The Wikimedia folk have been muttering for a while about taking on Internet search companies such as Google, but I suspect that Google is more likely to be able to “displace them”:http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/12/encouraging-people-to-contribute.html than vice-versa.

Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. … A knol on a particular topic is meant to be the first thing someone who searches for this topic for the first time will want to read. The goal is for knols to cover all topics, from scientific concepts, to medical information, from geographical and historical, to entertainment, from product information, to how-to-fix-it instructions. Google will not serve as an editor in any way, and will not bless any content … For many topics, there will likely be competing knols on the same subject. … People will be able to submit comments, questions, edits, additional content, and so on. Anyone will be able to rate a knol or write a review of it. … Once testing is completed, participation in knols will be completely open, and we cannot expect that all of them will be of high quality. Our job in Search Quality will be to rank the knols appropriately when they appear in Google search results. We are quite experienced with ranking web pages, and we feel confident that we will be up to the challenge.

I’m waiting to see what Eszter and “Siva”:http://www.googlizationofeverything.com/ have to say about this before I can start to think in earnest about this, but given Google’s clout and resources I imagine that this project is much more likely to have legs than, say, Citizendium.

Update: See also “Nicholas Carr”:http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2007/12/google_knol_tak.php.

Two great new blogs by academics who I admire but have never met. First, Lane Kenworthy, author of many articles and a few books on the comparative politics of inequality, is now blogging at “Consider the Evidence”:http://lanekenworthy.net/. This “post”:http://lanekenworthy.net/2007/12/07/households-running-out-of-wiggle-room/, for example, does a nice job of bringing together some of the data on economic risk (on which more soon), and looks at how the incipient credit crunch and the high number of families that already have two parents in the workforce means that lower income households simply don’t have much margin to cope any more with unexpected financial emergencies.

households now appear to be more sensitive to serious short-run financial strains — job loss, a medical problem that results in significant cost (due to lack of health insurance or inadequate coverage), a hike in rent, a rise in mortgage payments (as a low-interest-rate adjustable mortgage rolls over). A generation ago a household could adjust to this type of event by having the second adult take a temporary job to provide extra income. During the economic boom of the late 1990s they might have been able to switch jobs in order to get a pay increase. In the past ten years they could run up credit card debt or take out a home equity loan. For many households with moderate or low incomes, these strategies are now foreclosed.

Second, Eric Rauchway at UC Davis is blogging together with Ari Kelman at “The Edge of the American West”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/. One of his “posts”:http://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2007/12/12/let-us-ever-speak-of-this-again/#more-89 gets stuck into the recent “outbreak”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/07/AR2007120701618.html of the liberal bias in the academy thing in the Washington Post op-ed pages, and generates an interesting conversation in the comments section about where you can find intelligent and intellectually honest conservatives in the US. I’d add Steve Bainbridge to the people listed in the comments section; also “Clive Crook”:http://blogs.ft.com/crookblog/ and Clive Davis (who I don’t follow as much as I should now that he’s at the “Spectator”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/ and doesn’t have his own RSS feed any more). Both of the latter are Brits, of course. Does anyone have other nominations for interesting conservatives in the blogosphere or elsewhere? Please: no need to list obvious suspects at high profile blogs like Orin Kerr, nor to state that there ain’t any such thing as an interesting honest conservative. I know that this latter view has some adherents among CT readers, but its restatement in response to questions of this sort is kinda like telling people who are troubleshooting their PCs that the obvious solution is to buy a Mac.

Hundreds more at the Scared of Santa photo gallery. Via Apostropher.

Over the last few months, the volume of bad news from Iraq has diminished. For example, the number of US troops killed in November (about one per day) was the lowest in a couple of years. While it’s much harder to measure Iraqi casualties the number seems to be declining, at least in Baghdad. Of course it’s good that not so many people are dying. But what does this mean for the policy choices facing the US and its allies?

The short answer is ‘Not much’

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This link will work for a very short time, I presume, but it’s curious to note that Samuel Freeman’s book on Rawls is currently ranked #9 in Amazon’s bestsellers list for titles in Archaeology. Why?

I like Zotero a lot. It makes collecting and organizing material from research online much easier than it would be otherwise. Plus they sent me a t-shirt after my column about it appeared, which pretty much amounts for all the non-book-related swag to have arrived in 2007.

Still, I have been somewhat irregular about working with Zotero. Required to give a more or less sensible reason for this, I could say that it is a matter of waiting for the 2.0 version, none too patiently. But the really deciding factor is that I still use Netscape, which is proving less rational or defensible all the time. Shifting over entirely to Firefox (of which Zotero is a plug-in) seems like a good resolution for the new year.

One factor holding up the 2.0 version — which will, it’s said, allow people to share documents — is the range of intellectual-property issues it would create. But at IHE this morning, Andy Guess reports that the Center for History and New Media is going ahead with the development of a Zotero archive into which scholars can deposit material, as long as it is public-domain.
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A while ago, reflecting on approaching geezerhood, I said:

bq. Whenever I teach an undergraduate class, I ask the students what’s the earliest major news event they can remember. When I started teaching at Arizona, most students could remember the Challenger disaster. Then it was the fall of the Berlin Wall. Then the first Gulf War. Then Bill Clinton’s first-term election. At the moment it is the Oklahoma City bombing. Soon it will be the death of Princess Diana.

