ViaTimothy Noah at Slate, I learn that the NYT is going to start charging for access to its opinion columns. It’s not clear whether, and how, bloggers will be exempted from this – the NYT provides blog access to the archives (otherwise pay-per-view) through its RSS feeds

Speaking as a reader, I wouldn’t want to pay for the NYT Op-Ed page. The Editorials are worthy, but not very exciting. Of the columnists, only Krugman is consistently excellent, and most of his columns consist of necessary repetition of important truths well-informed readers are aware of, but most commentators are unwilling to harp on for fear of being called “shrill”. But Brad DeLong is equally good, takes a similar line, posts more frequently, and is free. Kristof, like the little girl in the rhyme, is very, very good when he’s good, but that’s not always. And Herbert is steadily good, if sometimes overly earnest. After that, there’s a long tail, with columns more often useful for mockery than for endorsement.

As a blogger, there’s no point in paying for something if you can’t link to it. That’s why the WSJ is so thoroughly marginalised in the blog world. So unless the NYT finds a way around this, they’ll be cutting themselves off from one of the most active parts of the public debate, and missing out on quite a few potential readers.

So when Newsweek publishes a story about the Koran being flushed away, it’s held responsible for riots in Afghanistan and Rumsfeld tells the press to watch what they say. When someone — presumably a soldier or other coalition official — leaks photos of Saddam in his underpants to the Sun, the President is confident that the photos will do “nothing to provoke any backlash”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/20/international/middleeast/20cnd-prexy.html?hp&ex=1116648000&en=f0b883a705779f5a&ei=5094&partner=homepage from insurgents. Now that’s a flexible theory of media influence.

I didn’t write this post.

11-year-old Katie Brownell, the only girl on her Little League team in upstate New York, “pitched a perfect game”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/19/nyregion/19perfect.html last Saturday, annihilating the opposing team “in an 11-0 shutout before a stunned crowd of about 100 parents and friends in the bleachers of the Oakfield Town Park.” Now, I am indifferent to baseball, but it has the virtue of being one of those sports that allow for the possibility of a well-defined “perfect game” of some sort. There are fewer of these sports than you might think — they’re generally confined to games where the player has to do something similar over and over again and never make a mistake. Watching a performance like that is quite a different experience from seeing a well-played football game or watching a track race where the winner does everything right. The tension builds in a different way. In the best cases, it takes some time for the crowd even to realize that something special might be on the cards. And of course in this case there’s the whole “who’s laughing now” angle, which I imagine some screenwriter somewhere is already bashing out a treatment of:

bq. Ms. Bischoff said her daughter had been an avid baseball player since she was about 6, and learned the game from two older brothers. But she said Katie’s first year as the only girl in the Little League was trying, and her teammates sometimes told her she should play softball with the other girls.

Google arrives at Yahoo! 1999.

[Image extracted from the Web Archive.]

For something that’s been around for so long (personalized portal pages) My Google isn’t offering much at this point. But how interesting that they have picked sites like Slashdot as one of only a dozen options to feature for now. I would like to see the behind-the-scenes of what led to these twelve particular items being featured. Some are quite obvious (e.g. redirection to Google movie searches or Google Maps), but others probably have to do with deals. Gosh, all this reminds me of my article in 2000 on the role of portals in channeling user attention online. I discuss the implications of the underlying commercial decisions in this piece.

Eszter’s post on physicists doing social network theory raises the issue of ‘reinventing the wheel’. In this case, the physicists are breathlessly announcing results that sociologists have known about for years.

That’s obviously silly, but I don’t think reinventing the wheel is entirely a bad thing. Whenever I start on a new research topic, I like to spend a bit of time thinking about the issues on the basis of first principles, before I start reading the literature to see what others have done. The benefit of this is not that you’re likely to discover anything fundamentally new, but that it makes it easier to see what is central to the literature and what’s merely the accidental result of its development history (Professor X, the founder of the field, stressed assumption A, so all subsequent writers pay homage to it, and so on). Of course, this is only useful if you can subsequently engage with the existing literature.

