The short version of this story is that the UC regents are controlled by a cabal of corrupt financiers who are strip-mining the nation’s premiere public university. The long story is — since you already knew that — they’re doing so in even more nakedly unethical ways than you realized. In 2003, as Peter Byrne reports, regents Blum, Wachter and Parsky began to steer the UC’s investment strategy “away from investing in more traditional instruments, such as blue-chip stocks and bonds, toward largely unregulated and risky “alternative” investments, such as private equity and private real-estate deals.”:

Bypassing the university treasurer’s in-house investment specialists, the regents investment committee hired private managers to handle many of these new kinds of transactions. This action increased management costs and limited transparency (since these external managers are not subject to public record laws). [And] unlike deals that take place on public stock exchanges—where sales and purchases are public information and regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission—the realm of private equity is opaque, largely unregulated and extremely difficult to exit should a deal go bad…by March 2009, the university’s books carried a balance of $6.7 billion in 212 private equity partnerships, which consist primarily of leveraged buyout funds—more than 10 percent of the investment fund total of $63 billion.

These have not proven to be prudent investments. UC’s private equity returns, as of spring 2009, were running at a negative 20 percent since the inception of the investment, according to the treasurer’s most recent annual report. According to operating reports made to the investment committee by the current UC treasurer, Marie Berggren, much of the loss to the portfolio was tied to the souring of leveraged buyouts during the recession.

Am I wrong to calculate 20% of $6.7 billion as $1.3 billion? In one year? I can’t tell because I can only see red. But Bob Samuels has done the numbers:

…while UC administration has argued that since the state reduced university funding by a combined $600 million in 2008 and 2009 (after we account for $718 million in federal recovery money), the system had to raise fees 41%, furlough employees, and layoff teachers. However, during this same time period, the UC lost over $23 billion in its investments.

This means that the investment losses were more than forty times greater than the state reductions, but the university administrators never talk about these huge investment losses. In fact, at the last UC Regents meeting, after I brought up the lack of discussion concerning the UC’s investment losses, the head regent, Russell Gould, exclaimed that, “Our investments have outperformed our peers in the last twenty years.” Not only was this statement incorrect, but it shows how the people overseeing the university do not want to deal with the real issues. Rather than looking at their own internal problems, the UC administration’s central strategy is to blame all problems on the state.

Are Blum and Wachter chastened? Have the learned their lesson? Well…

…in the face of the disastrous performance of private equity and private real estate, Wachter and Blum have continued to advise Berggren to increase UC’s investments in these two ailing sectors.

At the February 2009 meeting of the regents’ investment committee, Wachter, then the committee chair, observed that although private equity and real-estate investments were already “overweighted” in the portfolio, they should be “even more overweighted.” At an investment committee meeting three months later, Blum, who was then the chairman of the board of regents, urged his colleagues to continue on the same questionable course. According to the meeting minutes, “Chairman Blum expressed concern that the University might become too risk adverse.” At the same meeting, Wachter suggested that UC buy bundles of distressed real-estate and mortgage debt to profit off of the collapse of the housing market. (Though a matter of continued debate, experts say such investments are a risky undertaking, since another wave of home foreclosures is expected.) Recently, Wachter has championed increasing the volume of UC’s investments in risky timber and oil ventures.

Now, why would such people keep throwing good money after bad? Could it be because they have are themselves financiers and the UC has “$750 million in private equity deals involving a number of firms where Blum, Wachter or both had financial interests”? Perhaps. Or maybe they’re just idiots. In any case, the Sacramento News Review has the details of four cases where the regents had clear conflicts of interest between the UC’s money they were investing and the firms they were investing in. But here, from California watch, a summary of just oneof the more egregious examples:

In one example of the private equity deals where Blum or Wachter’s financial interests and the UC’s investments crossed paths, investment firms TPG Capital, Apollo Management and the Blackstone Group partnered in a leveraged buyout of Harrah’s Entertainment for $30.7 billion, placing billions of acquisition debt on the casino empire’s books as a result. At that time, Blum had investments worth more than $1 million in TPG funds, and Wachter had investments worth up to $1 million in two Apollo investment funds. The UC – through its general endowment and retirement funds – had $200 million to four private equity funds that financed the Harrah’s buyout. Since the deal, the Las Vegas-based casino empire has not been able to generate enough cash flow to pay off its debts – including payments to UC. The university’s investment in these private equity funds had lost up to 40 percent of its value as of March 2009, according to the Spot.us story.

Update: the UC is far from the only university run by financiers getting their clock cleaned on the market and then making their schools bail them out.

Just because it’s worth remarking on how deeply perverse it is for Glenn Beck to want to “reclaim the civil rights movement” because “we were the people that did it in the first place,” here’s Beck’s take on civil rights counterposed with a marginally important figure within the movement, Martin Luther King, Jr:

Beck: “the movement of the 1960s has been perverted and distorted” by people “like the Reverend Al Sharpton telling people that Martin Luther King’s dream was really about redistribution of wealth…I don’t remember that. Really?”
King: “…we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars — and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”

Beck: “Who were the civil rights marchers?…They weren’t crying for social justice, they were crying out for equal justice.”
King: (in his speech “Social Justice”) “we will be able to go this additional distance and achieve the ideal, the goal of the new age, the age of social justice.”

Beck: “They have infiltrated our churches” and “confused the gospel with government-run programs.”
King: “If America does not use her vast resources to end poverty … she too will go to hell.”

There is little to be said that has not been said already about Glenn Beck’s Tea Party rally, to take place Saturday in Washington at the spot where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech on its 47th anniversary. Tens of thousands will flock there from the parts of the country that received the most government dollars to rage against big government. Sarah Palin is headlining, and the National Rifle Association will make a strong showing. “We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the civil rights moment,” said Beck in May (quoted in this CNN piece by Will Bunch). “We will take that movement — because we were the people who did it in the first place.” The civil rights movement, it seems, has been coopted by people like African Americans, gay people, and women. They’ve had their turn.

Of course, this so-called reclaiming, in addition to being a publicity stunt that will keep Beck and Palin in the spotlight, is a transparently dishonest manipulation of the civil rights movement’s goals and accomplishments, the very effort to contain and coopt the movement that Jacquelyn Hall warned us about in her 2005 article, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past” (the article which inspired this scholarly collaboration). As Hall wrote, so-called “color blind conservatives” thought it was up to them to restore the original purpose of civil rights laws, which was to prevent isolated acts of wrongdoing against individuals”–in Beck’s case aggrieved whites–”rather than, as many civil rights activists and legal experts claim, to redress present, institutionalized manifestations of historical injustices against blacks as a group.”

Beck’s basic civil rights narrative seems to run like this: There were instances of racism in the past. We regret them, but they’re over, and today’s efforts at addressing questions of racism and poverty amount to “reparations” paid to minorities by whites innocent of personal wrong doing. The success of this narrative lies not only in the profound ignorance of its believers and the venal agenda of its peddlers; not only in racial antipathies but also in the schism between understandings of economic justice and racial justice. As long as lower-class whites feel angry and powerless and are able to blame black people rather than, say, the very rich (for example, Glenn Beck, Inc., made $32 million last year), it will never be necessary to begin the kind of economic restructuring that Martin Luther King hoped would alleviate the poverty of working class blacks, whites, Latinos, and others. As long as lower-class whites privilege their rights as individuals (say to own a machine gun) over their rights as a group (to unionize, or to receive fair pay for their labor), the pressure for economic restructuring only simmers, and never boils over.

The Tea Party folks are a strange breed of inverse civil rights unionists of the 1940s. The civil rights unionists wanted to, in Hall’s words, “combine protection from discrimination with universalistic social welfare policies and individual rights with labor rights.” The gains of the civil rights movement took some steps in that direction, and activists since the movement’s most visible moments in the 1960s have continued the struggle. Some might say that President Obama’s health care accomplishments, while a far cry from the socio-fascist elder-killing program feared by the new Know-Nothings, are nevertheless an important step toward an acknowledgment of the government’s obligation to protect the right to health care. The Tea Party people instead want protection to discriminate (as when Tea Party favorite Rand Paul insisted that a small government would not be able to enforce adherence to civil rights laws), and despite their reliance on and belief in the importance of social security Medicare, are hostile to the idea that people deserve rights that help them as a group.

It is easy–and stress-relieving–to dismiss the Tea Party groundswell as a reaction to bad economic times that will subside once the economy normalizes, or we get used to a new normal. But the stakes are too high to blow them off–Martin Luther King wanted to get at “evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society.” These are evils that remain, and which are showing themselves in the economically regressive and socially hostile politics favored by a “movement” fueled not by a thirst for civil rights but by anger. So while Beck and Palin are whitewashing Martin Luther King, let us consider instead these women, who at the 1963 March on Washington showed a more profound understanding of the civil rights struggle than multi-millionaires Beck and Palin, and their angry brood will ever reach.

Women demand economic justice at the 1963 March on Washington. Photo by Wally McNamee.

