Picking up on an “old item”:http://merlin.blogs.com/43folders/2004/09/osx_inventories.html over at “43 Folders”:http://www.43folders.com/ (this post has been marinading for a while), here’s a discussion of the applications and tools I use to get work done. I do get work done, sometimes. Honestly.

I’ll give you two lists. The first contains examples of software I find really useful, but which doesn’t directly contribute to the work I’m supposed to be doing. (Some of it actively detracts from it, alas.) The second list is comprised of the applications I use to do what I’m paid for, and it might possibly interest graduate students in departments like “mine”:http://fp.arizona.edu/soc/. If you just care about the latter list, then a discussion about “choosing workflow applications”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/files/misc/workflow-apps.pdf [pdf] might also be of interest. (That note overlaps with this post: it doesn’t contain the first list, but adds some examples to the second.) If you don’t care about any of this, well, just move along quietly.

[click to continue…]

A friend of mine, Philip Howard, has been taking a very innovative approach to teaching his class on Communication Technology and Politics at the University of Washington this Fall. He and his students have been collecting data about the use of communication technologies in the elections and writing reports about their findings.

The team has released reports on topics from the legalities of voteswapping to the political uses of podcasting. The latest article looks at voting error due to technological errors, residual votes and incident reports. They have collected data on these for all states for the presidential, the gubernatorial and the senate races. They weight the incident-report data by total voting population, eligible voter population and registered voter population. They find that in some cases – see state specifics in the report by type of error – the margin of error was greater than the margin of victory.

What a great way to get students involved, to teach them important skills and to contribute helpful information to the public. They make their data available for those interested in the details. You can download spreadsheets with information off their site. They also offer an extensive list of resources including a pointers to academic literature from the past twelve years on technologies and campaigns.

UPDATE: I should have mentioned that they are posting reports now as white papers and are eager to receive feedback. It looks like they will continue to analyze the data and welcome suggestions.

This post is pure response to a long critical comment by Michael Blowhard to my liberal groupthink post. I’ve clipped his comment, cut it up, responded point by point. There are many good comments to my post, which I will not respond to just right now, but Michael’s seemed to merit complete coverage. Still, this post will only be interesting to the truly excessively interested.

[click to continue…]

Jennifer Howard of the Washington Post has a longish article-cum-book-review in the most recent “Boston Review”:http://www.bostonreview.net/BR29.6/howard.html on “the uses of fantasy,” where she gets it very badly wrong, but in an interesting way. She takes a critical hatchet to Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1582344167/henryfarrell-20 (which “I”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002484.html and others on “this”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/12/a_tale_of_two_l.html “blog”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002570.html “and”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/12/books_of_the_ye.html “elsewhere”:http://www.longstoryshortpier.com/vaults/2004/11/28/magic_tricks liked quite a lot) and to modern fantasy in general, but rather than attacking it for being too ridden with the cliches of genre, she attacks it because it isn’t genre enough. For Howard,

bq. When the news strays so far from the familiar moral contours of the struggle between Good and Evil, it’s tempting to lose ourselves in stories in which this battle is fought in clear terms and on an epic scale.

bq. Good over here, Evil over there—call it the Lord of the Rings model, in which heroes may be flawed but are always recognizably heroes, and their enemies want nothing less than to stamp out (as one of the good guys puts it in Peter Jackson’s recent film adaptation) “all that’s green and good in this world.” Many other fantasy classics work this territory, too; think of C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, for instance, with its underpinning of Christian allegory.

Thus, Howard finds that JSAMN is a failure; it’s “a possibly fatal degree of academic remove away from epic sweep and the big moral questions.” More precisely:

bq. aren’t the showier sorts of magic—magic that battles for the soul of the world—exactly what we need, now more than ever? … Clarke’s novel doesn’t parody the genre; it displays in a lifeless cabinet of wonders all its elements—every element, that is, but the epic sense of Good and Evil, of things larger than ourselves, that makes the best fantasy so powerful and so necessary.

I’m not disputing that escapist fantasy can’t be good stuff (when it’s well written, it’s wonderful), but I do think it’s rather unfair to pillory Clarke for not writing the kind of book that she clearly didn’t want to write in the first place. Clarke isn’t especially interested, as far as I can make out, in epic battles between good and evil; instead, she’s rather more concerned with the tensions between the magical and the mundane. She’s not copying Tolkien; if anything, she’s riffing on a very different tradition of fantasy that goes back to Hope Mirrlees’ Lud-in-the-Mist. For which purpose, the incongruence between the world of Faerie and the social niceties of Regency England works extremely well – it not only provides Clarke with the makings of good comedy, but allows her to get at the fundamental _thinness_ of the British social order. The key moments in the book are those where you realize that Jonathan Strange and Dr. Norrell’s dispute is at most a sort of shadow play, a prelude to something much stranger and wilder. From Clarke’s novel:

bq. He had meant to say that if what he had seen was true, then everything that Strange and Norrell had ever done was child’s-play and magic was a much stranger and more terrifying thing than any of them had thought of. Strange and Norrell had been merely throwing paper darts about a parlour, while real magic soared and swooped and twisted on great wings in a limitless sky far, far above them.

