by John Q on March 11, 2005
In my first-ever blog post (apart from a Hello World! announcement), I commented on the fact that, whereas trade and current account deficits were big news in Australia, US papers buried them in the back pages. At least in the online edition of the New York Times, this is no longer the case. The latest US Trade deficit ($58.3 billion in January) is front-page news.
Despite this catch-up, it’s still true that anyone wanting coverage of economic issues in the US would do far better to read blogs than to follow either the NY Times or the WSJ, and no other mainstream media even come close. It isn’t even true, as it is in other cases, that bloggers need the established media to get the facts on which they can then comment. The NY Times story linked above is basically a rewrite of the Bureau of Economic Analysis press release which you can get by automatic email if you want.
The competition is much tougher in Australia. Media coverage of economic issues is better, the number of economist-bloggers is smaller and quite a few of us play both sides of the street anyway.
by Harry on March 11, 2005
My review of In Good Faith in the TES is now on-line (or, at least, it seems to be when I look at it). Its a book by 3 British academics about state-funded faith schools in the UK, and might be of some interest to non-Brits. who want to know how the British system works. My review doesn’t seem to have done much for its amazon sales. Here is a taster:
the authors have researched a large number of Muslim, Jewish, Greek Orthodox, Sikh, Church of England and Roman Catholic schools, and their findings make a vital contribution to the debate about faith schooling. They highlight the rise, since 1998, of non-Christian state-funded faith schools, and lay out the controversies, as well as providing a good deal of pertinent data. The authors rightly place Muslim schools at the centre of the debate about faith schooling. Islam is the largest non-Christian faith in Britain, and has the worst press. It is the only religion about which it is permissible to publicly express uninformed hostile opinions. The sagacious Lord Hattersley is quoted as pointing out that “fundamentalism is less acceptable when it is not white”. Islam has been a focal point for the new racism, and remains on the edge of mainstream British life.
by Harry on March 11, 2005
If you haven’t yet followed any of our numerous links to Scott McLemee’s columns in Inside Higher Education you might want to start by checking out this brilliant little essay about the lost art of the lecture (and no, he doesn’t pay us a cent for the links). Apparently the lecture is not only dead, but is widely regarded as
“another form of child abuse, aimed at nominal adults, of course, but still young people presumably subjugated and entrapped in an environment controlled by an authoritarian leader” — leaving them no self-defense except “to fall asleep to escape the painful environment they have paid so dearly to join.”
Worse, my former colleague Ron Barnett is quoted as saying that the lecture:
“keeps channels of communication closed, freezes hierarchy between lecturers and students and removes any responsibility on the student to respond.”
[click to continue…]
by Kieran Healy on March 11, 2005
So I’ve been experimenting with various “Textile”:http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/ plugins for WordPress. The best one so far seems to be “Text Control”:http://dev.wp-plugins.org/wiki/TextControl, which allows for a lot of flexibility. In particular, it’s supposed to support per-post choices about which markup to use. But although I can set global options, no options menu appears when I’m editing a new post. Is this a known bug?
I’ve also been looking at various spam filters. “Spam Karma”:http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/ looks comprehensive, but so far has proved a little enthusiastic with the false positives. Sorry to those affected. I’ve turned down the volume on it a bit, so hopefully that will stop being a problem. Any advice on fine-tuning Spam Karma’s options?
Also, if you notice any severe slowdowns or other performance issues, please let me know.
by Harry on March 11, 2005
I suppose that every Brit who reads this site already knows about this, but the rest may not. The die-hard fans seem pleased, but it is very hard to tell whether that is just a function of the relief they feel.
When I first heard about the return I had a conversation with my favourite pop star (no, I won’t tell you who that is) who expressed skepticism: on the grounds that the only way the series can sell is by Americanising it. My skepticism is more based on the fact that the post-war social-democratic consensus is so long dead that a show that self-consciously embodied it would now seem weird; but if the doctor were not a social democrat he would not be the doctor. However, at least the Americanisation thesis seems false, given the star’s disavowal of both sexism (ha!) and RP.
by John Q on March 10, 2005
Slate runs a good debunking of romantic popular misinterpetations of Godel’s theorem. Key quote
The precise mathematical formulation that is Gödel’s theorem doesn’t really say “there are true things which cannot be proved” any more than Einstein’s theory means “everything is relative, dude, it just depends on your point of view.”
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen dubious appeals to intuition or claims about chaos theory and the like supported with reference to Godel’s theorem, but I have derived the following proposition:
Quiggin’s metatheorem: Any interesting conclusion derived with reference to Godel’s theorem is unfounded.
Feel free to evaluate with reference to the post title, and your level of interest in the formalist program.
by Kieran Healy on March 10, 2005
CT has switched platforms from MovableType to WordPress. Thanks to lead WordPress developer Matt Mullenweg for doing the behind-the-scenes work on this. We hope this move will make things easier for our readers.[1] For one thing, it should be the end of double- triple- or even duodecuple-posted comments. These were becoming an embarrassing CT hallmark, thanks to our outdated installation of MovableType and way too much server load. Trackback spam and other blogging bugaboos should also become easier to manage. More generally, it’s good to move over to an open-source platform.