(You may, for your amusement, speculate where the seven swearwords I originally employed in this piece originally resided. My original reaction was considerably less charitable to Mr. Yglesias.)

Nonsense like this makes me wonder why I ever read Matt Yglesias. First he cites this:

College tuition has been outpacing inflation for decades. Between 1990 and 2008, tuition and fees rose 248 percent in real dollars, more than any other major component of the consumer price index. Raising the Pell grant’s maximum doesn’t address this underlying problem. Constant transfusions of public money help keep the patient alive but do not stop the bleeding. What’s to be done about dropout rates and outstanding student-loan debt that currently totals over $730 billion, or $23,200 per graduating senior in 2008? At first, I stood with progressives who say the federal government should increase grants and rein in the parasitic student-loan business. But while the student-loan industry has been part of the problem, and more grants are part of the solution, there is more to this story.

And then he parodies himself by declaring that “the only viable solution is to find ways to apply technology to the problem.” His commenters rightly took him to task for the incredibly underthought notion that replacing teachers with the internet will somehow save education, and though Anya Kamenetz isn’t nearly as dumb as he makes her sound (she doesn‘t claim the things he has her claiming), the way he takes her work to frame the problem and the solution are simple-minded and wrong-headed to the extreme.

Here’s why. As our Harvard educated pundit looks out on the world of higher ed, he agrees that the problem of rising tuition and student loan debt is a problem. And he thinks to himself “Hey! Costs of the product are rising! We must find a more efficient method of production.”  And so, as industrialist-of-education, he decides to turn to technology to lower those costs of production. Open source! Public domain! University 2.0! Google U!

What he’s missed is the real substance of Kamenetz’s analogy to health care. Tuition isn’t rising because the costs of education are suddenly on the upsurge; tuition is rising, for one thing, because the “public option” is getting the shit kicked out of it.

Of course, to my mind, Kamenetz mostly misses the point as well. She writes:

The higher-education system has a lot in common with another great challenge our country is confronting: health care. Colleges, like hospitals, have little incentive to conserve resources or compete on price. They can actually gain prestige by raising tuition. They shift costs to students to make up for gaps in state funding and then hand out grant money to the applicants they want the most, not the ones who need the most help. Community colleges dedicated to serving the poorest get a fraction of the public money that goes to flagship state universities.

And this isn’t all wrong. Ridiculous textbook prices are an important part of why university education is so expensive, and open source stuff is a way to address that (which universities have been mighty slow and mighty feeble in making use of). But as Peter Levine points out, open source course materials only cut tuition costs if the price of course materials is a significant portion of tuition. And they’re not. It’s a deck chairs on the titanic sized part of the larger problem, which is this:

1. Because a huge proportion of the jobs that provide an even moderately comfortable and secure living require, at a minimum, a college degree, universities provide an enormously valuable commodity.

2. To the extent that universities can charge whatever they want, they will. And they will, as a result, price that commodity — which represents one of the few real avenues for class mobility left — out of the reach of anyone not already comfortably ensconced in the middle class.

In other words, by approaching the problem of tuition costs by reference to production, Kamenetz and Yglesias seem to docilely assume that university administrators and Boards of Trustees and so forth are just mechanically passing along the cost of the product to the consumer. Tuition is rising, they notice, so the cost of education must be rising. And yet isn’t it strange that in the same period of time in which tuition has risen, steadily and consistently, we have also seen the steady and consistent replacement of tenured full time faculty with part time and contingent faculty in those same universities? Which is to say, as costs of instruction have fallen dramatically, the price of an education has risen!

Shock! Could it be that universities are acting like corporations? Could it be they’re focusing on the bottom line by minimizing expenditures and charging as much as the market will hold? And could it be that, since the market demand for a college education is extremely robust, universities are able to charge quite a shitload of money and the fact that they are, in fact, is the reason that tuition, fees, and student debt are all rising? As a passenger in the “University of California” section of the Titanic that is American higher ed, I’m pretty much convinced that this is the case. And if it is, then the methods of cost containment that people like Kamenetz describe will simply make the universities themselves more robust, having a much less direct impact on student costs themselves.

Which is why real lesson here — and the important point Kamenetz and Yglesias seem to have missed — is that a not-for-profit government run public option would be the only meaningful way to reverse the trend. We used to have that; it was called “public universities.” But while the UC system has gutted the old master plan for higher ed in the state of California, it’s just part of a general trend you can see everywhere in public education. My alma mater in Columbus Ohio now charges double what it did when I was an undergrad, all of nine years ago, but most of that spike happened before the recession. And we’re seeing that everywhere; from a presumption back in the day that student fees were more or less nominal, the sort of thing my parents could pay for with a part time job, we have come to a point where student loans are virtually unavoidable, and we’ve gotten there steadily and consistently. The market will bear it, so that’s how education gets priced.

There are all sorts of ways to skin this cat. But the most basic piece of the puzzle is  that upward economic mobility through education will happen only to the extent that an education costs less than it’s worth. Which is to say, if you have to buy your way into the middle class, you will only get there if you’re already there. That isn’t hard. But that means that if public universities don’t artificially depress the market value of a college education, the market will — as it does — ruthlessly redress any ineffieciencies that exist, pricing tuition upward and upward until higher ed ceases to exist (to the extent that it still does) as a meritocratic alternative to inherited privilege. And the United States Government has, as a body, ceased to regard doing so as a positive good.

Check out this post by Vince LiCata at World’s Fair about initiatives to get “accurate science” into the movies. Seems that the National Academy of Sciences is sponsoring an exchange to match producers with scientists, while the National Science Foundation is sending researchers to campuses to give film students perspective on research and visualization methodologies, all in an effort to align depictions of science with how it is actually practiced.

Is this a good idea? Do we need “more accurate” science in the movies? What kind of accuracy are we talking about? This objective is surely worthwhile, but maybe not in the way that it seems on the surface.

First, some details. Here’s LiCata’s outline of the NAS program.

The Science and Entertainment Exchange has thus far largely centered on getting more plausible science into science fiction films. They acknowledge that Sci-fi is far from real science, but also acknowledge that Sci-fi films almost always contain a nugget of real science from which the fantastical non-real science is grown, and that even Sci-fi films with no accurate science in them can provide “teachable moments” – where one can discuss (with a class of students) the physics of how the Flash might really be able to stop a bullet, or what the gravity on Krypton must be like in order for Superman to have the apparent flight power he has on Earth. They also clearly understand that many people go into science because of really good science fiction, like Star Trek. The bulk of what seems to be going on so far, however, is helping filmmakers maintain some semblance of logic in their Sci-fi (which, unfortunately isn’t quite the same as getting accurate science into the movies) …

So if it’s not clarifying science, what is the Exchange up to? It’s website explains that it seeks to help filmmakers out by

Providing the credibility and the verisimilitude upon which quality entertainment depends – and which audiences have come to expect. Drawing on the deep knowledge of the scientific community, we can collaborate on narrative and visual solutions to a variety of problems while contributing directly to the creativity of the content in fresh and unexpected ways.

This platitudinous statement is not helpful. For one thing, the tone makes the scientists seem like consultants at best and sycophants at worst, which is a poor rhetorical position to occupy if your goal is to emphasize the authority of real scientists over depictions of their theories. And the substance of this statement is also false. Audiences expect neither credibility nor verisimilitude unless you ask them to expect it. I wonder how frequently the average parent shields their child’s eyes from a screen full of junk science. Is there any evidence that this actually happens? You’re the National Academy of Sciences, for crying out loud, where’s your data?

And there’s a more transparent problem, too: credibility and verisimilitude are not the same thing. A film can be credible to its own framework without being verisimilar at all. Actually, the whole shtick of speculative fiction is to form its own conditions for credibility — that’s the appeal of the genre — so to measure it using a putatively “objective” metric is to mistake the sorts of achievement it tries to make. Indeed, a more scrupulous mimicry of actuality will narrow the horizon of speculation and thereby foreclose credibility.

Too much fact in science fiction is like too much marriage in erotica.

Okay, let’s look at the NSF enterprise, the “Creative Science Studio” or CS2, which was unveiled at a panel at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. LiCata again,

The speakers in this session included the director Ron Howard, who is part of the collaborative, and who spoke about the preparations and hours of study he puts into films like “A Beautiful Mind,” “Apollo 13″, and even “Backdraft”. [...] The CS2 was effectively born at this session, so it doesn’t have a track record yet, but their stated goals are to focus on movies about and containing real science, and to stay away from science fiction. They also state that they want to help scientists make better documentaries and better visual based teaching tools.

This is a smashing good idea. Not only would I love to see more films about scientists (and clinicians and naturalists), but wouldn’t it be great to see the scientific habit of thought at work in a wider series of dramatic situations? Whether they know it or not, people solve scientific problems and perform experiments constantly — with varying degrees of success. Those activities are at least as reflective of the human character as the passions that normally steam up celluloid, and films that emphasize this point would really be “fresh and unexpected.”