But this isn’t just a kids-these-days complaint. Today’s college freshmen probably don’t remember much about politics before President Bush, and the war as been going on for most of their teenage years. Combine that with the administration’s fine line in disinformational BS and, as Rob remarks in a comment elsewhere, this is what you get:

bq. I have now received three (3) student papers that discuss Iraq’s attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All three papers mention it as an aside to another point. I’ve had two papers on the virtue of forgiveness that argue that if we had just forgiven Iraq for the 9/11 attacks, we wouldn’t be at war right now. I just read a paper on the problem of evil which asked why God allowed “the Iraq’s” to attack us on 9/11. The thing that upsets me most here is that the the students don’t just believe that that Iraq was behind 9/11. This is a big fact in their minds, that leaps out at them, whenever they think about the state of the world.

On the front page of the Times today, it appears that the UK is attempting to wriggle out of its commitments to Iraqi employees of the British Army, even as we’re preparing to leave Basra. Part of me wants to believe that this is a matter of bureaucratic callousness rather than anything else, but as Brad DeLong says, the Cossacks work for the Czar – if people in David Milliband‘s department are trying to wriggle out of a commitment that David Milliband made, then they’re doing it because he told them to, or because he doesn’t care whether they do it or not.

The last time we had a discussion of this on Crooked Timber, it turned pretty ugly pretty quickly, but I’m prepared to have another go. The general obligations of a country which is carrying out a morally unjustified war of aggression[1] to the locals of the country it is invading are set out pretty clearly in the relevant Geneva Conventions, but what special obligations exist to local employees?

Personally I think this is pretty cut and dried. On grounds of fairness, the invading power should not discriminate between its employees on grounds of nationality, so they have a duty to give local employees the same kind of protection against harm that they would one of their own citizens. On prudential grounds, it is fairly obvious that any country has a long-term interest in establishing a reputation for protecting its employees. I am not convinced by any of the arguments against, most of which seem to involve fairly empty assertions about whether people might have been accessories to war crimes, combined with a strange insouciance about whether these alleged offences should be prosecuted in a proper court, or enforced ad hoc by death squads.

If anyone wants to argue either side of the case, go ahead. If you end up being convinced by my view, then perhaps you’d care to express this opinion to the British government. As far as I can tell, the most effective means to doing this (by far – the difference to the next best alternative is orders of magnitude) is by writing a letter or email to your MP. Dan Hardie has got a lot of anecdotal evidence that these letters have made a big difference so far in preventing this issue from being swept under the rug. (Update: You could ask your MP to sign Early Day Motion 401, tabled by Lynne Featherstone MP, please).

Comments policy notice: Just to make it clear, although this is a genuine invitation to a discussion, it’s a sensitive issue and will be moderated with extreme prejudice. In particular, racial epithets won’t be tolerated any more than they are on other CT threads. I am not going to delete or disenvowel people just for using the word “traitor” or equivalent, but nor am I going to tolerate blatant trolling. In which context I remind readers that the requirement for a genuine email address with every comment is still there, and the fact that it’s not particularly consistently enforced is not something anyone should rely on.

[1] Albeit one that was probably legal within the strict terms of these things, which in my mind simply shows it’s already much easier to start a war than it ought to be.

WASHINGTON, D.C. – One month after <a href=”http://lieberman.senate.gov/newsroom/release.cfm?id=287809″>calling for a review of the video game ratings process</a> in the wake of “Manhunt 2″ receiving a “Mature” rating, Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) called for a thorough review of the video game “Enhanced Interrogation 2.” In a letter to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), the Senators explained that the recent change in the game’s rating in the U.S. opened the door to widespread release of the game, which depicts acts of prolonged torture.

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I admit that I wasn’t certain that Samuel Freeman’s book on Rawls would be terrific. Two reasons. First, it is very long, and I imagined that a good introductory text would be less than 462 pages long (514 incl gloassry and notes). Second, although I’m a huge admirer of Freeman as a philosopher, all his work that I’d previously read is aimed squarely at scholars; he works on exceedingly difficult questions, makes complicated arguments, and although the pay off is always, in my experience, more than worth the effort, I never expect undergraduates, for example, to be able to make that effort.

But Rawls (UK) is a triumph. A brilliantly careful, utterly transparent, account of Rawls’s thought and an admirable presentation of the state of the debates around Rawls’s work. The amazon reviewer who says “this is the one” gets it right. Forcing students to read Rawls is the right thing to do; but I shall never again force them to read him without providing Freeman’s text as indispensable help.

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Ed Balls makes the following, bizarre comment, in yesterday’s interview with Andrew Marr:

Also make sure that every child is being taught a foreign language in primary school.

What is he thinking?

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Ralph Luker points out today that the history group blog Cliopatria has just celebrated its fourth birthday. Or anniversary perhaps. I guess it depends on how you look at it.

CT passed the same marker in July, though it does not appear from the archives that anyone noticed at the time.

A slogan that used to appear at Technorati said something like: “There are 55 million blogs. Some of them have to be good.” I never understood the logic of that. The idea that enough quantity is bound to produce some quality is not too rigorous, even by the standards of some blowhard quoting Anti-Duhring. Likewise, enduring for four years is no guarantee of anything either. But it’s pretty remarkable, even so, especially given the hyper-ephemeral nature of this medium.

Cliopatria at its best has been an example of why those who denounce the entire blogosphere as a bunch of people wearing pajamas in their basements and whinging about American Idol are, themselves, pretty silly. Congratulations to Ralph and the other Cliopatricians (also to myself for the good luck of being one of them) and also, retroactively, to the Timberistas (and ditto).

“Neither snowmen nor reindeer nor blinking lights stays these couriers from swift completion of their appointed rounds …”


(From the Parade of Lights this evening here in Tucson.)

That attack ad is pretty compelling. But it simplifies – some would say over-simplifies – aspects of Kant’s philosophy. I thought a technical defense of Kant’s ethics might be in order.