Will Wilkinson “claims”:http://www.cis.org.au/policy/spring_06/polspring06_wilkinson.htm that we can avoid positional conflicts in a world of infinitely proliferating status dimensions. [click to continue…]

Of two books on similar topics with similar publication dates, one is ranked #116 on Amazon (as of this writing, yesterday it was #350), the other is at #1,036,339 (as of this writing).* The former has an official publication date of October 17, 2006 (exactly a week ago) and has zero reviews on Amazon (as of this writing). The latter has an official publication date of July 27, 2006 and also has zero reviews on Amazon. Given zero reader reviews in both cases and the recent publication of the former manuscript, it would be hard to argue that it is its superior quality that has catapulted it to the top of Amazon’s popularity index. So what else differs?

Kati Marton’s book on The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World was published by Simon & Schuster, a trade press with a powerful marketing machine. My father István Hargittai’s book on The Martians of Science: Five Physicists Who Changed the Twentieth Century was published by Oxford University Press (OUP), an academic press notorious for not putting any marketing weight behind its publications naively assuming that quality will yield popularity.

Kati Marton is a journalist formerly married to the late ABC anchor Peter Jennings, currently married to Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. Her book has blurbs from the likes of Tom Brokaw and has gotten coverage on ABC’s Web site among many other venues. István Hargittai is a scientist in Budapest married to Magdolna Hargittai another scientist, both members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. His book doesn’t have blurbs from the likes of Tom Brokaw (it only does from two scientists, true, both are Nobel laureates) and has not gotten coverage in any major outlets.

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Fifty years ago today events occured in Budapest that quickly led to the death of many and the emigration of about 200,000 Hungarians to various corners of the world. (Considering a country of 10 million, that’s a significant number.)

Having grown up in a system that didn’t recognize this day as worthy of mention (given that its whole point was to topple the Soviet-influenced regime) I have never had much of a connection to it. And having left Hungary soon after the political changes of the early 90s after which the date became officially important and a holiday, I have never developed much of a bond with it. In fact, I’m more likely to recognize November 7th as a special date (the one Hungarians and others in the region used to celebrate) than October 23rd. All that is a testament to how strongly social context can influence one’s perception of important historical events and dates.

The image above is from the Times Square area in New York City. I was walking down Broadway on Saturday and noticed the red-white-and-green lines. I figured it was a mistaken use of the Italian flag. When portrayed horizontally, the Italian flag has to be green-white-and-red in order not to be confused with the Hungarian flag. But people unfamiliar with the Hungarian flag (which would be most of the world) don’t know this and so I sometimes see the Italian flag portrayed that way. However, as I neared 50th St. I realized that this was meant to be a Hungarian flag. The Hungarian Cultural Center put up two huge billboards on the corner of Broadway and 50th to commemorate the occasion and to invite folks to “REimagine freedom“.

And yes, there has been unrest in Budapest during the past few weeks including some events today. Some people are trying to draw parallels to the events of 1956, but that seems ludicrous. Just because some people – mostly on the far right so you are not going to see sympathies from me – who are especially good at inciting a few hundred folks do not like the current regime doesn’t mean the president prime minister [d’oh, of course] needs to be ousted. (I commented on all this a few weeks ago.)

spiked (my favourite) is sponsoring the Battle of Ideas conference next weekend at the Royal College of the Arts. My friend Adam Swift will be a panelist in the session on home-school relationships, Sending Parents Back to the Classroom (11-12.30 on Sunday morning). In the opening document Kevin Rooney says:

a profound change is taking place in the relationships between families, pupils and schools. What was once a relationship largely based on trust and informality is now being increasingly formalised into carefully regulated contracts and transactions. Parent-school contracts and homework contracts on the one side and inspection and auditing of teachers on the other are now the norm. At the extreme end of this spectrum are truanting orders, fines and the jailing of parents as well as a rise in litigation, with parents suing both schools and teachers.

Rooney’s piece is nicely provocative, and he raises most of the important issues. But I take issue with one thing he says in passing:

Most people over 40 struggle to remember their own parents spending any time helping them with homework.

