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September 25, 2007
Julian Dibble has a rich post about the interpenetrating of work and play. There’s so much in it, it’s hard to know where to start. Fortunately, I don’t have to decide because I’m running late for a presentation…
September 21, 2007
David Isenberg has a good post on One Web Day, Yom Kippur, and their coincidence tomorrow.
So, go celebrate the Web while we still have one that’s distinguishable from cable TV.
And if I have hurt you in any way in the past year, I ask your forgiveness. I will try to do better next year, especially if you’ll let me know what I did wrong ([email protected]).
September 17, 2007
My sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis, the novelist and writing teacher, ran a piece in her newsletter about how small presses see Amazon. It’s by Jonathan Greene of the Gnomon Press. I thought it was interesting. Here it is, in its entirety:
Just back from the [Kentucky] State House chambers and the uphill
useless fight against legislation to give Peabody Coal millions in
incentives which may very well result in more mountaintop removal
devastation in the eastern coalfields.But back to Amazon, this from the view of a small publisher (with over
40 years experience): The way the book world is set up is less than
ideal for a small publisher. Amazon is not Evil in that in many
instances it gives access to readers who want small press books that are
not otherwise easily available. Certainly I agree with my friend Gordon
Simmons: first support your local independent bookstore if you are lucky
enough to have a good one in your neighborhood; they are a dying breed.But not all such bookstores will go to the trouble to order a book that
is not distributed by the near-monopoly of Ingram Book Co. Ingram takes
the same deep discount (55% off of list price) that Amazon takes, but
(unlike Amazon) Ingram often returns much of what it buys in beat-up
condition which the publisher has to eat plus pay the UPS cost back to
its door. I once got a hardback book returned by Ingram with a razor cut
the length of its spine through both the jacket and the cloth. And had
to pay for its trip back to my warehouse. As far as Amazon being
non-union, I doubt many bookstores are union or pay what many would
consider decent wages. Not right, but friends who work in stores
complain to me about this fact without telling me their specific
salaries.Readers can also try to support publishers directly if their local store
will not bother to order a book that Ingram does not carry. Research
on-line and contact or buy from the publisher directly. Not all
publishers take credit cards, a reason some would prefer to deal with
Amazon. Barnes & Noble often will not order from small publishers
directly, but often seem to give out their telephone numbers to those
that want books from those publishers. Small Press Distribution and
Consortium that distribute books for many small presses return even less
to small presses that Amazon: they normally sell books to stores or
chains at 40% – 55% then take half of the gross receipts of any payment
and put the amount due the publisher in escrow for three months. And
Consortium charges the publisher a re-stocking fee for any books stores
or distributors return. In other words, it is almost impossible for a
small literary publisher to survive without massive infusions of grants
from NEA and foundations. Or increasingly asking for author subsidies.
And this affects writers who want to be published by small publishers.
The health of these publishers helps the writers they publish. The
worsening condition is also caused by big publishers deciding to kill of
their mid-list authors, authors who do not sell books at or above the
10,000 range. They would rather publish fewer authors selling more
product (a ubiquitous hateful word now in the book trade).Print-on-demand vendors are a new avenue for authors and publishers. Or
in many instances now the author is the self-publisher. A complicated
situation. Bashing Amazon is not really helpful. Bash Ingram, bash the
fact that mainstream literary publishing is now dominated by
multi-nationals. Knopf, Random House, Farrar Straus, etc. are now owned
by German companies. Or lament the fact that just released figures state
that 27% of Americans do not even read one book a year. One was quoted:
reading made them sleepy. Well, then tout reading for insomniacs as much
healthier than sleeping pills. That should boost book sales.
BTW, Gnomon is no longer accepting manuscripts for publication.
September 12, 2007
Bradsucks, the webbiest musician on the Web, provided the inspirational background while William Gibson was writing his latest novel….
