Show of Hands are brilliant. English folk with a rock beat, a sense of humour, and political passion. They sound like nice thoughtful guys, too. Hear them on this week’s Mike Harding show and make up your own mind. You can download two singles legally; Are We Alright and Crooked Man. Their home page is here. An inexpensive 2-CD sampler here. Tell me if I’m wrong.

“Yet another flaw”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12vote.html?ex=1305086400&en=5b3554a76aad524a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss has been discovered in Diebold’s electronic voting machines. Company spokesman David Bear presents the watertight case for the defence:

bq. “For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

This guy should get some kind of prize. America is the country that gave us the word “ratfucking”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratfucking, where party operatives “jam the phone lines”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/phonejamming.php of their opponents on election day, and where people say they want to die in Chicago so they can remain politically active.

During the discussion following the death of JK Galbraith, the issue of advertising came up. In the Affluent Society Galbraith dismissed the idea that advertising is informative, and argued instead that it was used to manufacture demand for goods and services people would otherwise not want. The NYT obit suggested that Gary Becker and George Stigler had disproved this, a proposition that attracted some attention, mainly focusing on the work of Becker and Murphy.

Although Becker and Murphy don’t present it this way, their model actually supports Galbraith in most respects.

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So here’s a topic on which CT readers are bound to have opinions: which laptop should I buy? Or, more exactly, what should I be looking for? Productivity-wise I need a machine that will run a LaTeX implementation — currently I use MiKTeX plus WinEdt on my desktop machines (XP based) in the office or at home — but just about anything will do that. And I’d like something that will be generally OK for surfing, playing the occasional video-clip or mp3, but that’s about it. And, of course, wireless is essential (though I’ve got a spare wireless card for a notebook as it happens … it came packaged with my router). How much memory? What size HD?

I had thought about making the switch to Apple, having seen a grad student’s neat little iBook. But since Apple is moving to Intel and their low-cost laptops haven’t yet made the switch, that seems a bad choice at the moment. (If I’m wrong about that mattering, then I’m sure some Apple-fan will set me right.)

Today (Friday), the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School is hosting a conference on Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture. In addition to the face-to-face discussions, the conference is also integrating digital media in neat ways for participation by those who can’t be at the meeting physically. For example, there is a Berkman Island (including a 3D replica of the Ames Courtroom at the Harvard Law School) in Second Life. If you get a chance, come join us, it looks like there will be some very interesting presentations and discussions.

The NSA “has assembled”:http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm a gigantic database of telephone calls in the United States, with the help of all of the major telecommunications providers (except Qwest). The database is not of voice recordings, but of calls made. It constitutes data on a huge network of ties between people who call each other. In recent years, sociology and related fields have seen a lot of development in dynamic modeling of social networks, and in fast algorithms for analyzing large, sparse graphs. Entities with this kind of structure include things like the Internet, or AOL’s instant messenger network, and the universe of telephone calls within the United States. Some of the papers in “this edited volume”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/, published by the National Academy of Science, give a sense of what people are doing. (The volume was co-edited by my colleague “Ron Breiger”:http://www.u.arizona.edu/~breiger/.) For instance, you can read about “Data Mining on Large Graphs”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/265.html, “Identifying International Networks”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/345.html, the “Key Player Problem”:http://darwin.nap.edu/openbook/0309089522/html/241.html, and the use of “MTML models to study adversarial networks.”:http://darwin.nap.edu/books/0309089522/html/324.html I think it’s fair to say that techniques of this sort are of significant interest to the intelligence community.

Social scientists, in the normal course of things, are severely limited in the amount of good data they can collect on networks of this sort. The “Internet Movie Database”:http://www.imdb.com has proved a very useful source of data for developing theory and methods in this area because it’s comprehensive and publicly available. Other researchers have set out to collect very large datasets describing some network structure together with the attributes of the people in it. A recent paper by “by Gueorgi Kossinets and Duncan Watts”:http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/311/5757/88, for example, analyzes all the emails sent over the course of a year by 43,000 students, faculty and staff at a large private university. But the traffic analyzed in that paper is just a drop in the ocean of the real flow of communication that travels by voice and email every day.