My short summary “By all means have a go at reinventing the wheel, but don’t try to patent it[1]”

fn1. Apart from anything else, this guy has already done it

Update As James Farrell reminds me over at my blog, I’m reinventing my own wheel here.

Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Of course, we at CT like to be ahead of the curve and thanks to Kieran’s ingenuity reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.

There has been much excitement about and focus on social networks in the past few years ranging from social networking sites to several high-profile books on the topic.

Interestingly, much of the buzz about recent work covers research by physicists. It’s curious how physicists have expanded their research agenda to cover social phenomena. I thought their realm was the physical world. Of course, since social phenomena are extremely complex to study, as a social scientist, I certainly welcome the extra efforts put into this field of inquiry.

What is less welcomed is watching people reinvent the wheel. Sure, partly it’s an ego thing. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate if the overall goal is scientific progress. Much of the recent work in this area by physicists has completely ignored decades worth of work by social scientists. If we really do live in such a networked world where information is so easy to access, how have these researchers managed to miss all the existing relevant scholarship? Recently Kieran pointed me to an informative graph published by Lin Freeman in his recent book on The Development of Social Network Analysis:

People whose overall work focuses on social networks are represented by white dots, physicists by black ones, others by grey circles. As is clear on the image, the worlds exist in isolation from each other. It would be interesting to see year-of-publication attached to the nodes to see the progression of work.

I have been meaning to write about all of this for a while, but John Scott from the Univ. Essex addressed these issues quite well in some notes he sent to INSNA‘s SOCNET mailing list a few months ago so I will just reproduce those here. (I do so with permission.)

[click to continue…]

Tony Banks is to become a peer. And Chris Smith. It’s a long way from the GLC. Check out the list here.

Estelle Morris too, presumably forgiven for setting the appalling precedent of taking responsibility for errors committed under her watch. And Gillian Shephard, the only Education Secretary in the past ten years I’ve heard nice things about from all sides.

“Savage Minds”:http://savageminds.org/2005/05/16/the-anarchist-in-the-academy/ posts on the decision of Yale’s Department of Anthropology not to renew David Graeber’s contract, and suggests that the “real tipping point was his involvement with campus politics” and more specifically his support for “one of the organizers of a graduate student unionizing drive.” The source for this appears to be “Graeber himself”:http://www.counterpunch.org/frank05132005.html. Now I’ve no way of knowing whether Graeber’s own account tells the whole story, and the other side don’t seem to be talking. But either which way, the decision to let Graeber go is illustrative of a wider problem; as Jennet Kirkpatrick and Ian Robinson “put it”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/menutest/articles/wi05/kirkpatrick.htm, non-tenure track faculty are fighting for the right “to be fired, but only with just cause.” It’s demonstrably risky for non-tenure track faculty to make waves, even when there’s strong justification for so doing; their reappointment (or lack of same) is at the pleasure of the Department, and they’ve no recourse (or right to know why) if they’re let go.

Update: See also this story at “Inside Higher Ed”:http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/05/18/yale where Marshall Sahlins says that Graeber’s “scholarship was at the level he would have had tenure at any normal university.” See also this “petition”:http://www.petitiononline.com/dgraeber/ in support of Graeber.

The AUT boycott was put before our local association today (for the motion I co-sponsored see “here”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/05/09/questions-and-answers-re-the-aut-boycott/ — and scroll down). The debate was passionate but respectful. Everyone on both sides agreed that the AUT had botched things procedurally. The pro-boycott lobby didn’t address the details of the Haifa or Bar-Ilan cases at all but made a generic anti-Israel case centred around an analogy with apartheid. In the end the vote was decisive, a pro-boycott amendment was defeated by 41 votes to 18 and my anti-boycott motion passed by 40 votes to 16. Somewhat disappointingly, a number of people then left and a vote was taken that effectively commits the Bristol delegation to splitting their vote to reflect the proportions of opinion (rather than swinging all our votes at Council against the boycott). This adds Bristol to the list of associations that opposed the boycott.