Besides, the conceptual and practical collaboration between science and film is hardly new. The sciences have always been about turning observation into knowledge, while films have been in the business of both expanding observability and even, paradoxically, of making the visible. Nowadays, both fields are undertaking new types of visualization thanks to new media. By doing so together filmmakers and scientists could not merely lend one another accuracy, but reinvent what we imagine accuracy to be. Ultimately, that’s how we’ll get movies of greater seriousness and visual power.

I’m still sort of processing what I think of the march 4th protests, not only because I’m selfishly busy with other stuff, but because “the movement” is getting too big to coherently generalize about, and the vividness of the small pictures (like my peeps on the left) can take away from the greater importance of the national big picture. This is a good thing, I think, though it means there really aren’t any easy answers or opinions. The many people who act like there is anything simple to say about what is happening are being simplistic (and though mindlessly denouncing and mindlessly supporting are equally mindless, I sure feel like I’ve seen a lot more of the former).

So this post is me thinking things through (if you want my take on the larger situation, you can read this). But most of American Leftist’s take (thanks Richard) seems very right to me, both as a single event and as a development within the larger movement:

“…Protesters on March 4 encountered a class divide between themselves and students from wealthier backgrounds who objected to the disruption of school. There is a class conflict emerging in the university that mirrors the larger struggle occurring outside of it…neither the faculty nor the administration within UC have been very helpful…Both are so bound to the university as an institution, and the neoliberal assumptions upon which it operates, that they are incapable of providing meaningful assistance.

“If forced to characterize the movement, I would say that it is an ideologically liberal one increasingly relying upon anarchist practice. It is liberal, because the emphasis is upon increasing social mobility through the restoration of financial support for existing educational institutions…But it appears that most students participating in the protests are motivated primarily by the recognition of their proletarianization arising from the fee increases.

“The movement finds itself compelled to adopt anarchist practice because of the inflexibility of decisionmakers that could, if they wanted, address their concerns. Anarchism has been the predominant organizational approach on the left on West Coast for nearly 20 years, as demonstrated through the direct action associated with radical environmentalists, the global justice movement that took over the streets of Seattle in 1999 and the shutdown of the financial district in San Francisco upon the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Student activists, well versed in this tradition, are utilizing horizontal methods of decisionmaking when undertaking actions and engaging in outreach. It is consistent with their belief that it is essential to provide a voice for people that have historically been denied an opportunity to shape their lives and the world around them.”

It’s a real problem that opposition to the administration’s privatization schemes is coming from two very different places: anti-capitalist opposition to the basic structures of production and reproduction — from which position, the university and freeways need to be destroyed — and adherence to the principles of social welfare capitalism by which freeways and universities are fundamental media of social mobility, and as such need to be defended from the corporatization project of the administration, regents, and Sacramento. The distinction on March 4th was very clear: I marched from Berkeley to Temescal along Telegraph avenue with a whole bunch of heterogeneous marchers, the police clearing the streets in front of us (and more or less “with” us), and after I and my liberal wishy-washy “remake the university” friends went back to the business of training American workers for their places in the American capitalist order, the anarchists got down to the business of occupying everything:



It was an impressive display. And while I’m not sure such actions are the wisest in terms of long-term strategy, you have to understand why it’s come to this. The police were not actively hostile on March 4th, but the administration’s attitude towards dissent has been, without exception, to blame it on off-campus anarchists and treat it through military logic. This video (at 0:33) doesn’t give anything like the whole story, but it will give you a sense for what the sort of people who refuse to be shut out of the decision-making process (and we have all been shut out of the decision making process) are faced with: be ignored or be arrested.

Still, while there are causes for which I would have walked out onto a freeway and stopped traffic — I participated in direct actions in DC in the days before the invasion in 2003, for example, and would again – I’m not sure this is one of them. My commitments to the university do not include or imply a complete opposition to the capitalist structures of our society, and I don’t want to pretend that they do. Which is why I’m concerned that this kind of rhetoric, for example, from Anti-Capital Projects, is so irreconcilable with the reasons I and a lot of marchers marched:

“A freeway, in this sense, is merely one of the most visible forms of the lines of force that cut up our cities and, in turn, our lives, that butcher them according to the logics of race and class, money and property. How can we see these arteries as anything less than instruments for the formation of a controlled population, instruments in the successive waves of urban centralization, white flight, gentrification? They are checkpoints and blockages – massive pours of concrete, of labor, erected to determine who gets to go where and how…Some people have counterposed the occupation of buildings to the freeway takeover on the grounds that the former challenges property directly, that a building can be emancipated, communized, turned into a liberated zone for care and conversation, planning, learning, fun and eating and dancing…Still, the obvious point here is that you can’t communize a freeway. You can only destroy it…We will have to learn to do this well, to shut down the flows and pours of capital and labor. Those who oppose this action on the grounds of a theory of property or value miss the fact that property is not a thing; it’s not matter. It’s a social relation, a form of interaction between people that is mediated by objects and signs. By commodities and commands. The freeway is no less a part of this relation than a university building. At the most abstract level, ours is a world in which there are bodies and there are values. The freeway is an instrument for circulating the former according to the self-expanding imperative of the latter. Buildings have no intrinsic value beyond this circulation – beyond the inbox of bodies and the outbox of values. As such, we must learn to attack not only the immediate place of production but its apparatus of circulation as well. We must learn both to destroy and to emancipate.

This is a coherent intellectual position, and I respect it, but I don’t particularly share it, especially because I don’t see these people making effective affective appeals to people who are not already committed to some form of fundamental revolution. “Occupy Everything” is a great slogan, but it’s also become an in-group marker that locks people out, and what happened at the end of the day — after I had gotten off the bus and back to the work of being a university employee — marks a useful way of differentiating the two. Of course, as I said, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing that “the movement” is fundamentally at odds with itself. We shouldn’t necessarily be afraid of diversity, you know, and just because the phrase “democracy is messy” has been co-opted by Rumsfeldians to mean “we get to kill people in Iraq,” there’s an underlying truth to the sentiment. As Angus Johnston puts it:

“The contemporary American student movement isn’t an organization or a political party. Nobody was screening March 4 actions and giving out credentials. There was no seal of approval. This was a grassroots event. Nobody had the power to impose a common agenda on the events, because the events weren’t coordinated or conceived by a central body. Anybody could mount an action on March 4, and just about everybody did. That’s how social movements roll…That diversity is a reflection of the vigor and vitality of the movement.”

I think everyone who took part in those events has a different perspective on them, and if “the movement” is to amount to anything, it will have to come from building collective practice out of common goals where we find them, both respecting our fundamental differences and finding ways to make common opposition to the administration into effective organizing. I’m not particularly optimistic. The loudest voices of the people actually doing things tends to be so focused on complete upheaval as to make them unrepresentative of the majority of people with skin in this game, who are, by and large, not doing things for this reason. Yet while a police sponsored protest march will never provoke the kind of change that’s necessary, “occupy everything” as a slogan will simply not draw people out of their inaction. I’m also not particularly pessimistic; one of the hopeful signs is the willingness of some of the more vocal anti-capitalists to acknowledge the youth of this movement, the growth it needs to do. And the intransigence (and general tone-deaf blundering) of the administration is so profound that they radicalize more and more people with tone-deaf email and police brutality at a time. So maybe the two sides are coming closer together.

And on that last note, Scott Saul’s piece in The Nation on the life and times of Mario Savio — the man who took off his shoes before standing on a police car so as not to dent the roof — has a lot of relevance for what’s going on here. As he puts it:

“…thirty years of conservative counterrevolution have ma[…]

At Humanities, Ammon Shea reports on the best damn thing I’ve read about in a while. It’s a dictionary, but a special dictionary. Let me explain.

Now, as everyone knows, a “perfect” dictionary is impossible. First of all, as Shea points out, any dictionary is out of date before it is finished, as it will not incorporate words or usages added to a language during the duration of editorial revision. Second, no dictionary could be truly comprehensive. Why not? Well,

One might very well say that a perfect dictionary would include all the words in a language. But if this were so, it would include not only the hundreds of thousands of common and not-so-common terms found in an unabridged dictionary, but also several million scientific words that are used by only a handful of professionals. To include all possible words would swamp the vernacular of the language in a sea of jargon and specialized terminology.

Before you start waving fingers, let me concede that these first two problems have been diminished by online practices and digital media. Using a wiki-model database and crowdsourcing, the duration between compiling and publishing can be eliminated. What’s more, since there is no scarcity of material support – no maximum amount of paper to be printed upon – online dictionaries can hold the swamp of vernacular language without bursting. For the sake of argument, let’s even grant that a suitable editorial practice can be devised to make sure that the resulting dictionary doesn’t get soppy.

Even so, there’s a third problem. There always is.

Dictionaries are intended to reflect a language as it is used, whether spoken or written, and this can never be done in anything less than an incomplete fashion. In the United States alone there are now hundreds of thousands of books being published every year. To read all of them (and many are doubtless not worth reading) and keep track of all of the word usage and meanings within would require an army of erudite madmen.