Social network analysts — in fact, any social scientist who works with quantitative data — often dream of ideal datasets. The kind of thing we would collect if money, time and ethics did not constrain us. When we daydream like this, our thoughts tend toward harmless megalomania: maximally comprehensive data on the whole population of interest, in real-time, with vast computing power to analyze it, and no constraints on updating or extending it. “And a pony”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/03/if_wishes_were_.html, too. At the limit, something like “Borges’ map”:https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/f2d03252295e0d0585256e120009adab?OpenDocument is what we want, a perfect, one-to-one scale representation of the world.

Scientists and spies are not so different. The intelligence community’s drive to find the truth, to uncover the real structure of things, is similar to what motivates natural or social scientists. For that reason, I can easily understand why the people at the NSA would have been drawn to build a database like the one they have assembled. The little megalomaniac that lives inside any data-collecting scientist (“More detail! More variables! More coverage!”) thrills at the thought of what you could do with a database like that. Think of the possiblities! What’s frightening is that the NSA is much less constrained than the rest of us by money, or resources, or — it seems — the law. To them, Borges’ map must seem less like a daydream and more like a design challenge. In Kossinets and Watts’ study, the population of just one university generated more than 14 million emails. That gives you a sense of how enormous the NSA’s database of call records must be. In the social sciences, Institutional Review Boards set rules about what you can do to people when you’re researching them. Social scientists often grumble about IRBs and their stupid regulations, but they exist for a good reason. To be blunt, scientists are happy to do just about anything in the pursuit of better knowledge, unless there are rules that say otherwise. The same is true of the government, and the people it employs to spy on our behalf. They only want to find things out, too. But just as in science, that’s not the only value that matters.

A few weeks ago I saw the documentary The Beauty Academy of Kabul and wanted to recommend it as I thought it was a very interesting film. It’s playing now in a few U.S. cities and will continue to show up in a few others over the summer. (Just click on “Where to see it” on the flash page.)

A small group of American women (a couple of them immigrants from Afghanistan) decided to open up a beauty school in Kabul to train local women about their craft. (It turns out that most of these Afghani women had already been pursuing this line of work previously, but they had not received any training in a while.)

The film does a nice job of giving some historical context starting with footage from the 70s about life in Kabul and the introduction winding up with images of all the destruction on Kabul’s streets today. It is really fascinating to see the transformation. The focus is mainly on day-to-day life, a perspective we don’t usually get to see much.

The movie seems to be very honest about portraying various sides of the parties involved. Although the American women go into all this with a reasonably open mind, not surprisingly they remain naive about the local women’s lives. This comes through clearly in the footage, there does not seem to be any attempt at making them seem more sophisticated or in-touch than they are. The toughest parts, for me, were the heart-wrenching realizations about the situation of women in Afghanistan today, regardless of certain changes.

It’s a bummer that films like this don’t get wider distribution. If you happen to be in one of the few towns where it’s playing, I recommend checking it out.

Today’s Guardian has an “obituary for Peter Alexander”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,,1770686,00.html (written by my colleague Andrew Pyle).

Did you know what it meant? “Neither did I”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4756851.stm .

John & Belle is terribly amusing at the moment – check out our new comments policy, for example. I self-promote so shamelessly because I know many of you sincerely loved the ‘jake’ contributions to this thread – college squid, hepcat leftist sockhopper assumptions J. Edgar etc. etc. (Jim Henley devoted a short post to marvelling.) So you should know there is more to be had. Acephalous is having fun as well. We aren’t yet taking pre-orders for the CT brand “even Ezra Pound would have called you a bitch” Café Press thong underwear (with the delicate ‘Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made’ stitched in). PZ Myers is already banging the table for his college squid baby-t. Ah well. But the future is a long time, as they say. Perhaps the troll will straighten up, fly right – that is, in an away direction, and all will be well.