Maybe, but perhaps that’s because most people over 40 think og helping the kids with their homework as doing it for them. My parents never, as far as I can remember, looked over my homework before I submitted it, or helped in any substantial way with the content. But they were helping me all the time. They made me go to bed early and get up in time for school, they encouraged me to listen to Radio 4 until I was addicted (at about age 6), they forbad homework in front of the TV, and provided space to do it without interruptions. They showed an interest in the work I did at school which resembled the interest my daughter now has in what I do at work — casual conversational interest, indicating that though it was no great concern of theirs they were genuinely interested. And, of course, at the limit I always knew that I could seek help. I can’t remember seeking substantive help from them, but the day I screwed up my first A/O Level paper in Additional Maths I called in a favour from the bloke down the street whom I trained in the nets for his annual work cricket match, and got him to run through how to do calculus with me. (Update — I should have added that he was bloody brilliant at it, and I salvaged a B, thanks to his incredibly clear explanations, in case anyone is considering taking a class from him, although the data is now 27 years old)

The difficulty with home/school agreements is not that they prevent parents from parenting, or encroach on their rights; by and large they don’t. The difficulty is, instead, the fact that this is a very blunt instrument for conveying to parents what really counts as helping kids with homework and giving them the means to do so. Basically, the help I needed was reinforcement of the message that this stuff was really really interesting and important for its own sake. That’s a very hard thing to get parents who don’t already know it, and feel that way, to do.

Back to Jacob Hacker’s book, this “review”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/22/business/yourmoney/22shelf.html?ex=1319169600&en=e12ba6da23dbafc5&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss by Roger Lowenstein in the NYT this weekend is really pretty awful. It’s one of those reviews which prompt you to wonder whether the reviewer has read the same book as you have. The very faintest of praise,”as predictable and, at times, whiny as his examples seem, Mr. Hacker does make a contribution to our understanding,” together with some unpleasant insinuations, “[s]ounding at times like a liberal Pat Buchanan.” But what really gets me is that Lowenstein baldly mis-states Hacker’s argument. [click to continue…]

Via the “common-as-dirt PZ Myers”:http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/how_common.php comes “this site”:http://ww2.howmanyofme.com/search/, which alleges it will tell you how many people in the U.S. share a name with you. The results are not encouraging.

HowManyOfMe.com

There are: 0 people with my name in the U.S.A. How many have your name?

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As everyone knows (or ought to know by now), one of the main reasons controversy over climate change is continuing in the face of overwhelming evidence is the fact that ExxonMobil has the cash spigot open to fund anyone willing to deny the evidence – the Competitive Enterprise Insitute, George Marshall Institute and the old tobacco industry network run by Steven Milloy, Fred Seitz and Fred Singer have been among the main beneficiaries. The Royal Society wrote to them recently, asking them to turn off the money tap.

Exxon’s response

The Royal Society’s letter and public statements to the media inaccurately and unfairly described our company.”

It went on: “We know that carbon emissions are one of the factors that contribute to climate change – we don’t debate or dispute this.”

So, they know the groups they are funding are lying, but they need to promote the idea that there is so much uncertainty that we should do nothing. The best way to do this is to create as much Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt as possible by promoting those who claim that global warming is a fraud.

Here I am, talking about the Lancet study on “Counterspin”, the American radio program. Fans of incoherent mumbling, strangely reminiscent of the interviews that ended Shaun Ryder’s career, tune in. Or alternatively, copy one of my blog posts into Word and add the phrases “kind of”, “like” and “you know” every three words, to get a similar effect.

Internet legend Gary Farber is going through a really rough patch right now and needs lots of medicine he can’t afford to buy. If any of you fine CT readers could kick him a few bucks that would be great. Gary tends to run hot and cold, but when he’s fired up about a topic he’s a prodigious blogger. Also, he can be kind of a prickly fellow, as he would be the first to admit, so don’t let the fact that he pwn3d you with unnecessary harshness one time in a comments thread hold you back. (Remember that time, when you said something interesting, and then Gary said he’d already blogged about it like two months ago? Yeah, that time.) You know what they say: charity begins at blog.

Megan McArdle “tells us”:http://www.janegalt.net/archives/009521.html that the _Economist_ has moved all of its material from behind the paywall (if you’re not a subscriber, you need to watch an ad to get in). It seems to me that this is good news for the _Economist_; I can’t imagine it’ll lose many subscribers, and it may gain some. It’s also good news for people like meself who like to take potshots at its odder articles; we can now be sure that our readers can actually read the original if they click on the link. This “piece”:http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8058337 on the demise of Mark Warner’s and George Felix Allen’s respective president hopes is a case in point. Most of the article is pretty unexceptionable. The peculiar bit is this summation of the current state of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But whatever the reason, [Warner’s] retreat has created a vacuum. He had positioned himself as the centrist alternative to Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination and the darling of the party’s liberal activists. Southerners, Westerners and moderates are now shopping for a new candidate, perhaps Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico or Governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana or former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the vice-presidential nominee in 2004.