Gotcha, hasn’t he?

If we include spoken instances of the language and online text, we’d need to record and analyze every usage of every word uttered, written, painted or scrawled on every surface, sign, screen or page by everyone everywhere instantly. Such a dictionary belongs in the world of speculative fiction because the idea of a dictionary is, at its core, a speculative fiction. That’s what makes it sexy.

But let’s get back to the good news. Evidently, despite all the vexing problems mentioned above, a group of researchers at the University of Toronto is attempting to create a perfect dictionary, one that includes not only every single word in a language, but every meaning conveyed by each of those words in every context in which it has ever appeared as written by every known native speaker.

There’s a trick to it, of course. You’ve got to start with a dead language.

The lexicographic work in question is the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), currently being compiled at the University of Toronto. This team of researchers, now led by Antonette diPaolo Healey, is working from a corpus that contains every known piece of Anglo-Saxon text (some three thousand items) and is fully searchable by computer.

Four million words, each formed out of the twenty-two letters of the Anglo-Saxon alphabet, and amounting to something like thirty-three to thirty-five thousand headwords. Nothing left out, everything included.

Shea’s article goes on to explain why we need such a dictionary. Turns out there are plenty of reasons: it will shake up Old English lexicography; it represents a new standard in using electronic searching for corpus study; it collates a language from the most pedestrian materials – wills, land records – along with revered epic poetry and engravings on stone and jewelry. Toronto’s project leader, Antonette diPaolo Healey, thinks that the DOE will also be of use to social historians and economists studying topics such as class structure and early taxation.

But that’s not what interests Shea:

After listing all these reasonable arguments for why we need a dictionary of Old English [Healey] added, almost as an afterthought “Plus, it’s our language.”

It is our language indeed [...] This makes me think how odd it is that we are such ardent admirers of museums full of partially reconstructed bone fragments, taken from animals that are millions of years removed from us, and yet we find it so difficult to warm to Old English. While it is true that this is a dead language, it has died so recently (at least compared with the dinosaurs whose fossils are perennially alluring) that the corpse is still warm.

You can see the roots and traces of our language, evident even in the words that did not quite survive until the present day. Bealofus (liable to sin) did not last into our vocabulary, having been pushed out by the upstart and Latinate peccable (we apparently do not need more than a single word for this concept). But the bealoful of yesteryear became the baleful of today, and so even though bealofus lost the evolutionary battle it still tickles the familiar to see it there.

Hold up. Sure, I like what you’re saying. But isn’t the “tickle of the familiar” already there in several well-annotated etymological dictionaries of the extinct component languages that combine to form the family of modern English? And why does this product have to be our own for it to be deemed worthwhile? What if you’re not an English speaker? What if this was a dictionary of Etruscan, Nahuatl or Khitan – wouldn’t those be also equally perfect, equally valuable?

While I share the enthusiasm that motivates Shea’s rhapsody, I don’t understand his question. The value of the DOE should be obvious – it’s sort of a beautiful thing to do. Asking why we need it is like asking why we need drawings of perfect circles, why we need clocks that keep time precisely for a thousand years, why we need daredevils. It’s an embodied fantasy of completion, preciseness, perfection. There’s something archaic about that pursuit, more Pythagorean than postmodern. Perfection is beguiling.

And whatever it may be to lexicographers, the finalized DOE promises to be something everyone admires: a sheer human feat – harmless, ingenious, noble. Maybe the desire to create or witness feats of human ingenuity is a little embarrassing, but it’s also something we should like about ourselves. I mean, at the end of the day, what else is there in the human personality to counterbalance our baleful liability to sin?

Adam Serwer is full of win:

“The theological justification for al Qaeda’s wholesale slaughter of civilians was provided by Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, also known as Dr. Fadl, one of the founding fathers of al Qaeda. Because the murder of innocents is forbidden in Islam and the murder of Muslims in particular, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden required some sort of theological framework for justifying terrorism. This was provided by al-Sharif, who essentially argued in his book, “The Compendium of the Pursuit of Divine Knowledge,” that apostates could be murdered, and that approach, takfir (which has come to be known as takfirism) allowed al Qaeda to, for all intents and purposes, kill anyone they wanted without violating the laws of Islam by declaring them to be apostates. In other words, Dr. Fadl helped provided a theological justification for something that everyone involved knew was wrong.

“The legal memos justifying torture aren’t very different in terms of reasoning–it’s clear that John Yoo and his cohorts in the Office of Legal Counsel saw their job not as binding the president to the rule of law, but to declare legal any tactic that the executive branch believed necessary to fight terrorism. They worked backwards from this conclusion, and ethics officials at the Department of Justice, we now know, decided that they they had violated professional standards in doing so. Whereas al-Zawahiri and bin Laden turned to al-Sharif for a method to circumvent the plain language of the Koran, Bush and Cheney went to Yoo and Jay Bybee to circumvent the plain language of the law. Most Islamic scholars, just like most legal experts, reject their respective reasoning as unsound.

“The torture memos–indeed, all of the pro-torture arguments rest on a similar intellectual themes to the takfiris. Suspected terrorists are “illegal enemy combatants”, outside the framework of laws that would otherwise guide us. Just as the takfiris justify the killing of even self-identified Muslims by excommunicating them as “infidels”, torture apologists argue that even American citizens like Jose Padilla who are accused of being terrorists become legal “apostates” without any rights the president is bound to respect…The architects of torture are the intellectual mirror image of their declared enemies, depending on the perceived inhumanity of their foes to justify monstrous actions.”

Bob Samuels nicely argues at Inside Higher Ed that the university administration’s approach to its funding structure is to blame the state for withholding resources while refusing to use its profitable aspects to subsidize the parts of the university that merely provide a public good, despite the fact that those “businesses” are very basically dependent and subsidized by public resources in the first place. An excerpt:

“When reporters asked Yudof how he could lend the state money at the same time he was cutting salaries, reducing enrollment, and laying off non-tenured faculty, he responded that when the university lends money to the state, it turns a profit, but when the university spends money on teachers’ salaries, the money just disappears. According to this logic, the university should just get out of the education business and concentrate on generating high bond ratings.”

Which is as good a time as any to re-visit this great piece, which rips apart the myth that the UC’s private functions cannot be used to subsidize its public functions (a particularly pernicious myth, after all, because its public functions subsidize its private functions in all sorts of ways). In an open letter to Yudof, Charles Schwartz writes:

You say “A payment for a surgery in a UC hospital can’t be redirected to fund graduate students.”
That is a half-truth. In fact there is a surplus income from the UC medical enterprises, amounting to around $1 billion a year, which is distributed to faculty in the Medical Schools as “bonus pay”, on top of their regular academic salaries. A portion of that money could be redirected to other pressing academic needs in these times of budget stringency: that would be called shared sacrifice. You and The Regents have authority to implement such a strategy.

The regents, however, operate under the assumption that money which the university’s “businesses” earn while benefiting from your tax dollars is to be theirs alone. And classes, the public function of the state’s university system function are to be thought of simply as a commodity to be sold to its consumers.

At NPR, Celeste Headlee reports on a new volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English, an initiative inaugurated by Frederic Cassidy, who sent field workers in “word wagons” out into the hinterland back in the 1950’s.  The idea is to capture local usages and idioms that are employed primarily in face-to-face relationships – fusty old expressions that do not spread evenly into shared idiom exchanges such as newspapers, literature, broadcasting, the internet.

It’s simple and brilliant: a dictionary that describes how local people speak instead of explaining how national people ought to.

Examples?

honeyfuggle (v) To swindle or dupe; to intend to cheat or trick. (Usage: scattered)

Lucy Bowles (n) Diarrhea; loose bowels. (Usage: scattered, but especially Pennsylvania, New Jersey and southeast New York)

mulligrubs (n) A condition of despondency or ill temper; a vague or imaginary unwellness. (Usage: scattered, but especially the South)

pungle (v) To shell out; to plunk down (money); to pay up. (Usage: chiefly West)

rantum scoot (n) An outing with no definite destination (Usage: scattered)

I’m looking forward to writing the tags for this post. Don’t forget to read the comments at the NPR site, where readers describe the dictionary as “wicked pissah” and “the bee’s knees.”

But it’s all purely academic, right?  Not that different from online slang dictionaries?  Nope.  Editor Joan Hall recounts stories of practical uses:

Forensic linguists once used it when a little girl was kidnapped and police had only a ransom note to go on.

“In this ransom note, the writer said, ‘Put $10,000 cash in a trash can on the devil’s strip,’ ” Hall says.

The key phrase in the note was “devil’s strip,” a term used only in a tiny section of Ohio to refer to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. As it happened, one of the suspects on the police list was a man from Akron. After being confronted with the evidence, linguistic and otherwise, the man ultimately confessed.

There’s such a thing as a forensic linguist? Something new every day.

More regional expressions from the book are available at this site.

