Nottingham today, and I eventually found wireless access in the lobby of a rather better hotel than the one I’m staying in. Just time to note that, in the light of last weekend’s Eurovision song contest, my “network analysis of voting”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001852.html is now both confirmed and redundant.[1] The introduction of the Eastern European bloc of countries has had striking structural and cultural effects. Structurally, political voting for neighbors is now blatantly obvious love fest and openly commented on by the returning officers for each country. When Russia its _douze points_ the Russian announcer said highest marks went “to our great friends, Ukraine.” “We used to be so close,” Terry Wogan commented on the BBC. Culturally, the “Euro Heritage” type song also seems to be eclipsed and the contest has returned to its roots as a festival of tat and pap, thanks mainly to the fashion and musical tastes of the breakaway republics and former Yugoslavian countries. From sub-Britney to proto-Xena to quasi-Miami Vice, there’s clearly no sleaze like Balkan sleaze.

fn1. That was real data, by the way. I abused it but I didn’t make it up.

Today, I will be attending a conference workshop in New York on Measuring Search Effectiveness: The User Perspective. I will be presenting some findings about What Makes an Expert Searcher? Evidence from User Studies. (That paper is not ready for distribution, but I will take this opportunity to link again:) to the paper that presents the coding scheme I used to analyze most of the data.) The workshop is being held in conjunction with WWW2004, the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference.

I am reminded of my attendance at The 4th International World Wide Web Conference in Boston in 1995. I was a senior in college writing a thesis on the unequal international spread of the Internet. I went to this conference with the hopes of learning what research was being done about the social implications of the Internet. There were very few sessions on the program that were about any aspects other than technical. After one of the few sessions where panelists discussed some philosophical questions related to the Internet, I walked up to someone to ask whether they thought the government was doing anything about the Web. His response: “Yes, I think they have a Web page now.” This wasn’t exactly what I was getting at. I had hoped to see some sessions discussing policy implications. But this was still the era when many people thought the medium was somehow going to evolve in a vacuum, in isolation from existing social institutions.

Looking at this year’s program, it is clear that technical questions are still the overwhelming topic of this particular conference so perhaps it was a mistake to look for other types of content at WWW4. But this is easy to say today when the conference scene is littered with meetings discussing all aspects of IT. Back in 1995, there weren’t too many meetings you could go to where people would care to discuss any aspects of the Web.

Brian Leiter has a “nice response”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001241.html#001241 to an article in the _Village Voice_ on “the job market in the humanities”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/kamenetz.php. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though I have one or two nits to pick.

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It’s striking to observe that the Daily Mirror has more stringent standards of personal responsibility than the Blair government (or, for that matter, any government in the Coalition of the Willing).

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I’ve just notices Julian Baggini’s “piece about hypothetical questions over at Butterflies and Wheels”:http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/badmovesprint.php?num=40 . Baggini observes the politicians often bat away questions they don’t want to answer by observing that the point is hypothetical. This is a disgraceful move by politicians, but its televisual ubiquity means that many people now seem to believe that hypothetical questions are, by their very nature, illegitimate. And bad though this belief is among the general public, it now seems to be spreading among philosophy undergraduates who don’t seem to appreciate that their subject would be _impossible_ without such questions. I first noticed this phenomenon a few years ago, when sitting-in on a lecture my then-colleague Patrick Greenough. Patrick was running through some “Gettier problems”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettier_problem and had reached a familiar example involving a dog cunningly disguised as a sheep in a field (a real sheep being just out of sight behind a fold in the land). When Patrick asked whether the observer of the dog knows there is a sheep in the field, a hand went up in the audience: “Excuse me, isn’t that a hypothetical question?” Doh!

I know that a largish number of political theorists and philosophers read Crooked Timber, and some of them even write for it! I’m interested in opinions about the most significant journal papers in the field over the past 10 years (we can start with 1994 to keep things simple. I’m especially interested to hear about papers that others consider fine, but which have not received the attention they deserve. Here are five suggestions from me to start us off, some well known, others less so (post other ideas in comments):

Thomas Pogge, “An Egalitarian Law of Peoples”, _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ (1994).
G.A. Cohen, “Where the Action Is” , _Philosophy and Public Affairs_ (1997).
Michael Ridge, “Hobbesian Public Reason”, _Ethics_ (1998).
Elizabeth Anderson, “What is the point of equality?” _Ethics_ (1999).
David Schmidtz, “How to Deserve”, _Political Theory_ (2002).

UPDATE: With the permission of my co-bloggers, I’m moving this post up to the top again in the hope of getting a few more submissions. On a related note, I’m happy to see that two of my own selections (Anderson and Cohen) and a different paper from another one of my chosen authors (Pogge) are included in Matthew Clayton and Andrew Williams (eds) “Social Justice”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1405111461/junius-20 , my copy of which arrived in this morning’s post.

