-brings-the-world-together sort of a way. Enjoy.

Consider the following piece in the Daily Telegraph, which may begin making the rounds:

Scientists find ‘law of war’ that predicts attacks: Scientists believe they may have glimpsed a “law of war” that can be used to predict the likelihood of attacks in modern conflicts, from conventional battles to global terrorism. … The European Consortium For Mathematics in Industry was told today that an international team has developed a physics-based theory describing the dynamics of insurgent group formation and attacks, which neatly explains the universal patterns observed in all modern wars and terrorism. The team is advising the United Nations, the Pentagon and Iraq. …

Most remarkable, “or the case of modern insurgent conflicts, our results are in close agreement with observed casualty data.” “What we found was really quite startling,” said Prof Johnson. “Although wars are the antithesis of an ordered system, the datapoints for each war fell neatly on to a straight line.” The line meant they obeyed what scientists call a power law. The “power laws” describe mathematical relationships between the frequency of large and small events.

This finding is remarkable given the different conditions, locations and durations of these separate wars. For example, the Iraq war is being fought in the desert and cities and is fairly recent, while the twenty-year old Colombian war is being fought in mountainous jungle regions against a back-drop of drug-trafficking and Mafia activity. This came as a shock, said the team, since the last thing one would expect to find within the chaos of a warzone are mathematical patterns. …

“We can use the power-law distribution to accurately predict the likelihood of different sized attacks occurring on any given day. This is useful for military planning and allocating resources to hospitals. .. “The fact that the power-law distribution seems to be constant across all long-term modern wars suggests that the insurgencies have evolved to find an ideal solution to the problem of how to fight a stronger force. … “Unless this structure is changed then the cycle of violence in places like Iraq will continue,” said Dr Gourley.” We have used this analysis to advise the Pentagon, the Iraqi government and the United Nations.”

This one has all the ingredients: a few economists, some physicists, a couple of papers on arxiv, power laws, media coverage, and of course the thrilling sense that no-one has noticed anything like this before. Except, of course, they have.

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Seen outside a Walgreens. Maybe the owner was getting some antibiotics.

Eric Lawrence, John Sides and I have just finished writing a paper which looks at the first decent dataset that allows us to figure out what blog readers look like. This isn’t a final version (there are comments from Eszter and a couple of other readers that we want to incorporate – further comments and criticisms welcome), but it is just about fit for wider human consumption. The paper is “available at “:http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers_LAB.cfm?abstract_id=1151490 SSRN (if you’re signed up with them, we’d love you to download it from there cos it’ll bump up our hit count), and at “http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf”:http://www.themonkeycage.org/blogpaper.pdf if that’s more convenient. So what do we find?
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Unlike national central banks, the Bank for International Settlements doesn’t have to worry too much about the effect of its statements on business and consumer confidence or on the possibility of political flak. Hence, it has usually tended to give a less rosy view of the economic outlook than other official and quasi-official institutions. The latest assessment is particularly gloomy .

The full annual report has the cheery title “The unsustainable has run its course and policymakers face the difficult task of damage control” (Overview here).

The money quote:

Perhaps the principal conclusion to be drawn from today’s policy challenges is that it would have been better to avoid the build-up of credit excesses in the first place. In future, this could be done through the establishment of a new macrofinancial stability framework, which would call for both monetary and macroprudential policies to “lean against the wind” of the credit cycle

It’s hard to disagree with this, but equally hard to imagine such a framework (reminiscent of the “new global financial architecture” proposed in the late 90s) being introduced without the stimulus of a truly dire financial crisis.

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” You’ve all heard that. It’s A.N. Whitehead. At some point I read something which suggested that the thought continues: ‘because he had the foresight to write out all the heresies in advance.’ Or words to that effect. I thought that was rather witty. Now I bother to look at the original source, Whitehead’s Process and Reality (Amazon has an edition you can search inside.) And apparently the witty, heretical sting in the tail isn’t there. Curious. Does anyone know what’s going on? I’d sort of like to go one quoting the thing. I’ve done so informally on a few occasions. I didn’t think of it. Did someone else famous say it?

I have also discovered that if you Google Whitehead you get sponsored ads that promise: “No More Whiteheads! Whitehead Removal for under $25 Satisfaction Guaranteed.” Ha! You could never do that to Plato.

Thanks to Henry for the invitation to guest-post. I’m a long-time reader and admirer of CT, and my goal this week is to ask a couple of questions that I don’t think have obvious answers, but which I think are quite important to the development of a networked society, and about which CT readers may have a lot to say.

The first question is pedagogical: it’s obvious, both from observing my own students and from paying attention to social media, that the work students have always done in groups is now migrating online. What, if anything, should the academy do to adapt?

The poster child for this change, of course, is Chris Avenir, who was the admin for a large Facebook group discussing chemistry homework from Ryerson University. <a href=”http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/19/student-wont-be-expelled-over-facebook-study-group”>Avenir was threatened with expulsion</a> (though he was not expelled), and was given a 0 out of 10 for the homework being discussed on the site.

While the decision over his expulsion was still pending, Avenir said “But if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials.”

After deciding not to expel Avenir, Technology Dean James Norrie said “Are we Luddites here at Ryerson? No, but our academic misconduct code says if work is to be done individually and students collaborate, that’s cheating, whether it’s by Facebook, fax or mimeograph.”

Now, my natural inclination is to think Avenir is right and Norrie is wrong — that learning is a basically social activity, and that the model that treats the effort as an exercise in quality control of individual minds is not merely silly but hypocritical — as Avenir notes, discussion, both formal and informal, is a large part of the pedagogical landscape.

And yet I also know that there are fields where problems are complex but answers are simple — there are an infinite number of mathematical formulae for which 42 is the answer, but your possession of that number only operates as proof that you understand a particular formula if I also trust that you weren’t just handed the answer.

So, to adopt The Economist’s old motto of “Simplify, then exaggerate”, here’s a false dichotomy: does the growth of networked support for student-to-student study mark the appearance of the previously invisible but critical engine of learning, or will its normalization set up a harmful social gradient, where nerd kids give likeable kids the right answers with no work?

And should the response on the part of the academy be a) “We should support this important change”, b) “We have never really cared what students do outside class, and this is no different”, or c) “Deep socialization of study is a core threat to academic integrity, so this must be stopped”?

We’d like to welcome Clay Shirky, who will be guestblogging with us for a week. Clay is a consultant, journalist, sometime academic, and general _provocateur._ His recent book, Here Comes Everybody (Powells, Amazon) is a very good, well-written and interesting take on how the Internet has lowered the transaction costs of group formation, and the consequences this has for politics, commercial relatoins etc. It’s one of the best books on the Internet that I’ve read in the last few years. We’re happy to have him on board.

More on the Mickey Tax, courtesy of a set of talking points forwarded by my person in the Travel Industry Association, which are (to put it mildly) quite unconvincing on the major points of contention. I’ve decided to adopt this piece of legislation in the same way that some people and organizations adopt highways – expect more on this over the coming months. Also, NB that this is one of those activities where the Internet really _has_ changed everything – it would have been infeasible for me to investigate this stuff without Congresspedia, online access to Her Majesty’s Government’s taxation guidance documents for airlines etc. Talking points and response below the fold.
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