I just watched President Obama’s Cairo speech.   It’s not a very pretty piece of writing, but it has an impeccable quality.  I’d equate it with a Henry James novel or a shaker chair – all is all plan, intention, and the shrewd distribution of energies.  I’d love to learn more about the process that went into crafting it, as the prose shows evidence of long contemplation and final polish.

That said, remember that this speech is really not for Americans: beware of any analysis of this oration that is not based on how it sounds in Arabic, Persian or Urdu.  For instance, I feel certain that the reason that the speech uses the term “extremist” instead of “terrorist” has something to do with translation, not ideology.  Of course, virtually none of the opinions that we read in the West will be based on foreign language versions, so the meaning of the speech has been reduced to a parlor game.

But it’s a smashing good parlor game, and one with implications.  In fact, the interpretation of Obama’s speech proves one thing: politics thrives on treating speech in a dishonest way, because commentators keep asking burning questions about words, yet they paradoxically refuse to pursue answers, even when there exists obvious ways to find these answers.

Consider, for instance, this response to Obama’s speech, an exchange between Liz Cheney and James Zogby on CNN the other day:

CHENEY:  What I thought was new and particularly troubling was the juxtaposition. You know, when he talked about the Holocaust and horror of the Holocaust, but then in the very next paragraph, when he was done with the Holocaust, he said, on the other hand — and seems to equate the death of six million Jews in the Holocaust, the murder, the slaughter of six million Jews to the situation in which Palestinians live today.

And I think that — that, you know, goes way too far. And I know he was trying to sound even-handed, but I think that begins to be very much appalling, frankly, to a lot of folks and walking away — putting some distance in the relationship with Israel.

ZOGBY: Clearly not and not intended as such. He was playing out the historical narratives of both peoples. This is why Jewish people suffer. This is why they’re afraid. This is why they have a feeling that they are insecure. This is why Palestinians have suffered. This is why.

Okay, this is little more than a dog-and-pony show.  But let’s pretend for the sake of argument that the purpose of this exchange is to understand what the President really means, what he thinks about the world and intends to make of it.

With this in mind, consider what Cheney is suggesting: for her, the idiom “on the other hand” is a connective phrase that contains a fully-developed intellectual proposition – when people use this phrase, she suggests, they promulgate the idea that the preceding subject and the succeeding subject are equivalent in a moral sense.

So let’s imagine that I said: “AIDS is sad; on the other hand, dysentery is sad.”  According to Cheney’s reasoning, by employing the phrase “on the other hand” I have consciously proposed that AIDS and dysentery are equally deserving of lament, as if sadness is to be justly meted out in equal portion to sufferers of each disease, and this notion may be questionable by campaigners who specialize in HIV prevention or water treatment initiatives.  You could say that I have “elevated” dysentery to the status of AIDS, or vice versa, and then get all huffy about it, if we follow Cheney’s way of looking at things.

This turf battle would not exist if I instead said something like “AIDS is sad; also, dysentery is sad,” or – even better – if I discussed AIDS and dysentery in two separate speeches on separate occasions.  That formula would presumably not imply any provocative moral equivalence.  Now that’s what Zogby is saying.  For him, the phrase “on the other hand”  is merely a signal that tells listeners “okay, that’s one story; now I’m moving on to another story.”  This reading imputes little meaning to the connecting phrase – Zogby thinks that the phrase is just a marker, not a miniature argument – and so he has the benefit of simplicity.

But which reading is correct?  If an ordinary person really cared to know what Obama really meant, how could he or she find an answer?

One way you could do so would be to look to your own usage.  Personally, when I use the term “on the other hand” I seldom intend it to convey moral equivalences.  Rather, I tend to use it when I am deliberating an issue that has more than one legitimate perspective and I want to give each one equal airtime, but not necessarily equal gravity.  My usage is closer to Zogby’s model than it is to Cheney’s.  Of course, I am not infallible, and it is possible that many people use this term in a different way.  But if Cheney wants to prove her point, she would need to examine her own recorded usages of this phrase, to ensure that they conform to the interpretation that she is imputing to the President.

Another way to answer the question would be to look to the whole of the speech.  I don’t have the time to really do  justice to such an exercise, but let’s look at the highlighted paragraphs anyway:

Around the world, the Jewish people were persecuted for centuries, and anti-Semitism in Europe culminated in an unprecedented Holocaust. Tomorrow, I will visit Buchenwald, which was part of a network of camps where Jews were enslaved, tortured, shot and gassed to death by the Third Reich. Six million Jews were killed – more than the entire Jewish population of Israel today. Denying that fact is baseless, ignorant, and hateful. Threatening Israel with destruction – or repeating vile stereotypes about Jews – is deeply wrong, and only serves to evoke in the minds of Israelis this most painful of memories while preventing the peace that the people of this region deserve.

On the other hand, it is also undeniable that the Palestinian people – Muslims and Christians – have suffered in pursuit of a homeland. For more than sixty years they have endured the pain of dislocation. Many wait in refugee camps in the West Bank, Gaza, and neighboring lands for a life of peace and security that they have never been able to lead. They endure the daily humiliations – large and small – that come with occupation. So let there be no doubt: the situation for the Palestinian people is intolerable. America will not turn our backs on the legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own.

For decades, there has been a stalemate: two peoples with legitimate aspirations, each with a painful history that makes compromise elusive …

If Cheney is correct, then the sheer fact of mutual mention implies equivalence.  It matters not if one persecution is “enslaving” and “unprecedented,” while another is “humiliating” and “intolerable,” so long as the descriptions of these two situations abut one another in a sequence.  Meanwhile, Zogby is focusing on the last phrase.  His view is that Obama set out to summarize and dignify two peoples, not to engage in some historical argument that measures and compares the sums of collective suffering.  In his reading, one would imagine that the last part is the “core message” of the passage, rather than some connecting idiom in the middle of it.

There is a third way to find out the truth: by contextualizing these readings in the larger corpus of Obama’s statements and acts.  Remember that our goal is to know Obama’s meaning, what he intends to convey with words, because this gives us a window onto his plans.  If that’s the case, then it would be smart to look at a pattern in how his use of the term “on the other hand” correlates with policy proposals.  Sounds like a job for a grad student …

Of course the question does not even end there.  Ultimately, this dispute of interpretation isn’t about a speech, but about character.  Is Obama’s penchant for even-handedness bona fide, or is it merely a gesture to ingratiate himself to both sides in a dispute before he disappoints one of them?  To answer this question both Cheney and Zogby would have to present a case.  For instance, Cheney might show an instance in which Obama proposed to balance two opposing points of view, but really only helped one side to the unmitigated detriment of the other; conversely, Zogby might go through Obama’s speeches and look for other moments in which he summarizes positions of opponents without overtly aiming at moral judgments of either position.

Whew.  Okay, let’s back up and look at the larger implications of all this: my point is that there are many avenues available to find the truth, if we really wanted arguments that are illuminating.  But why on earth would we want that?  To do so would not make for very good television.  The purpose of these disputes is not to find meaning in words but to ascribe meaning to words, which is why this debate throws open a number of questions that are perfectly answerable by obvious research – which never takes place and therefore provides no answers.

That’s what’s so dishonest about this kind of political debate.  It asks questions that we could answer fairly easily, but it refuses to do so, because it is more exciting to perpetuate uncertainty than to expunge it.  By now everybody knows that the facts don’t really matter; what’s amazing is that we create great opportunities for the facts to matter and then immediately give up at the moment that the facts begin to show promise.

At Boston Review, Evgeny Morozov writes a thoughtful essay about whether or not authoritarian states can withstand the democratizing power of youtube, twitter, blogging and all the other stuff that we call Web 2.0. The larger concept is that types of technology have determinate and predictable impacts on the political systems of the societies in which they are nested.  This idea is as old as the hills – or as old as Lewis Mumford, who is as old as the hills – and it has long been the province of earnest but overeager writers willing to sacrifice meticulous understanding for swift publication.

But that’s only part of the reason why writers run into trouble in this subject area, where declarative statements about the “role of technology” have all the solidity and durability of sandcastles.  Morozov really knows this field, and one of his challenges is to discover whether or not it is possible to solidify the sand of technological determinism into rhetorical stone.  In this post I’ll explain a few aspects of his approach, in the belief that it has lessons for the difficult craft of deterministic argumentation.

Morozov begins with a reminder of the giddy enthusiasms of the 1990’s, when it was de rigueur to propose that the Internet would break the intellectual and imaginary binds that fetter the subjects of authoritarian regimes.  As it turned out, the results were mixed; many studies revealed that the relation between technology and society is primarily shaped by the latter.  So much for the cyber-optimists, at least for a time.

Older and wiser now, Morozov decides to give the old deterministic ideas another whirl:

Could it be that changes in the Web over the past six years—especially the rise of social networking, blogging, and video and photo sharing—represent the flowering of the Internet’s democratizing potential? This thesis seems to explain the dynamics of current Internet censorship: sites that feature user–generated content—Facebook, YouTube, Blogger—are especially unpopular with authoritarian regimes [...] Were the cyber–optimists right after all? Does the Internet spread freedom?