I expect there will be teething problems in the short-term, as we fine-tune the layout and learn how to use the new software. We hope you’ll bear with us. Right now, our main page doesn’t render properly in Safari: the right sidebar text ends up positioned on the left. This isn’t a problem on Firefox or IE. If there are any CSS gurus out there who want to suggest a fix, we’d be very grateful.
fn1. This is a test of footnotes.
by Henry Farrell on March 10, 2005
I’m about to jump on a plane to Europe, after jumping off a plane from Hawaii yesterday, but couldn’t resist blogging this aside from a recent Scott McLemee “column”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/intellectual_affairs__11.
bq. At one point, they [‘Chairman Bob’ Avakian and his philosopher sidekick] note that the slogan “Serve the People,” made famous by the little red book, could be used — with very different intentions, of course — at a McDonald’s training institute. This is, on reflection, something like Hegel’s critique of the formalism of Kant’s ethics. Only, you know, different.
Chairman Bob is stealing a riff here from Damon Knight’s famous short story “To Serve Man,” which was made into an even more famous Twilight Zone episode. I imagine that Chairman Bob’s version is more laboured and less funny than the original: “Don’t get on the ship. The book, To Serve Man, IT’S A COOKBOOK!” has to rank as one of the best closing lines of all time.
by Belle Waring on March 10, 2005
I don’t know how to put this delicately…but I never knew there were so many–ah–euphemisms (kakophemisms?) for anal intercourse until I read this list of words which you cannot emblazon on an NFL personalized jersey. And, I think that if you had asked me, I would have said I did indeed know quite a good number. The scales have fallen from my eyes. (via Hit and Run.)
by Daniel on March 10, 2005
Congratulations to the team at King’s College London, who have managed to achieve the first claimed “cure” of Type 1 Diabetes via transplanted islet cells. Just to drive the point home, the technique that they used was originally developed in Canada, so it’s a double win for socialized medical research.
The temptation is almost overpowering to speculate that the reason this particular procedure was developed outside the USA might have something to do with the fact that curing a disease with a single operation doesn’t produce a lifelong dependence on patented pharmaceuticals. But this temptation probably ought to be resisted; it’s only a single case. But well done King’s College, and perhaps this will shame our government into funding London’s hospitals properly.
by John Q on March 9, 2005
I just got off the phone from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you’ll all be agog to read my views on bankruptcy reform, social security, the trade deficit, the impending crisis of capitalism, and so on. You’ll have to wait a little while, however. The topic of the interview was bunnies vs bilbies.
by John Holbo on March 9, 2005
Interesting discussion at the Loom (via Panda’s Thumb):
So here is a fascinating scenario to consider: a small-brained African
hominid species expands out of Africa by 2 million years ago, bringing
with it stone tools. It spreads thousands of miles across Asia,
reaching Indonesia and then getting swept to Flores. It may not have
undergone any significant dwarfing, since they were already small. This
would change the way we think about all hominids. Being big-brained and
big-bodied could no longer be considered essential requirements for
spreading out of Africa. And one would have to wonder why early
lineages of hominids became extinct in Africa when one branch managed
to get to Flores.
I figure the most scientific explanation is that one day a wizard showed up at the door. The road goes ever on and all that.
by John Holbo on March 9, 2005
I’m rereading Louis Hartz’ 1955 classic, The Liberal Tradition in America, one of the first academic books that fired my brain when I got to college. (David Greenstone taught me. I should read his Lincoln book out of filial piety.)
Here’s a bit on Hartz by Arthur Schlesinger: "The broad liberal objective is a balanced and flexible "mixed
economy," thus seeking to occupy that middle ground between
capitalism and socialism whose viability has so long been denied
by both capitalists and socialists." Interesting shifts in usage since that was written. For a Democrat to stump for a ‘mixed’ economy today would be ballot box poison. But all Schlesinger is saying is: the New Deal. Which folks like.
Hartz’ basic thesis is packed into his Tocqueville epigraph: "The great advantage of the Americans is, that they have arrived at a state of democracy without having to endure a democratic revolution; and that they are born equal, instead of becoming so."
[click to continue…]
by Henry Farrell on March 8, 2005
Via “Armed Liberal”:http://www.windsofchange.net/archives/006456.php, I see that George W. Bush appears to be on the verge of “taking action”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-1516076,00.html to signal emphatically to Sinn Fein that they are _personae non gratae_, unless they get rid of the hard men in the IRA. I’d noted in a “previous post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003252.html that there was a political controversy over whether Sinn Fein would be specifically singled out for exclusion from the St. Patrick’s Day party in the White House, or whether instead all political parties would be disinvited from the party, so as to make the snub less pointed. Now, according to the _Times_ it appears that no political party is going to get an invitation to the reception – but that the relatives of a recent victim of the IRA will be invited to the White House instead. If the _Times_ is right on this (the story seems to have some legs, but rightwing British papers are frequently unreliable sources on Northern Ireland politics), the Bush administration is sending about as clear and unambiguous a signal as one could possibly hope for. Interestingly, the signals from the North seem to suggest that Sinn Fein and the IRA recognize that they’re in real political trouble – not only because of the frost in their relations with the Irish, British and US governments, but also, more importantly, because of protests from natural constituency in the Catholic working class communities in Northern Ireland (where the murder in question has been highly controversial). For the first time in my memory, there’s a serious internal challenge to the IRA’s ability to control its own community, and to the frequently brutal actions of its hard men. Getting rid of them would be a considerable step forward for democratic politics in the North.