This post is in Estzter territory, and probably just reflects ignorance on my part, but I’d be grateful for the information from those in the know, anyway. Following “one of Eszter’s posts recently”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/02/07/networks-and-tastes/ , I signed up to “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ and have been dutifully entering my ratings in various spare moments. Like Amazon, “Movielens”:http://movielens.umn.edu/ tells me that based on the movies I like I should check out various other ones. Presumably, the program checks the database to see which movies I haven’t seen are highly rated by other people who like the same films that I liked (ditto Amazon for books, dvds etc).

Now here’s my problem. When we all come to such systems “cold” (as it were), the links between our choices provide genuinely informative data. But once we start acting on the recommendations, even chance correlations can get magnified. So, for example, suppose we have three movies A, B and C. Perhaps if we showed these films to a randomly chosen audience there wouldn’t be any reason to suppose that people who like A prefer B to C or vice versa. But if the first N people to go to the expert system happen to like both A and B, then the program will spew out a recommendation to subsquent A or B lovers to follow up their viewing with B or A. And those people in turn, having viewed the recommended movie, will feed their approval back into the system and thereby strengthen the association. Poor old movie C, excluded by chance from this self-reinforcing loop, will not get recommended nearly so often.

I guess the people who design these systems must have considered these effects and how to counteract them. Any answers?

Julian Baggini, writing in the Guardian, “reports”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1438440,00.html :

bq. In the newly revised, more accessible edition of the New International Version of the Bible, “stoned” has been changed to “stoned to death” for fear that modern readers may get the impression that the reward for adultery is a big spliff.

Juan Cole reports the bad news about the town of Fallujah. Forty per cent of the buildings were destroyed in the bombardment and the remaining buildings have either “major” or “significant” damage. The city has effectively no water or power. It is currently a tent city, composed of about 9,000 residents living in tents near the ruins of their homes. The other 290,000 residents are living with relatives in other cities, or in refugee camps, or dead. Presumably the refugees will be experiencing a mortality rate rather more than 1.5x its prewar level.

I suspect that the Fallujah residents might consider it an addition of insult to injury that the main importance of their town in Western political debate is as a trophy for statisticians like me to show how intellectually scrupulous we are and win arguments with morons, by discarding their suffering as an “outlier”. With real tears in my eyes, I apologise.

When I came onboard at Crooked Timber, it wasn’t without some trepidation among my august co-bloggers. As respected academics, they didn’t want CT to devolve into a cesspool of personal invective. Accordingly, my invitation asked me to refrain from using terms such as “douchebag” and “world’s biggest douchebag”.

Obviously, there was an exception in a sub-clause for Ramblin’ Christopher Hitchens. The Poor Man explains.

Rep. Edward Markey has offered a bill (note: .pdf file) to stop extraordinary rendition. Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings makes the basic case quite ably:

Extraordinary rendition is a loathsome practice. If we have grounds to think that someone is a terrorist, we ought to charge that person and try him or her in a court of law. If we do not have enough evidence to bring charges, our response should be to try to develop some, not to ship that person off to another country to be tortured. This is completely inconsistent with our respect for the rule of law, and with our claim to basic decency. It is unworthy of our country, and it should be banned.

Representative Markey’s bill has 52 co-sponsors. 51 are Democrats, and 1 is independent.

I’m not an idiot. I know that this bill will never pass in this Congress. But I’d like to see at least one Republican co-sponsor for this bill.

I’m going to ask that readers politely contact Connecticut moderate Republican Christopher Shays, who might be open to persuasion. His phone number in DC is 202-225-5541. In Bridgeport, CT, it’s 203-579-5870. He can be emailed from this page. My letter, which you can adapt or just use, is under the fold. Thank you in advance.
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Gwydion the Magician (whom I’m guessing from his title must be some kind of pagan) has “issues” with Alaskan Airlines (and quite right too):

bq. Alaskan Airlines, I discovered, does not deign to serve its transcontinental passengers anything resembling a full meal. All we got on a 6 hour flight was a crappy sandwich. The IFE comes as a small portable DVD player that costs 10 bucks. But the particular feature of the Airline that pissed me off was the little Christian verse they include on each meal tray. I know this is America, where God-fearing zealots control the government. But inflicting Christianity on a captive audience of fee-paying passengers is just too much.

Indeed.

Via “Elayne Riggs”:http://elayneriggs.blogspot.com/2005/03/estrogen-month-day-14-welcome-any-new.html comes Tild~’s “She-Blogger”:http://tildblog.blogspot.com/2005/03/return-of-she-blogger.html. Enslaved to the conventional wisdom, constantly whoring for attention and desperate for validation by the polite society they affect to despise, these sad creatu– I’m sorry, those are the He-Bloggers. That should have read, Sharp-tongued, lurking in the shadows and heedless of their proper place in life, these slatterns tempt innocent young boy-bloggers to “subvert the dominant link hierarchy”:http://www.google.com/search?q=subvert+the+dominant+link+hierarchy. Disgusting. Yet strangely alluring.

The effort to normalize torture proceeds on two fronts. The first comes up with scenarios where torture seems justified — the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/ case that we “know and love”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power. As we know, real torture never meets the criteria that even seemingly reasonable ticking-bomb hypos demand. The scenario depends on the prospective torturer knowing everything relevant about the circumstances _except one thing_ (viz, the location of the bomb and the time it will explode), which the suspect knows, and we know they know. This never happens. Instead, torture is generally a much more protracted affair, carried on with much less information about what the suspect knows or even who the proper suspects are. Nevertheless, as we saw the “other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/03/13/torture-2/, the ticking-bomb still exerts a “considerable hold”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html over people’s minds. Why?