The answer to this question substantially depends on how we measure “freedom.”

It’s satisfying to see Morozov raise this trenchant point.  Too often technology writers get so caught up in predicting the future that they don’t bother to explain what they mean by pivotal terms like freedom and democracy. Without doing so, readers evaluate the proposal using very pedestrian notions of confounding political ideas, and the writing lacks honesty, complexity and verve. It’s not hard to prove that Yahoo made the world more open so long as you don’t explain what criteria identify “openness,” although the latter question is pretty interesting.  Instead of pursuing it, writers merely circle the empty definition, which makes the veracity of primary conjectures unknowable.  That’s why these claims often feel juvenile, even cowardly.

Morozov explicates the problem. First he suggests that “freedom” might hypothetically indicate something like the “free flow of information.”  If that’s “freedom,” then we can say that the Web indeed makes heavily-censored countries like China and Iran “freer.” On the other hand, what if “freedom” means something more specific, like dissent.  In that scenario, even though self-publishing may have helped empower the Orange Revolution dissidents in Ukraine, the direct role of the internet in that process is a little more doubtful.  And the ultimate ends of democratization movements remain well beyond the compass of web-based phenomena - as Morozov explains, “no dictators have been toppled via Second Life.”

Notice that this line of reasoning begins with a minimal definition of “democratization” (freedom of information), proceeds to a  more robust one (empowerment of dissent) and ends at a very strong revolutionary paradigm (toppling of dictators).  This shows one trouble with this type of argument:  the more specific the definition of “freedom,” the less that new media seem to be bringing that freedom about.  As a consequence, those who conclude that technology is determinative must argumentatively limit that determinative power to the blandest of all possible outcomes.  If the internet is doing something new, then it’s probably something banal, weak and obvious.

This leads us directly to a second problem:

The major challenge in understanding the relationship between democracy and the Internet- aside from developing good measures of democratic improvement-has been to distinguish cause and effect. That is always hard, but it is especially difficult in this case because the grandiose promise of technological determinism-the idealistic belief in the Internet’s transformative power-has often blinded even the most sober analysts.

But why should metrics be so hard to establish?  Well,

Consider the arguments that ascribe Barack Obama’s electoral success, in part, to his team’s mastery of databases, online fundraising, and social networking. Obama’s use of new media is bound to be the subject of many articles and books. But to claim the primacy of technology over politics would be to disregard Obama’s larger-than-life charisma, the legacy of the stunningly unpopular Bush administration, the ramifications of the global financial crisis, and John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate. Despite the campaign’s considerable Web savvy, one cannot grant much legitimacy to the argument that it earned Obama his victory.

What’s worse, the metrics are not applied consistently.  While we accept that technology is a mere “contributing factor” to the Obama victory, we do not ascribe the same nuance to international events.  Again, the example of the Orange Revolution is instructive.  “To focus so singularly on the technology” Morozov observes, “is to gloss over the brutal attempts to falsify the results of the presidential elections that triggered the protests, the two weeks that protesters spent standing in the freezing November air, or the millions of dollars pumped into the Ukrainan democratic forces to make those protests happen in the first place.”

The only thing that the American and Ukrainian examples both prove is that group-defined action is now “cheaper, faster, leaner.”  But if that’s the case then theorists are actually measuring the wrong thing.  If we really want to know about the impact of the internet on politics, here’s a better question:

What is the impact of the Internet on our incentives to act? This question is particularly important in the context of authoritarian states, where elections and opportunities for spontaneous, collective action are rare. The answer depends, to a large extent, on whether the Internet fosters an eagerness to act on newly acquired information. Whether the Internet augments or dampens this eagerness is both critical and undetermined.

So we should look at whether online communities transform ideas into action; if the publication of damning documents on wikileaks gets people to toss out officials who would otherwise have enjoyed impunity; whether or not bloggers are more adept at spurring readers toward measurable offline behaviors.  Any theorist who wants to prove that democracy is made stronger by the internet would have to prove that a million bloggers wading through a billion documents can inspire more meaningful activity than a single powerful article by a good investigative reporter.

Sure, that’s a tall order.  But at least its a clear one: in Morozov’s proposal, a standard of action (and action that would not otherwise exist) is to be the evidence on whose strength we ought to measure how technology changes political behavior.  It’s an attractive approach, and it has been offered in an intelligent way.  After explaining that the determinism debate lacks rigorous definition and useful metrics Morozov solves both of these problems by focusing on the psychic process that transforms thought into deed, and separates the twits from the twitterers.

We should keep in mind that, despite its strengths, this view also tends to denigrate aspirations and attitudinal readjustments that take a very long time to play out.  Personally, I don’t care for this idea, as my interest is in the history of dispositions, and there is something affectedly unsecret about action, something unpuzzling in the way that thought reduces to deed with suspicious willingness.

Still, Morozov has moved the conversation forward by choosing the heaviness of outcomes rather than the spirits that breathe life into to those outcomes, a decision that so many writers lack the determination and honesty to make.   He is exactly right in the way he arrives at this model, showing that we have spent so much time trying to find the answers about the impact of new technology that we have skirted the issue of how answers ought to be found in the first place.  By providing an argument with a clear sensitivity to the latter process, Morozov has brought a little responsible boldness back to the business of drawing bright lines that assess the technological developments that consume our public conversation.  Whatever you make of the deterministic approach, Morozov has surely managed to move its rhetoric from supposition to suppleness.

For a decade or so Japan's lost decade has been the great bugaboo of modern macroeconomics. Economists constantly warned that you mustn't do X or you must do Y, because otherwise we'll turn into Japan. And policymakers congratulated themselves in advance for not being like their Japanese counterparts, who dithered and drifted, refusing to make [...]

Just an interesting tidbit of information I discovered when preparing my class on Retrieving and Evaluating Electronic Information (here’s my previous post on planning the class). Covering the topic of bias in search engines, and in particular Google, we talked about how PageRank introduces various bias in the type of information it makes available. I assigned as reading the excellent honor’s thesis (pdf, via the Internet Archive) from 2005 by Stanford undergrad Alejandro M. Diaz. Alejandro’s (where are you now? leave a comment if you read this!) thesis is a straightforward, accessible (if not always “scientific”) account of the different bias that are reflected in Google and Page Rank. A sample quote:

Our description of PageRank, like that put forth by its inventors, makes heavy but unqualified use of the term “important.” This is somewhat disconcerting since importance, like relevancy, is a highly subtle, ambiguous, and subjective thing… To the algorithm, being “important” simply means being “popular.”

It is therefore interesting to see how Google itself changed the way they talk about PageRank. Thanks to the Internet Archive, I give you a direct comparison of the text on the official Google “corporate tech” page, highlighted for your reading pleasure and emphasis:

PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page’s importance by the number of votes it receives.

- Google, 2002 (via the Internet Archive)

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

- Google, 2009

In fact, the change in language, as you can see on the Internet Archive history for the Google Corporate Technology page was done as late as 2007, and to be accurate, sometime between April 6th and May 6th, 2007 – the same month Google has bought DoubleClick (don’t know what this says but conspiracy theorists are welcome to suggest ideas).

Here in Washington, the compound adjective of the moment is “shovel-ready.” That’s the description of stimulus projects that are ready to go on the day President-elect Obama takes office. For the most part, as the term implies, it refers to large infrastructure projects like the building of new roads or bridges.

But one obvious project that’s also ready to go on day one is the scanning of the contents of the Library of Congress. Today there’s a ceremonial event at the LC to showcase the thousands of books already scanned as part of the LC’s partnership with the Internet Archive, and to highlight the potential of a mass digitization project. It goes without saying that this project could be extended easily to other cultural heritage institutions. IA already has a dedicated scanning center in the LC, and just needs the funds to expand its project.

Let’s all tell our representatives to support such an effort. Given that the “HYP Solution” I advocated last spring is now extremely unlikely to happen given the sharp downturn in university endowments, let’s do what should have been done in the first place. Let’s not leave mass digitization to Google. Scanning all public domain books in the Library of Congress is pocket change compared to other investment projects, and like roads, it is infrastructure that will have enormous utility for decades to come.

Shovel-ready, move over. We’re scanner-ready.

[Image credit: ethanz]

How can we raise, and organize a new generation of technology-aware research that has the guts, and the creativity, to design a comprehensive field of critical concepts that can be implemented into code? We have to stop understanding the Internet, and start to shape it.

In 1977 Charles and Ray Eames made a documentary film called Powers of Ten. The second half of the film includes a slow zoom into a man’s hand, right the way through cells and molecules all the way down to an atomic structure. It’s extraordinarily engaging, beginning at a familiar human context, and visualising something desperately distant and unknowable.

About a year ago James King brought a book to my attention from a series called Analysis of the Massproduct Design by Japanese product designer Taku Sato.

Analysis of the Massproduct Design is just like the Eames Powers of Ten video but for everyday products.

Each book takes a manufactured product and breaks down the content, graphics, construction and packaging page by page. The books are like infinite zooms into fabrication and history.