I recommend that you check out Wonkette’s dissection of the American Conservative Union’s 40th anniversary party. If I were the conservatives, I would have ‘accidentally’ neglected to send Ms. Cox an invitation, but we can all be glad that they were less prudent. Go on, it’ll give you that “thank god I’m on the left because conservatives are a bunch of big lamers” frisson that’s so cheering when all is bleak. (No, seriously. Who’s the coolest famous conservative in America? Jonah Goldberg. That’s just sad, people.) Highlight:

9:30PM No after party? Sure, there’s an after party. It’s in the bar, and the tab is being picked up by the ACU. A dozen twenty- to thirty-somethings, drinking beer. Luminaries (LaPierre, a Virginia congressman whose name I forget, Grover) come over to have hands kissed, say hi. As the night wears on, another difference between attendees at this event and the journo-types who dominated the others (WHCD, RTCA) emerges. . . how to put this delicately? Hmmm. OK: I have not had my rack checked out so brazenly and so often since I stopped going to Cozumel for Spring Break. What is it with the cultural conservatives? They’re all Ken-Starring me and shit.

In the immortal words of Nelson Muntz, “ha ha.”

UPDATE: Sophomoric and partisan, you say? A similar party by a Democratic group would be equi-lame, you say? It’s a fair cop. But you have to admit the Jonah Goldberg thing did sting a little.

When I first studied economics ( a long, long time ago) the textbook explanation of why income differed between countries was based on capital. In the simplest version for example, that of Harrod and Domar), rich countries had a bigger stock of capital than poor countries, and the problem was one of accumulating sufficient capital to catch up. In more sophisticated versions, rich countries had more modern capital stocks, and therefore benefited from embodied technological progress.

Even when I was a student, this kind of thinking was already being superseded by notions such as human capital theory[1]. Still, I’ve never seen a really convincing refutation. It strikes me that computers and the Internet provide one, at least as far as differences among developed countries are concerned.

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A couple of bloggable bits from the programme booklet for last nights opera. There’s an advertisment for the “National Theatre’s production of Iphigenia at Aulis”:http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/?lid=7783 , where the copy reads

bq. Just how far will a leader go in order to save face and secure a military victory in the East?

How far indeed?

And the notes for Valerie Reid (mezzo soprano, Grimgerde in Valkyrie) tell us that her plans include

bq. Natasha [in] ” _The Electrification of the Soviet Union_ for Music Theatre Wales”:http://www.musictheatrewales.org.uk/electrification.html .

Comments from anyone who has seen that piece?

I saw the second installment (and therefore, confusingly “The first day … “) of Phyllida Lloyd’s _Ring_ for ENO: “The Valkyrie”:http://www.eno.org/whatson/full.php?performancekey=19 , last night. Some of it was rubbish, but other parts were truly splendid, and, as it became more and more splendid as the evening progressed, I was able to leave feeling quite satisfied.

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I was thinking idly about Erdos numbers, and it suddenly struck me that I could easily prove the necessity of a couple of ‘stylised facts'[1] about the associated networks. It’s well-known that the collaboration network for mathematicians contains one big component, traditionally derived by starting with Pal Erdos. The same is true of the network generated by sexual relationships. Although there is no generally agreed starting point here, it is a sobering thought that a relatively short chain would almost certainly connect most of us with both George Bush and Saddam Hussein.

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From “the Guardian review”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/politicsphilosophyandsociety/0,6121,1216899,00.html of a new book by Regis Debray:

bq. Jeffrey Mehlman has managed to translate from French into an entirely new language, one born dead. It is constructed using English words but the effect is of something almost entirely unlike English. This raises profound questions. What is one to make of a chapter heading like “The Milieu/Medium Deflagration”? How is one to translate the last sentence of that chapter: “That nomadic psycho-object, the unknown masterpiece of a nation’s furniture, would mark the improbable encounter, to the benefit of a God more snobbish than His predecessors, of the custom-made and the ready-to-bear”? The last word is clearly wrong. But should it be “wear” or “bore”?

[Removed. Upon reflection, I couldn’t back this up. I apologize.]

When I met Henry in March we conjectured that one possible unifying influence on many even perhaps most of the CT-ers is the work of the analytical Marxists. It’s hard to find other unifying themes. But in the early days I noticed a penchant for Moleworthian phrases and even brief discussions (that I now can’t find). For the Molesworth innocents, unwilling to risk the miniscule cost of the collected works (also purchasable in the US at staggering expense), Radio 4 just rebroadcast its pretty good tribute to the curse of st custards. Have a listen. And then buy the book.