According to a survey of Korean bloggers done by Edelman Korea (Disclosure: I consult to Edelman, which is how I heard about this study), the leading reason (42%) Korean bloggers blog is “To create a record of my thoughts.” Only 1.2% blog “To raise visibility as an authority in my field.” This compares with 34% of American bloggers blogging to raise their visibility as authorities and 32% blogging to create a record of their thoughts. [Tags: korea blogging blogosphere edelman]
September 11, 2007
Peter Galison is a university professor of physics at Harvard. He’s giving a Tuesday lunchtime talk. [As always, I’m paraphrasing, getting things wrong, etc.]
Positivists tried to ground knowledge in an accumulation of observations, with a minimum of theory, Prof. Galison says. Science would come in the form of little bricks. The result would be “out of the reach of metaphysical theories.” Observation-based science would get better over time.
After WWII, via Thomas Kuhn and others, there was a rebellion against the positivist view. Theory comes first, they said. Science was so framed by theory that what counted as valid observation was dictated by the framework of theory. There is no neutral observation and there’s no raw perception outside of the framing provided by our theories. Various theories therefore were not continuous (as for the positivists) but were ships passing in the night…at least according to this point of view.
Example: The positivists saw special relativity as the capstone of a continuum of observation-based theories, while the Kuhnians think Einstein overthrew his predecessors and created a new whole.
Prof. Galison looks at the rhythms of the rise of theories. There are breaks in the strands of experiment, theory and instrument but the breaks don’t occur at the same time. And that’s to be expected because new instrumentation takes a while to yield new experiments and theories.
Doesn’t this just make the Kuhnian predicament worse? Now there are three strands with discontinuities, not just the strand of theort. “How do subcultures of science coordinate? What is shared between experimentalists and theorists, or between instrument makes and theorests…or between a subculture like instrument making and the wider technical world?” When a string theorist want to talk to a biochemist, do they have to engage in radical translation as posited by the anti-positivists? No, it’s more like the pidgins, jargons and creoles that build up at the real, “thick boundaries” between the natural languages. Prof. Galison wants to use linguistic anthropology to see how scientific disciplines talk. He calls the areas where these inter-languages are built up “trading zones.”
(There are no pure fields, he says. Physics, for example, contains elements of craft, math, experimentation, Plato…)
He looks at the growth and change of language, its local connections to people and places, and its contextuality within the wider world. E.g., Einstein had the idea that time is nothing but properly coordinated clocks. Poincare in 1898 had to figure out how to synchronize clocks so he could figure out the longitude of places around the world. He used this to talk philosophically about what simultaneity means. In 1900, he saw that simultaneity existed in the intersection of philosophy of time, technology of time synchronization, and the electrodynamics of moving bodies. New trading zones are emerging: Nanotech (surface chem, elec eng, atomic phyics…), string theory (geometers, field theories), simulations (computer science, stat, viz display). Each of these have had to develop jargon, pidgin and then a creole.
Of course these fields are collaborative. The question is how they’re able to. We should dig in to understand the shared techniques, theoretical notions, and instrumentation, and how they relate in the various intersecting fields. What exactly is the coordinative project, how does it change over time, and what does that tell us about the local knowledges?
Q: (ethanz) To what extent have people looked at languages between the engineering and business communities?
A: There’s been a little work. It’s a very important area for research. You can see the influence even in the architecture. When a lab is built, it reflects where ideas sit in the world. Does the lab resemble a church? A factory? Is it a place to bring VC’s? “VC’s don’t expect to go to PS 101 circa 1956. That’s not who they expect you to be.”
Q: (eric von hippel): When engineers talk to others, there’s often someone translating. What are the general principles?
A: There may not be a generic solution to this problem. In the coordinative process, what is characteristically coming from the different groups. E.g., in the development of radar, the engineers taught the physicists to look at the problem as that of providing a black box with voltage in and voltage out. So, look at what’s relevant to the exchange — part of it is knowing what to ignore.
A: (halley suitt) If two disciplines like biology and chemistry create a whole new set
of words to describe biochemistry, per your example, is the number of
new words in a new field — for instance all the Net jargon bursting
forth — predictive of the importance of that new field?
A: Boundaries are always thick. “In these thick regions of exchange, a lot of the vocabularies produced by these individual fields get thrown out. There’s a stripping away.”