There are four, in turn looking at Xylitol Lime Mint chewing gum, a Fujifilm disposable camera, ‘Licca the fashion dress up doll by Takara Co.’ and a litre of milk from the Meiji Dairies Corporation. The blurb reads:

…we will take up and focus on one mass-produced product seen everywhere in our daily life without special attention paid to and from the point of view of design we try to take a closer look at and analytically examine it to find what kinds of ideas, efforts, ingenuities have been put in to it.

Each book begins with an overview and in some cases a history. This is from the book on the Fujifilm disposable camera.

As the book progresses, spreads examine the product in greater and greater detail. Near the end of the Fujifilm book, there’s a photographic one micrometer cross section of the film stock.

One of my favourites spreads is from the book examining Xylitol chewing gum and is titled ‘The Feeling on the Teeth When Chewed.’ It’s about the material qualities of tablets versus sticks of gum. A quote:

The firmness of a chewing gum changes gradually with the passing of the time of its being chewed. In order to make this change of the chewing feeling close to an ideal one, the elements that should make up of the chewing gum are controlled… The figure shows the strength of the chewing exerted in the mouth measured with an analyzing device called RheoMeter. These graphs will tell you how different the chewing feelings are between ordinary sheet-type chewing gum and sugar coated chewing gum.

An ideal chewing feeling! A RheoMeter! They’ve got a machine for testing the chewiness of gum.

I think Taku Sato actually designed the packaging for the milk carton he analyses. One of the spreads shows what each of the indents on the base of the cartons are for. Ambiguity in the translation adds to the mystery in some cases:

…(image a) is a little dented. This is for securing the stability of the carton when placed straight on a table… The number (image c) is the filling machine’s column index. The embossed information works for cause of the trouble to be clarified when it happens.

The books feel like imaginary manuals. They offer the seductive illusion that with this book the object can be completely known, all secrets unravelled. They somehow imply that if all was lost, objects like these could be reconstructed with this knowledge alone.

A while back I came across the term ‘Spime’ in Bruce Sterling’s book Shaping Things. He uses the word to characterise smart objects which talk about their histories, how they were made, where they were sourced, where they’ve been, etc. Spimes might be a cars which announce their locations, or a packaged beef steak which shows the cow it comes from and where that cow was raised.

Sato’s books are raw Spime porn. Objects showing off their shiny interiors, construction and their ancestors. The celebrity biographies of mass produced objects.

Work has me transcribing video footage these days. While the work is interesting, I thought to make a footswitch…makes the transcribing easier. Armed with an Arduino, a VOX amp pedal and a little bit of code, I made my first instructable.

Mac OS Foot Switch from a Guitar Amp Pedal. - More cool how to projects

This growing repository of procedural knowledge is pretty sweet. A happy stomping!

In Montreal this Friday, McGill professor Darin Barney will be giving a version of his talk on citizenship and technology. Here’s an excerpt:
Each of the telegraph, telephone, radio and television was accompanied by its own heroic rhetoric of democratic transformation and reinvigorated civic engagement. None have delivered fully on this promise, but each has been crucial for the maintenance of a system of political and economic power in which most people are systematically distanced from the practice of citizenship most of the time. For the most part, these technologies have been means of anything but citizenship: spectacular entertainment; docile recreation; habituation to the rhythms of capitalist production and consumption; cultural normalization. The internet, as a radically decentralized medium whose capacity for publication and circulation far surpasses that of its broadcast predecessors, has certainly provided the means by which politically-engaged citizens can access and produce politically-charged information that would never have seen the light of day under the regime of the television and newspaper. This information can be an important resource for political judgment. But the Internet also surpasses its predecessors as an integrated medium of enrolment in the depoliticized economy and culture of consumer capitalism. This is why we should be wary of equating more and better access to information and communication technology with enhanced citizenship.

One Montreal resident deeply influenced by Barney’s critique of the Internet as an enabler of citizenship is Michael Lenczner, whom I interviewed for this week’s ITConversations show. Mike is a co-founder of Île Sans Fil, Montreal’s community wireless network. With over 150 access points and nearly 60,000 users, the project is a huge success, all the more so given that municipal wi-fi projects in other cities have failed to materialize. And yet, Mike questions the value of what’s been accomplished. The project’s goal was not merely to light up hotspots in downtown Montreal, but to enhance the “sociality” of the city and elicit more and better civic engagement. He doubts these goals have been achieved, and asks himself hard questions about how technology can be deployed to these ends.When I met Mike recently in Montreal, I said: “It amazes that you’re asking yourself these questions. He replied: “It amazes me that others don’t.”

Recently I randomly came across this (fairly old) post from an environmentalist who was getting excited about Google’s sketchup. As I wrote in a comment on their blog:

I applaud your support for “an economic model that works by sharing rather than hiding” as well as your appreciation for the “power of open source” but would point out that sketchup itself is most definitely not open source (nor are pretty much any of the rest of Google’s online toolkit).


While one can be thankful that Google have provided this and other services (and in most cases have also provided support for export in an open format) we would do well to keep clearly in mind the distinction between ‘free as in beer’ and ‘free as in freedom’ i.e. free to reuse, redistribute (see http://www.opendefinition.org/ for more details).


We should also remember that it has long been common in the software industry when pricing proprietary products to follow a ‘cheap (free) at the start, expensive later’ pricing scheme in order to exploit the lock-in that arises from the existence of switching costs and indirect network effects.


Thus, it might well be worth investigating (or contributing to) an 3-D design system that really is open-source on the basis that as truly ‘open’ system will prove the better investment for your time and effort over the long-run.

This is a general point. Generally Google gets very good press whether among the wider public, the ‘open’ community or techies. Yet actually almost all of the products they product that are in any way core to their business have remained completely proprietary (and in many cases secret). Consider the following list:

The Google File System: proprietary and partially secret (some documentation in some academic papers)
Google Search (the algorithm and related software): proprietary and mainly secret. Basic pagerank idea was published (not original anyway since part of bibliometrics for a long time) but changes since then are not generally published. Of course there are reasons, primarily related to spam why you would want to keep this information secret but one could always deal with this by publishing information with a lag (e.g. 2-5 years)
Google Stripped Down Linux: proprietary (only used in house so GPL ineffective)
Google Docs: proprietary (free to use) though does use open document formats.
Google Groups: proprietary (free to use) and with no obvious export format (though I may be missing something here).
Google Mail: proprietary (free to use)
Google Code: proprietary (free to use) (as far as I can tell)
Google Knol: unknown at the present time
Google Scholar: proprietary (free to use)

Thus one might wonder why Google is generally seen as such a supporter of ‘openness’. One simple answer is that at present our primary experience of Google is of it providing a ‘free’ (as in beer) services while making the money by selling our attention to advertisers. While all of Google’s core products remain proprietary the fact that users are not charged at the point of use makes it seem we’re getting something wonderful for free — all the costs invisible because either they occur indirectly via the impact of advertising (higher prices etc) or in the long-run (potential lock-in to a single provider whose interests in terms of innovation and competition are not likely to coincide, at least in the long run, with those of society as a whole).

It is particularly interesting here to compare Google with Microsoft (perhaps at an earlier stage of their progress to the Monopoly they now have). Microsoft also supplies a proprietary product but one which, because of the demand structure of the industry, is priced directly to the consumer. This combined with its closed nature and ubiquitous use have combined to make Microsoft, at least at present, much less popular both generally and in the free/open community than Google, with a fairly widespread belief that the effects of the Microsoft monopoly on the software industry and wider society have at best been mixed.

A second point would be that because of the nature of Google’s products there are quite a few areas where it is willing to support open-source development because those open-source products are complementary (and not therefore competing with) its own activities. For example many of the open-source activities that receive support via Google’s Summer of Code are related to basic tools (e.g. python) which are an input into Google’s work but in no way compete with anything Google do (it would be interesting to see what would happen to Google SoC proposals that did propose work on projects directly competing with Google’s own activities — for example work on an open search engine).

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Spot Image, a leading provider of satellite imagery, are making a fantastic offer. Spot Image are teaming up with GeoNames to help improve the availability of free geographical data and offer high resolution 2.5m satellite imagery for automatic feature extraction.

Features that we think can be extracted from 2.5m imagery are city contours, airports, streets, shore lines, lakes, rivers and others. We believe this is a fantastic opportunity for researchers and student-works to find algorithms for feature identification and extraction. Drop me a line for more details if you are doing research in this area and would like to work on this challenging task.

Contact : Marc Wick, marc@geonames.org

The data extracted from satellite imagery will be made available through GeoNames. Up to now GeoNames was exclusively focusing on point data due to the lack of good and free vector data. The extracted features will allow us to provide vector data and we will be able to include shapes of cities and other features into the GeoNames database. It will be a gigantic step forward for the availability, quality and coverage of free geographical data on global scale.