So Hillary Clinton is apparently the “darling of the party’s liberal activists.” Now, we don’t have any really decisive evidence on this – the only surveys that I know of which try to figure out what “liberal activists” want are the “Pew survey”:http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/240topline.pdf (which focuses on Howard Dean supporters) and the “Blogpac survey”:http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/6/15/125046/110, which draws from a sample of MoveOn email list subscribers. Neither is definitive – but Pew finds that Clinton polls number 4 or number 3 among former Dean activists depending on which question you look at, while the Blogpac survey finds her to be joint fifth with Joe Biden, and to have higher unfavourable ratings than any other listed candidate. Given that Clinton has specifically tried to position herself _as_ the centrist alternative over the last couple of years, this is about what one would expect. Equally bizarre is the suggestion that centrists might want to gravitate towards John Edwards. This could just be the result of sloppy thinking that telescopes “Southerners, Westerners and moderates” into a unified category, but to the extent that Edwards might appeal to Southerners and Westerners, it’s not because he’s a moderate. It’s because he’s running the most economically populist campaign that a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination has run in recent history. These claims don’t seem biased to me so much as clueless. The bit about Clinton in particular strikes me as the sort of thing one might believe if one listened more to Republicans talking about Democrats than to Democrats themselves. I don’t get the impression that the article’s author actually knows very much about what’s happening within the Democratic party. Not what you expect from a serious magazine.

Earlier this year, Brad DeLong suggested that he should get rich and then give a large grant to me to do a study. I’m all for Brad getting rich and I happily await the day including the check he’ll send my way as a result. However, in the meantime, it’s good to know that there are some other sources of potential funding for work on information technologies.

Yesterday, the MacArthur Foundation announced a new initiative in Digital Media and Learning. They have committed $50 million dollars over five years to this. I was fortunate to be one of the recipients of a research grant. My project will be a look at young people’s uses of the Internet with particular focus on their skills and participation. I will also be conducting a training intervention (on participants randomly assigned to the control versus the experimental group) to see if we can create a program that helps people improve their online abilities (in such domains as efficiency in content navigation and evaluating the credibility of information).

Generally speaking, the goal of this initiative is to gain a better understanding of how young people are using digital media in their everyday lives and how various types of learning are taking place outside of the classroom through the use of such media. MacArthur has also launched a blog to discuss related projects.

The press conference was simulcast in Second Life and some participants captured a few screenshots, including ones from Teen Second Life.

As you can imagine, I’m super excited about all this and so will likely be blogging about related issues in the future (hah, not that I haven’t already).

I doubt very much that I’m the only person in the CT community who has found themselves for some reason unbeknownst to them signed up to the Comnet Communitarian Letter (which I find to be rather trite and platitudinous; but then, I’m not a communitarian nor do I ever want to be). Nor am I the only person who’s found that it’s impossible to get off the mailing list; I know this for a fact as one of my mates was bitching about this very problem to me the other day. There’s an email address at the bottom of the Letter that you’re supposed to write to if you want to get off the listserv, but the way that they’ve configured their software, the only result you get is an error message . This is not an acceptable way to configure an email list that you then sign people up to without their permission. I believe that communitarians are big into collective shaming mechanisms, where you call people out for bad behavior in front of the community, so that they will mend their ways and do better in future. Here goes.

Blog: Marc Lynch of Abu Aardvark has set up a new group blog-journal, “Qahwa Sada”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/qahwa_sada/.

Why a new blog-journal by Middle East experts? Because Middle East studies specialists have a phenomenal amount of quality knowledge about the Arab and Islamic world… Many are out there in the region, seeing things happen and talking to people over a sustained period of time. But they often have trouble getting that knowledge out into the public realm. Part of the problem is that there just aren’t nearly enough of the right kind of outlets. Academic journals are not well suited to getting information and analysis out to a wide public, and many have yet to adapt to the internet era. Blogs are wonderful, but not everyone wants one or has the time to run one. … That means that debate is too often dominated by people with, shall we say, a less empirically rich or theoretically sophisticated understanding of the region. Qahwa Sada aims to fix this market failure by providing a public forum for Middle East studies specialists to talk about what they know.

Manifesto: Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin have written a forthright (and in my view, excellent) “manifesto”:http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=12124 for liberalism in the US, as a response to Tony Judt’s accusation that US liberals have been supine in the face of the conservative onslaught over the last several years. Those who aren’t allergic to signing these things on principle should seriously consider signing it – it isn’t the usual pablum. A lot of people whom I respect have signed up already (Yochai Benkler, Josh Cohen, Robert Dahl, Margaret Levi and Charles Tilly to name a few).

“A new Bravia Ad”:http://www.bravia-advert.com/paint/thead/. No, not the bouncy balls one. A new one. Via “Alan”:http://www.schussman.com.