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The latest episode of Mark Tavener’s comedy, High Table Lower Orders, includes a character who has held both the Donald Rumsfeld Chair in Peace Studies and the Bill Clinton Chair in Personal Ethics. (My University has a set of Chairs which are named by the recipients: my fantasy is to hold the Tony Hancock Chair in something, though if push ever came to shove I guess I’d go for C.L.R. James if his executors would let me). Anyway, you can do better than Mark Tavener, surely. Nominations please.

The Eastern Sociological Society annual meetings will be in Washington, D.C. this weekend at the Wyndham Hotel. I organized a mini-conference on Sociology and the Internet for it that includes a session called “Can Blogs Influence Public Policy?”. This session will be held at 8:30am this Friday. If you’re in the area and inclined to be up and about at that hour, please stop by. Panelists are as follows:

* Tyler Cowen, George Mason University (Update: Unfortunately, it turns out that Tyler Cowen won’t be able to make it.)
* Henry Farrell, George Washington University
* Eszter Hargittai, Northwestern University
* Amy Sullivan, The Washington Monthly and Princeton University
* Discussant: Jeff Weintraub, Lehigh University and University of Pennsylvania

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Two good posts on the continuing slide towards routinized and euphemized torture by the U.S., one at “Body and Soul”:http://bodyandsoul.typepad.com/blog/2005/03/the_beast_in_us.html and one at “Respectful of Otters”:http://respectfulofotters.blogspot.com/2005_03_01_respectfulofotters_archive.html#111068506853331238. Jim Henley “notes”:http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/03/11/4026 a couple of recent domestic crime cases where the obvious suspects turned out not to have done it, asking “Couldn’t we have tortured the “right” people into confessing to both these crimes?” (That “real-estate arson”:http://www.jrrobertssecurity.com/security-news/security-crime-news0013.htm last year in Maryland was in that category, too.) Meanwhile, “Juan Non-Volokh”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_03_06-2005_03_12.shtml#1110426704 might be trying to talk himself into it through the “latest version”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A18709-2005Mar8.html of our old friend, the “ticking bomb”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/18/by-the-power-of-stipulation-i-have-the-power.

This NYT report shows how the Bush Administration has been producing covert propaganda, which is then shown on US TV stations as news, with actors posing as reporters. It would take much more than this to surprise me in relation to the Bush Administration, and in any case, the practice apparently began under Clinton.

What did strike me was that, while the NYT went in for plenty of handwringing about the government manipulating the news, the report showed no concern about the fact (news to me) that corporations have been doing this for years, more or less openly, to the extent that those involved in producing “video news releases” have their own association, annual awards and so on

Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance.

Of course, reprinting press releases with minimal editing has been a standby of lazy journalists for decades. But the standard press release story opens with what is presented as a paraphrase of a quote “In Washington today, Senator X criticised the neglect of problem Y …” or whatever. Even if the reader is led to imagine that the statement was actually made to an audience of reporters, there’s no serious deception, though a well-designed press release can certainly ensure that the writer’s key points get prominently reported in a way that makes them seem like fact rather than opinion.

But the video news release goes way beyond this. The closest analog in the print world is those supplements, designed to look like news, with “advertisement” in small print at the bottom of the page.

I don’t know anything about the legality of all this. Here in Australia, radio commentators got into a heap of strife over “cash for comment”, accepting money from corporations to say nice things about them. But this was advertising presented as opinion. Presenting advertising as news seems far worse to me.

The issue of paid-for or sponsored political comment has already arisen in relation to blogging. It seems unlikely that commercial PR can be far behind, if it isn’t here already.

This post contains a valuable commercial opportunity for someone, but I’m giving the advice for free. If I were a publisher of art-books, a commissioner of programmes for a channel like BBC4, or the editor of an art magazine or a Sunday supplement, I’d be desperately trying to do something on the photographs of Gustav Szathmary. Szathmary was the lover of the well-known German painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, and the “Modersohn-Becker Museum”:http://www.pmbm.de/ in Bremen, Germany currently has an exhibition of his work. (He was a composer and an inventor of photographic equipment too.) I toured the exhibition yesterday with another academic (and anonoblogger) who, like me, was there for the “Social Justice Conference”:http://www.gsss.uni-bremen.de/socialjustice/ at the GSS at the University of Bremen. We were both stunned by the Szathmary’s portraits of his friends. The pictures, from about 1905, are so natural and lively that — allowing for changes in clothing in some cases — they could have been taken at any time up to last week. There’s hardly anything about Szathmary on the internet (8 hits on google and 9 on allthweb) and the only way you can see any of the photos is by “downloading the German catalogue”:http://www.cupere.de/pdf/gustav_szathmary.pdf (only a small selection, right at the end of this enormous PDF) or by visiting Bremen. There’s also “an html-page on Szathmary”:http://www.cupere.de/gustav_1.htm , linking to the catalogue, but without any of the relevant pictures.

(BTW, if anyone actually is a commissioning editor etc., reads this page, acts on it, and something comes about, I’d appreciate a free copy or an invite to the opening etc.)

Update: See also Gwydion the Magician’s take on “Gustav Szathmary and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler”:http://gwydionthemagician.blogspot.com/2005/03/joys-of-bremen-elfriede-lohse-wchtler.html .

UPDATE: See the link from Andrew’s comment below: Szathmary appears to be a spoof character wholly invented by artist Dirk Hennig. Doh!

Teething continues apace. Right now the main issue is with formatting. More below the fold.

Update: Now we have comment previewing and validation. We aim to please. Seems to be working OK.

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