Magic, in Susanna Clarke’s novel, is profoundly unsettling, in a way that it isn’t in Howard’s preferred forms of fantasy; it threatens to disrupt the social order. There’s a sort of dynamic tension between it and reality, rather than a simple escape from our complex world. If the usages of Regency England are so fragile, so vulnerable to disruption from without, then what of our own settled ways of doing things? Howard clearly doesn’t like this mode of writing, which is her right, but it seems to me at the least peculiar that she should prosecute the book for not being what it doesn’t want to be in the first place, and then convict it on all counts. There’s more than one mode of fantasy out there, and if JSAMN doesn’t conform to her preferred type, then that’s really not Clarke’s fault, nor does it reflect on the book itself so much as on the lack of sympathy between the book and a particular kind of reader.

Prompted by Henry and other CTers, I’ve been reading, Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, so I was very interested in Henry’s latest Since it’s too long for a comment , I’ve posted my draft review over the fold. Looking at Jennifer Howard’s review article, I think it’s clear that a lot of people are looking for “Harry Potter for adults” and are likely to be disappointed.

[click to continue…]

Der Spiegel’s new English-language site has “an intruiging article”:http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/spiegel/0,1518,330728,00.html about foreigners — including a US strawberry-farmer, who have bought up German government bonds issued in the 1920s and are now trying to get the German government to pay the … billions. I have a vague memory that Piero Sraffa became fabulously rich (or his college did) because he bought up then-worthless Japanese government bonds during WW2 on the — correct — assumption that any postwar Japanese goverment would honour them. The Germans, unsurprisingly, don’t seem keen:

bq. But investors like Fulwood [the strawberry-farmer] don’t want to wait any longer: He’s the first to take on Germany’s Bundesbank, or central bankk, to force the government to pay up. On September 10, Fulwood filed suit in the 13th Judicial District, Hillsborough County, in Tampa, Florida.

bq. According to court documents, the strawberry farmer isn’t exactly asking for small change, either: Fulwood is demanding $382.5 million for 750 bonds.

bq. Other bond owners are also preparing to launch legal battles. In the United States, a group of investors has formed, seeking to turn 2,000 of the old bonds into cold, hard cash. In Italy, say insiders, the grandchild of former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie holds 20,000 of the bonds. And a U.S-based lawyer claims to represent the heir to Japan’s emperor, who allegedly owns “countless boxes filled with these bonds.”

Is this real? Or is it like those people who claim to own Manhattan?

This is one of those ‘liberal bias/groupthink in academia’ posts. (Oh goody, you say; another for the pile.) Let me launch off from Mark Bauerlein’s Chron piece, which I agree with almost entirely. And away from George Will’s op-ed,
in which he is agreeing with Bauerlein, in the wrongest way. What makes Bauerlein right and Will wrong? (George F. Will? Wrong? Stop the presses! Get that JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR type we save for special occasions. DOG BITES MAN should do.)

[click to continue…]

I was looking at “Peter King’s website”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/mystuff.html, especially his book “One Hundred Philosophers”:http://shop.abc.net.au/browse/product.asp?productid=160490 and I thought this passage on “David Lewis”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~worc0337/authors/david.lewis.html was delightful.

bq. Lewis’ philosophical interests were broad, as evidenced by the contents of the five volumes of his collected papers published so far: ethics, politics, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, language – he wrote on a vast range of subjects, from holes to worlds, from Anselm to Mill, from the mind to time travel. In everything he wrote he was rigorous, committed, and clear, but perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his attitude to other philosophers, and especially to criticism: _one can scarcely find a book or paper attacking Lewis’ views that doesn’t contain an acknowledgement to him for his help_. What mattered to him – what he loved – were the ideas, the arguments, the philosophy, not winning or being right. He was the ideal, the model philosopher; he’s also (and this is a very different matter) widely regarded as being the best philosopher of his generation – perhaps of the twentieth century. (Emphasis added.)

The model philosopher indeed.

As commenters and my last post, and others, have pointed out, there’s a logical gap in my argument that, given imperfect knowledge and the recognition that we tend to overestimate our own capabilities, we should adopt a rule-based version of consequentialism which would include rules against pre-emptive or preventive wars[1]. The problem of imperfect knowledge also applies to the consequences of deciding not to start a pre-emptive war. As I’ll argue though, the symmetry is only apparent and the case for caution is strong.

[click to continue…]

I’m trying very hard to imagine what the film version of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is going to be like if “The Times”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2-1393306%2C00.html is to be believed. According to an article today, the film’s director is cutting all references to God and the church from the script, for fear “of a backlash from the Christian Right in the United States.” Instead, the sinister ‘Authority’ (read horrid amalgam of Calvinism and the Catholic Church) of the novel will be taken as representing any old repressive establishment that you might care to oppose yourself – totalitarian, Marxist or what-have-you. This seems to me (and I suspect to most of Pullman’s readers) to be utterly mad – the entire point of the series is that it’s an extended diatribe against organized religion. Pullman is a vociferous member of the Devil’s party, even if his vague humanistic alternative to Christianity (described in the greatly inferior final volume of the series), is decidedly “droopy”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/002961.html.