I’ve done some fairly elaborate googling on this, and have found out much more than I want to know about Ted Nugent, but haven’t found what I want. I remember many years ago reading a story about the custody arrangements after one of his divorces; he and his ex-spouse agreed that instead of the kids moving back and forth between them, they would move in and out of the house in which their children were permanent residents. This is the nicest thing I’ve ever heard about Ted Nugent, including his music. Unfortunately, whatever references there are on the internet are hard to find because they are obscured by disputes over Ted’s tendency to produce further children (as well as sawing his leg off). I found one reference to it in a comment on a blog, but would rather cite something more authoritative when I write about this. Can anyone point me to an authoritative account fo Ted Nugent’s innovative custody arrangements.

Eric Muller “reports”:http://www.isthatlegal.org/archive/2005/05/nine_months_lat.html that Peter Irons and Aiko Herzig-Yoshinaga have “extracted a retraction and apology”:http://michellemalkin.com/archives/002489.htm from Michelle Malkin, after she smeared them in her book and on her blog last year. At least in some of its parts, the self-correcting blogosphere still needs the threat of legal action to kick it into gear.

Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest research report, this one on health information-seeking online. The study finds that 80% of users have searched for some type of health information online (it’s worth noting here that “health information” is defined broadly by including searches for diet and exercise or fitness in this category). Regarding material pertaining to a specific disease or medical problem, the survey of 537 users found that two-thirds have used the Internet as a resource.

One of the topics of interest to me in my research is seeing how different types of Internet access may result in different types of Web uses. The report shows that while 87% of those with a broadband connection at home sought some health information online, only 72% of those with a home dial-up connection did so as well. Also, Internet veterans (in this case people who’ve been online for six or more years) are considerably more likely to have engaged in such activity (86%) than those who have 2-3 years of online experience (66%).

Of course, we would need more information about all these users to draw any conclusions regarding the independent effects of certain factors. People who went online later and who don’t have high-speed connections at home may differ from others in various ways (e.g. lower income, lower education), which may then be related to their propensity to search for health information in the first place. Nonetheless, these relationships are interesting to observe. They support my arguments about the potential implications of connectivity quality and experience for types of uses.

The author of the report is Susannah Fox, Pew’s resident expert on the topic. She has been working in this area for several years and has put out other related reports in the past, e.g. one dealing with prescription drugs online and another looking at how users decide whether to trust online information when it comes to health matters.

A couple of Australian legal academics have caused a stir by publicising an article they’ve written (so far unpublished), advocating the legalisation of torture (details and links here). Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke present a rehash of arguments put forward by Alan Dershowitz, centred on our old and much-refuted friend, the ticking bomb scenario. Their main contribution is to bite the bullet where Dershowitz was not, advocating the torture of innocent people who are suspected of having useful information.

The really startling thing about all this is that, until a few months ago, Bagaric, the senior author, was a member of the Refugee Review Tribunal, part of the apparatus used by the Howard government to implement its highly restrictive policies on refugees. In this context, he had to judge numerous cases in which refugees claimed to be fleeing torture, but never thought it relevant to recuse himself on the basis that he was on the side of the torturers.

The blogospheric reaction has been predictable (at least if you share my priors). Although Bagaric was previously regarded as a mild lefty (he’s advocated higher taxes, for example), anti-war bloggers were uniformly horrified by his and Clarke’s views. By contrast, with less than a handful of exceptions, the pro-war side of the sphere either supported Bagaric and Clarke, defended their right to speak while avoiding the substantive issues, or kept on blogging about Newsweek.

This is a bit disappointing, but it provides a useful lesson. Next time you read one of these guys talking about Saddam and his crimes, remember it’s just a factional brawl within the pro-torture party. If Saddam had stuck to fighting wars against Iran, and torturing Iraqis, instead of invading Kuwait, he’d still be “an SOB, but our SOB”, just like Karimov in Uzbekistan.