“David Brooks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/05/opinion/5brooks.html?ex=1265346000&en=ae72d590be931a39&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland has another op-ed expressing the emerging right-wing wisdom that Dean’s chairmanship of the DNC shows that the lunatics have taken over the asylum of the Democratic party. In Brooks’ account:

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Scott McLemee ‘s new column at Inside Higher Ed. The ethics and aesthetics of kettle chopping. Plus this bit about our kind:

For every scholar wondering how to make blogging an institutionally accredited form of professional activity, there must be several entertaining the vague hopes that it never will.

I am the former sort. But let’s consider. The concern might be that blogging will drag down the tone of scholarship. But clearly Scott has in mind the reverse concern that scholarship will drag down the tone of blogging. It is clear enough how the dynamics of obligatory overproduction – among other common, cruel disfigurements – can produce hollow but noisome artifacts such as Scott laments:

And so the implicit content of many a conference paper is not, as one
might think, "Here is my research." Rather, it is: "Here am I,
qualified and capable, performing this role, which all of us here
share, and none of us want to question too closely. So let’s get it
over with, then go out for a drink afterwards."

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Retailers such as Amazon and Half use social network methods applied to people’s previous purchasing behavior and demonstrated interests to figure out what other items customers may want to buy. MovieLens is an interesting example of a non-commercial service that uses information provided by the user about his or her movie preferences (ratings of movies already viewed) to suggest what additional movies may be of interest to the person based on the movie evaluations of others who exhibit similar tastes. Music Plasma suggests what artists are close to each other based on style and epoch. Unfortunately the site doesn’t tell us much about the underlying methodology.[1] Unlike MovieLens, it seems to rely on information about the position of artists in the network based on shared genre and era to make recommendations (i.e. display linkages) instead of relying on listener feedback about shared tastes. I’d be curious to hear about other similar services resembling any of these approaches. For those interested in visualizations of this type, the search engine Kartoo and the Virtual Thesaurus may also be of interest (the latter is quite restricted for non-subscribers though and I have never been able to access enough of it to be particularly impressed). For more on visualization of networks see orgnet.com.

fn1. A few months ago I contacted them for more information, but got no response.

Could anything be more “Airmiles” than the suggestion that we start an essay competition to foil Bin Laden?

What I would do with the $75 million we have budgeted as rewards for bin Laden and Zarqawi is use it instead to sponsor an essay contest for high school students in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Syria and Egypt. The contest entry form would say the following: “In 2,000 words, write an essay on one of these two topics: 1. Why do you believe the Arab-Muslim world is fully capable of achieving democratic, representative government and how do you envisage it coming about through peaceful changes inside your country, without any American or other outside help. 2. Write an essay about the lives of any of the great medieval Arab or Muslim mathematicians, scientists or philosophers and how their innovations helped to shape our world today.”

You know what else we should ask? Turn-ons and turn-offs. Then they could be like, “I’m Miss September from Egypt. Turn-ons: democratic government, long walks on the beach; turn-offs: rude guys!”

Blogger Joe Gordon, sacked by British bookselling chain Waterstone’s (see “an earlier post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/003101.html ) seems to have been offered “a better job by some nicer people”:http://www.woolamaloo.org.uk/2005/02/my-interstellar-journey-to-forbidden.htm . Splendid!

I’m one of the objects of denunciation in “an article by Louis Proyect on marxmail”:http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/FredHalliday.htm . Proyect is disgusted with various former editors of the New Left Review who have supported “humanitarian intervention” here and there. It is certainly true that I did (and still do) support the intervention in Kosovo, but Proyect has much more specific allegations:

bq. In October 2000, the NLR asked Bertram to write an article on the anti-Milosevic revolt. However, editor Susan Watkins nixed the article since it implied political support for the forced absorption of Yugoslavia into Western European economic and political institutions.

The NLR never asked me to write such an article, I’ve never written such an article (asked or not), and so Susan Watkins couldn’t have “nixed” it. In fact, I’ve had no contact whatsoever with NLR since 1993. I don’t know whether the facts adduced by Proyect against other people in his piece are accurate ….

(Thanks to Henry for drawing my attention to this.)