It also says some interesting things about the comparative state of debate over religion in the UK and the US. In the UK, the Anglican establishment seemed to be “quite delighted”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1165873,00.html with Pullman’s books – that someone took Christianity seriously enough to attack it was cause for celebration. In the US, in contrast, the movie’s financial backers are clearly terrified of a backlash from fundamentalists who are anything but interested in vigorous debate about the merits and defects of organized Christianity. Anti-semitic movies about the Passion are all very well and good, but pull-no-punches atheism and criticism of organized religion apparently are not. Of course, this may just be nerves on the part of the money people (in fairness, Gibson’s magnum opus got squeamish responses from potential backers too), but it is interesting how little public space there is for the expression of atheistic views in the US. I’m neither religious nor a card-carrying atheist myself (I’d describe myself as a mostly-lapsed Catholic), but it seems to me that it doesn’t do any great service to genuine religious debate if a well argued and intellectually coherent perspective on religion is denied any space in popular culture.

Update: slightly revised following comments.

Laura’s been running a three part review of Mary Ebersatdt’s Home Alone America. Eberstadt’s argument is that women entering the workforce has done untold damage to America’s children. Laura doesn’t exactly savage the book, and hasn’t even persuaded me not to read it, but the review is very interesting, and so are the discussions (now that she has her own comments section). Go there and discuss.

The National Council of Churches has issued a nice statement on the refusal of NBC and CBS to air the bizarrely controversial advertisement by the United Church of Christ.

bq. Advocacy advertising abounds on TV: agribusinesses, drug manufacturers, gambling casinos, oil companies, even some government agencies regularly expose viewers to messages advocating their products and programs, in the interest of shaping public attitudes and building support for their points of view.

bq. Are only the ideas and attitudes of faith groups now off limits? Constitutional guarantees of religious liberty and freedom of speech, not to mention common fairness, beg for leadership by the FCC to assure that America’s faith community has full and equal access to the nation’s airwaves, to deliver positive messages that seek to build and enrich the quality of life.

If you watch evening network TV you may well, I suppose, think that such an ad would be completely out of place — there are no grisly murders, no-one has sex with someone they don’t know, there is no irrational anger, and the bouncers do not physically assault the people they turn away. Even the humiliation of the rejected congregants is mild compared with that heaped on numerous participants in reality shows. I suppose that is what makes the ad so controversial. Or perhaps it is part of a conspiracy to improve UCC’s visibility. If you want to help pile on to the networks, UCC has some suggestions here. Oh, and if you’re not American, and don’t live in the States, please watch the ad; it’ll cheer you up.

The postgraduate colloquium at La Trobe have “archived their radio show”:http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/ltppc/web/radio.html on the web. I’ve listened to bits of the “democracy” programme and to this Pom’s ears, the participants begin by exuding a certain antipodean charm and thereby remind me of a certain Monty Python sketch … but the discussion gets serious pretty quickly. It continues the be marked by a certain Australian robustness, however, as when one participant utters the words:

bq. “.. if only those stupid arseholes out there would vote the right way, and take the right decision … yet we can’t disenfrancise any of them ….”

Other programmes have a bit too much of a po-mo ring about them for my taste, but others will disagree.

Speaking of spirituality designed to get one out of going to church, I offer you the following passage from Stephen Potter’s superlative Lifesmanship. This could very well come in handy if you are ever invited to the sort of English country house where everyone is expected to go to church on Sunday. (I know little about such things, but my reading of Wodehouse leads me to additionally suggest that you not get involved in a church fête of any kind, in any capacity.) Potter:

The man who lets it be known that he is religious is in a strong life position. There is one basic rule. It is: go one better. Fenn went too far. This is his method–in his own words:

To take the most ordinary instance, the simple Sunday churchgoer. “Are you coming to church with us?” my host says. It is a little country church, and my host, Moulton, who has some claims to be a local squire, wants me to come, I know, because he is going to read the lesson. He reads it very well. He enjoys reading it. I heard him practising it to himself immediately after breakfast.

“Yes, why don’t you come to church for once, you old sinner?” Mrs. Moulton will say.

Do not mumble in reply to this: “No, I’m afraid…I’m not awfully good at that sort of thing…my letters…catch post.”

On the contrary, deepen and intensify your voice, lay your hand on her shoulder and say, “Elsa” (calling her by her Christian name for perhaps the first time):

“Elsa, when the painted glass is scattered from the windows, and the roof is opened to the sky, and ordinary simple flowers grow in the crevices of pew and transept–then, and not till then will your church, as I believe, be fit for worship.”

Not only does this reply completely silence opponent; but it will be possible to go out and win ten shillings on the golf course, come back very slightly buzzed from Sunday pre-lunch drinks, and suggest, by your direct and untroubled look, before which their glance may actually shift, that your host and hostess, however innocently, have only been playing at religion.

Potter is a genius, and it seems his books are coming back in print! Now millions more can learn those methods of winning without actually cheating so dear to my heart and to those of fellow Yeovil alums.