[Image : Spot Image Quality ZoomifyViewer Casablanca, Morocco]

Spot Image, based in Toulouse (France), are providing satellite imagery to GoogleEarth and they are selling images to professional and private users. If you are looking for images of a particular area you can use this gallery layer on GoogleEarth to view and find relevant images. As an example the 2.5m image from 24. Sept of Barcelona.

Sometimes you find some data whose lack of freedom is totally mysterious from a commercial point of view.

At mySociety, we recently released made some travel time maps which help you work out where you should live that would have the quickest commute to your place work. Interactive flash sliders to balance this delicate equation against house prices would definitely be a simple, tangible benefit for many in the UK.

But for some reason, public transport data is closed. So we can’t make this available for anyone, whatever the postcode of their place of work.

The data itself is totally locked up. Tim Howgego gives a detailed reckoning of the status of timetable data for everything from local buses to long distance trains.
Both TransportDirect and Transport for London have beautifully integrated together all forms of public transport to help individuals find individual routes from A to B. They are, however, impenetrable consortiums with impossibly hard to negotiate, non-existent licensing terms, even if you have the cash.

Meanwhile, Google are negotiating access to the transit information for their own website, so that they can make money from adverts relating to it. But the data itself stays closed (Tim Howgego again). Tim’s article gives lots of details about this.

The mystery is why the public transport companies and local authorities don’t make the data free. They would not only enable new innovative services like the mySociety house prices / where to live one, but also make more money as more people would know when and how to use their buses and trains.

The answer? It’s totally anodyne. “Local public transport has little motivation to sell itself. And when it does, the decision making process is cluttered by many organisations with slightly different aims.” (Tim Howgego again).

How do we fix that!

I’ll be talking more about the travel time maps, and mySociety’s upcoming Freedom of Information site, at the next Cambridge Open Knowledge Meetup on Wednesday 13th Feburary. Rufus will be talking about CKAN and open knowledge packages, and Jim giving an update on open access in Chemistry. Remember if you’re in London, Cambridge is just 45 minutes from Kings Cross, nearer than some parts of London.

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Recently at Web Directions North, I introduced Snap, the syndicated next action pattern. It’s a way to get all those little interactions out of websites, and all in the same place: your newsreader. You can watch and read the presentation here.

In this post, I want to expand on those slides to introduce Snap and show it working.

What kind of ‘next actions’?
There are loads of small next actions. For example:

Taking a new bug in a tracker, and accepting it, allocating it, completing it, or marking it as a duplicate
For an email or weblog comment in a moderation queue, accepting or deleting it
Clicking through and perhaps purchasing a recommended book

It’s tedious to move around the Web to do these actions. It would be better if they were all in the same place. We had this same problem with weblogs and other media, and RSS was invented to syndicate new entries to the desktop.

What I’ve previously suggested is that we need a kind of RSS for interactions–and you can see a mockup here. At the time, the concept got some attention.

Conceptually, each ‘object’ that requires interaction is a feed entry. The actions are shown as an HTML form, and using the form sends data to the website which updates that object. The feed is then updated, changing the original entry to show the new object state. The original object state is no longer visible. This requires the newsreader to allow HTML forms and respond sensibly when feed entries change.

I’ve been working together with Tom Armitage on a proof of concept (of which more in a minute), and the headline is this:

Feed entries can indeed represent interactions, and update to show new states. The user never needs to leave the newsreader.

This is the pattern I’m calling Snap. It works, and we have a demo.

Demo: Dentrassi
For the proof of concept, we created Dentrassi (Tom did the heavy lifting), a desktop todo list manager which can be run entirely through a newsreader.

Watch a screencast and transcript of Dentrassi in use.

The app demonstrates a number of ideas:

There is an admin feed which has persistent entries. One entry includes a form, which is used to add new tasks
New tasks appear in the inbox feed, until they are allocated to projects
New project feeds are created dynamically: users can subscribe to a project feed from another persistent entry in the admin feed
Every task feed entry is smart: each includes a form to show the available interactions, so tagging, task completion and editing all happen inside the newsreader
Tasks move from feed to feed so you can focus on different lists of next actions at different times

Tasks only appear in feeds if they require actions. This means there’s a single place you look to find what to do next.

One interesting feature, not in the demo above, is the idea of the deferred task: a task can be pushed into the future by some day - a day, a week or a month - and it then disappears from the feeds, only to reappear when it’s valid again.

Dentrassi possibilities
Imagine having your todo list manager - whether it’s iCal or TaskPaper - expose a Snap interface, so you can use it entirely from your newsreader.

Tasks could then be mixed with interactions from all your other sources - like email moderation or bug tracking - and even tasks from other people in your company. Perhaps tasks from other people would be read-only, or maybe you could collaborate.

Lessons learned for Snap
We learned a lot from Dentrassi. Some points:

Stale items: once you act on a feed entry, the entry is stale until the feed is refreshed. Problems are avoided, in Dentrassi, by giving each object a serial number which increments on updates, and refusing to accept updates from forms which don’t pass in the current serial. This isn’t great from a interaction design perspective. Instead each feed item should query the server when it’s viewed, showing a ’stale’ badge if a refresh is required. If the user is offline, an ‘unknown’ badge should be shown instead.
Disappearing entries: an entry will often disappear from a feed once it’s actioned. It’s important that a newsreader allows the entry to vanish, and doesn’t keep its old state as a duplicate entry (GUIDs help here).
Keeping interaction in the newsreader: when the follow-up to submitting a form is a success or failure, Dentrassi shows a badge. It would be good to have a standard way of reporting status. But sometimes the follow-up to a form is another form, and that’s tough: the interaction has to move to a website. Using Ajax inside the feed entry will help.
Subscribing to feeds from within the newsreader: inside feed entries, new feeds URL should be prefixed with ‘feed:’ to make sure the newsreader handles them directly, instead of opening a Web browser.
Working offline: there is currently no way to work offline. It would be good to have the newsreader cache the form data to send… although this may pose a problem if Javascript is being used.

One point to look further at is how to improve newsreader support for this usage. Maybe there could be a Snap profile for Atom, in the same way podcasting is supported by enclosures? If forms were ‘enclosed’ in feed entries, they could be shown separated from the main body - more like a dialog box - and it would be clearer how to use them. This was the look that seemed to make most sense in Dentrassi. In my original mock-up, which just used the straight HTML, the forms look confusing.

Other possibilities
I’ve mentioned a number of possibilities for Snap in general:

Mixing together multiple ‘next action’ feeds from different sources
Having several feeds representing different states of a process, for example different Snap feeds for the different states of a bug in a tracker
Desktop applications exposing a Snap interface, for local use. And using the location of the feed request to show full feeds or read-only feeds, for collaboration
Having multiple people work on the same applications, each using a different mix of feeds

These are rather abstract, so here are some systems that use these patterns:

Multi-player turn-based games, like Risk, or Scrabulous
An editorial work-flow for a CMS, where each article goes through a number of states, dealt with by journalists, subeditors, editors and other sign-off parties. The documents could be links to the Web, or included as enclosures. A persistent item would allow the upload of new documents
Similarly, an HR system. Employees would use a website or persistent feed item to submit a form, and then track its process using a single feed. The HR team would have an interactive version of the feed
iPhoto exposing a Snap feed of all untagged photos, to encourage me to categorise them
A blog feed which has all posts, and a comments feed which only shows comments from posts the reader is following. A reader follows and unfollows posts by using a persistent entry in the comments feed
The Facebook activity steam, except each entry carries with is contextual interactions: see more/less of this type of item; add this person as a friend; join this group; enlarge this photo; add a comment
Feed pipes, slim applications which take a single object through a number of steps in different applications. For example, the same feed entry could represent an untagged photo in iPhoto, then the same photo uploaded to Flickr, which then becomes an object which can be commented on
A feed of ‘travellers you might know’ from Dopplr, each having a form to either share trips or ignore for a month

Snap as part of the Web
RSS/Atom is simple human interface to website content. A REST API is a simple machine interface to website functionality. Jabber/XMPP is gaining attention for being a machine interface to website events. Snap sits in this same constellation: Snap is a simple human interface to common actions, on a website or desktop application.

All of these are ways for websites to get blurry edges and mingle into one another. They offer ways for website to be recombinant, so that each can build on the functionality of others. They also offer ways for websites and applications to be more humane–to let us build around the tasks and experiences of people, rather than the features list of an individual website.

Snap isn’t a technology. Snap is an interaction pattern which works right now, and I’m convinced makes the experience of using websites better. I’m hoping you’ll give it a try.

Next action!
So, what’s next?

Go read Tom’s post on Snap, about building the proof of concept and the interaction design learnings that came out of it–in particular how the big tick is useful for hitting flow states. That’s first.

Second, if you have a web app, it’d be great to see Snap happening. Feel free to drop a mail if you want to bounce ideas around (and I’m sure Tom would be happy to speak with you about it too).

Thanks
Thanks again to Tom Armitage, WDN08 for giving me the opportunity to think about this, and Ben Hammersley for hosting the session which led to this, way back in 2004. (Also…)