[UPDATE: Proyect has now edited the piece so that Marko Attila Hoare is referred to as the author of the rejected NLR piece. I hope that’s correct]

Every so often the Guardian brings me up short. Today, for example, when “I read the following”:http://education.guardian.co.uk/racism/story/0,10795,1406216,00.html :

bq. Thirty years ago a book by a Grenadian writer about the number of black British children being sent to schools for the educationally subnormal caused outrage in the community. Here author Bernard Coard describes how the ‘ESN book’ came to be written and its relevance to today’s black children.

Now, whilst it is strictly irrelevant to the merits and demerits of his book, it seems to me to be remarkable that the Guardian fails to mention that this is the same “Bernard Coard”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Coard who led a Stalinist coup-d’etat against the Maurice Bishop, charismatic leader of the New Jewel Movement. Bishop and several other people were arrested on Coard’s orders and shot. This gave Ronald Reagan an excuse to invade the island. Coard was subsequently sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment, and Coard is still in gaol. A “Grenadian writer” ….

The multinational character of Crooked Timber means that there’s bound to be more than one view about who is going to win “Rugby Union’s Six Nations tournament”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/default.stm this time around. The smart money is on Ireland who have the best player in Brian O’Driscoll and home advantage against the stronger teams. I’ll be tuned into Wales v England this afternoon and there’s every chance of an upset this time. Unfortunately for Kieran and Henry (and for Brian who is an interested neutral) I shouldn’t think that a microsecond of this will get transmitted in North America.

I’ve not been posting much lately because I’ve been teaching new material, starting a new semester and also been assessing another department as an external panel member. Busy busy busy. Still, life goes on in the insterstices. One of the things I look forward to in my weekly schedule is driving my youngest son to his piano lesson because this co-incides with “Bob Harris Country”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/ on BBC Radio 2. I’d long have said that the one genre of music I just couldn’t listen to is country. But Bob Harris has always been one of my favourite DJs and I’ve just been sucked in by what is one of the best music programmes on the BBC, to the point where I’ve bought 5 Steve Earle cds in the last month. No doubt everyone else has been listening to Earle for years, but for me he’s a new discovery, a songwriter who managed to summon up a whole world in a few minutes. I confess to listening to the unbelievably poignant “Billy Austin” from his live “Just an American Boy”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0000AOV39/junius-20 several times in a row.

Crooked Timber has been out of commission for the past day or so. Our hosting provider had a hardware problem on one of its file servers, and fixing it took longer than they thought. The upshot was that this site was accessible the whole time, but everything was read-only: any attempt to post a comment, or write a post explaining what was wrong, or do anything that involved creating any file on the server, would get an error. Sorry about this: we didn’t have any control over it. But now here we are again, I hope.

Ernst Mayr has died. The NYT has an “obit”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/04/science/04cnd-mayr.html?oref=login describing him as a giant of the field, but also strongly hinting that he was a bit of a controversialist (I’m not a biologist, so I don’t feel competent to judge the truth or untruth of that assessment).

“Stephen Bainbridge”:http://www.professorbainbridge.com/2005/02/voltaire_and_wa.html steps in for the right, and says that basic principles of free speech and academic freedom mean that Ward Churchill shouldn’t lose his job. I think he’s right; but I also think that there is something to “Timothy Burke’s argument”:http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma20205.html that Churchill shouldn’t have been invited to speak at Hamilton in the first place (the two positions are of course not contradictory). Not because of his extreme opinions – but because he seems to be neither a good nor thoughtful academic.

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First, many thanks to all who have bought stuff through the Amazon
links. Tomorrow I’m sending another US$150 check to the Singapore Red Cross for Tsunami reconstruction efforts. Please feel free to continue helping by buying … if you were gonna buy anyway.

Andrew Sullivan gets letters. Boyo does he:

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Matt Yglesias explains what Bush’s three-step plan for Social Security entails, “in terms adapted to the meanest understanding”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2005/02/understanding_t.html. It’s a very good post, and you should read it. Regular observers of the present administration will not be surprised to find that by the end, Matt is saying things like this:

bq. If you are in the top one or two percent of the income pyramid, this may be a good deal for you anyway since phase one allows you to keep your income taxes lower. The other 99-98 percent of us are getting the shaft. … This is also good for you if you are a manager or major stockholder in a company that will be managing the private accounts. It also might be good for you if you own a great deal of stock already (i.e., you’re rich!) and this program winds up increasing the share of national wealth invested in the stock market.

Funny how analyses of recent domestic policy always tend to conclude along those lines. It’s almost like there’s a pattern or something.