But all this is just to entertain you, by way of paying you back for answering a question. I’m writing a review of Zizek’s The Parallax View – which, weirdly, doesn’t discuss Pakula’s The Parallax View (see the top post on J&B). But the weird thing about this, seems to me, isn’t just that Zizek is a filmhound, so he should mention the film in a big book of this title – one containing a lot about film. The weird thing is that ‘the parallax view’ is a weird phrase because there’s no such thing as a parallax view. Parallax is a difference between two views – for example, the view through a camera viewer and the view through the lens, which then comes out as the picture you’ve taken. (See all the different things parallax can mean.) A difference between two views is not, itself, any view. The one thing that seems like it could be a ‘parallax view’ would be … healthy eyesight. The marksman with two eyes has better depth perception than the one-eyed marksman, to whom everything looks flat (like a carefully composed Pakula frame). I’m not sure what to make of this, but for starters I’m just asking: I’m not a photographer or astronomer, so maybe my premise is wrong? Does anyone ever use the phrase ‘parallax view’ except as the title of a book or film? If not, then it seems like Zizek naming his book after the film, then not discussing it, is some kind of clue, or joke.

Laura berates her readers for not coming up with America’s most popular Cookbook author in response to her plea for good cookbooks. Unlike Laura, I rarely get recipes from the internet. Sometimes I make them up; other times I reverse engineer them (upcoming later this week; my reverse engineered recipe for Tesco’s fresh pesto). My own favourite cookbook of all is out of print: Katie Stewart’s wonderful Times Cookery Book; my mum gave me the more beaten up of her two copies a few years ago and I treasure it no end. But the best internet recommendation I got was in this thread; cranky observer recommended Rose Levy Beranbaum’s The Cake Bible. She leads you through both the stages and the science of baking good cakes; I’ve yet to have a failure. Better still is The Bread Bible; again, she shows how you to deal with yeast and flour, and tells you enough of the science to instill the necessary patience. I have had failures with this, but not many, and because the book is so well designed I’ve actually learned from the failures!.

“Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/05/09/report reports that some people got together and “went through”:http://www.freeexchangeoncampus.org/index.php?option=com_docman&Itemid=25 David Horowitz’s book _The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America_ looking for errors. They found a bunch, of course, but by far the funniest one was the discovery that “While Horowitz’s book promises a list of the 101 most dangerous academics, he actually includes only 100.” Inside Higher ed reports “Horowitz said that’s because he included at least two and possibly three professors in his introduction.” This stuff writes itself.

_Update_: Post edited to make it clear that the “that’s because …” quote was from the news report, and not Horowitz himself. (The report seems to be paraphrasing a response from Horowitz, though.)

Since Harry “recommended”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/david-brooks-on-unequal-childhoods/ Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0520239504/junius-20/102-8303545-9810554 I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about it and related issues. Two questions seem particularly pertinent to me: first, I think that Lareau’s demonstration that different parenting values and styles impact on children’s life chances has implications for the way in which political philosophers view the social world since it suggests that social outcomes are not just the result of the the “basic structure” of society, but also of ingrained habits and dispositions that are reproduced from one generation to another. Second, I think that fact, if true, poses a problem to liberals in that state action to overcome disadvantage-reproducing “habitus” requires the state to take a stand on the relative value of different conceptions of the good.

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bq. The sole aim, let us not forget, of the British military deployment in Iraq is to facilitate the establishment of a stable government in Iraq. But if, as now seems increasingly likely, that goal is unobtainable, then the sooner that they pack up and come home, the better.

So writes “Con Coughlin in the Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/05/09/do0902.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/05/09/ixopinion.html . Now I’ve no brief for Mr Coughlin, whose absurd stories “Saddam had advance knowledge of 9/11”, blah blah blah … have regularly been picked up by Powerline, Instapundit and the credulous Euston left in Britain. My guess is that Coughlin is best seen as a relay for what “intelligence sources” want us to read. If British “intelligence sources” are now promoting the idea of abandoning Iraq that’s worth noting. (Btw, googling “Con Coughlin” and “intelligence sources” gives a useful sample of past reports.)