Q: (judith donath) In a consulting company, there’s a different type of cooperation — it’s very competitive. They’re trying to use a new language to convince the clients that they have something unique to offer. It’s more about jockeying for leadership than cooperating. It’s intellectual scent-marking
A: Yes, complexification can sometimes be obfuscation. Cooperation and competition are closer together than we often think. Freud once said “Ambivalence is the basic emotion.” I’m trying to move away from an intentional account.
Q: (me) Do these intersections simplify the concepts? Do the participants translate back into their own terms? Do the translations change the theoretical understanding of each of the fields?
A: There’s a difference between simplification and regularization. We know how to talk differently to different people. The regularization doesn’t mean that you’re simplifying the ideas. When two famous physicists wrote a book on physics, they wrote a second volume for experimenters. All sorts of intra-theoretical connections were dropped out, but the calculations got more complicated. This was more regular but also more complex. So, is it simplification? Simple is not a simple concept. The “outspeak” becomes regularized. And does it feed back into the constitutive fields? Yes. And that’s why interests me most. It’s not that physics founds everything. The radar story is an example where the engineers taught the physicists. The fact of the coordinative activity begins to backform the science. I think that happens all the time, and it’s really important. The top down picture not only is bad business, but it keeps you from learning things.
Q: (wendy seltzer) Attorneys are called on to speak many disciplinary languages. What’s the role of formal education in differrent disciplines as opposed to learning on the job? Should law firms hire biochemists to talk to biochemists. Others hire generally interested people. I think the generally interested people are going to better at explaining it to a judge, etc.
A: People often think that’s what wanted in a book about science is to make it stupider. That seems to me to be empirically wrong. Pedagogically, we need to develop ways to speak about technical-scientific ideas that are not weighed down by jargon and don’t require prior knowledge, but are cognizant of the ability of people to deal with complex concepts. If you go to an art museum, it’s designed for adults. If you go to a science museum, it’s designed for children. You don’t have to write in one-syllable words and assume the audience wants to climb on the exhibit. [You go, Dr. Pete!]
Q: (john palfrey) People argue that locking up IP discourages research. Others disagree.
A: The idea of individual development is mythopoeic, although our institutions try to recuperate it, including the Nobel Prize. It’s trying to get back to an Edenic past, but it’s like chasing the sunset. In science and engineering, innovation always have aspects of collectivity. Patent lawyers sometimes want the physicists to do work they don’t want to do, patenting every variation on an innovation. Sometimes, though, patents can provide an incentive, and maybe makes us less interested in the classical ontological, philosophical questions. Physicists are thinking more like engineers. Patents and IP play a very complicated role in the changing ethos between science and technology.
September 9, 2007
Today’s Dilbert is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every Web 2.0 conference for the next two years. And it uses the phrase “tag-based folksonomy,” albeit it as a phrase so technical it’s suppose to scare us. It
And today’s Doonesbury is destined to be shown during the introductory remarks at every “Future of Media” conference for the next two years. Along the way, the strip mentions DonorsChoose.org, a cool site that will get a boost from the plug, thus inadvertently showing the power of the mass media that the strip questions. (I blogged about DonorsChoose here.) [Tags: dilbert doonesbury donorschoose web2.0 media everything_is_miscellaneous]
September 1, 2007
Bill Koslosky blogs about the attempt to take Shakespeare’s “First kill all the lawyers” (approx) line as actually being pro-lawyer, drawing on a Seth Finkelstein post.
I agree with Bill and Seth that it is hard indeed to take that line as anything but anti-lawyer. I’d only make two points:
First, one line of argument by the Shakespeare-didn’t-write-Shakespeare folks says that the author of the Works must have been a lawyer because of all the legal language and metaphors, especially in the sonnets.
Second, clearly Shakespeare was thinking in the back of his mind, “But not the Berkman Center.”
August 29, 2007
Angry Chinese Blogger maintains that US companies share the blame for the dangerous goods manufactured for them in China:
…much of the blame for unsafe or low quality products lies squarely with the purchasing policies put in place by Western companies. Policies under which companies sign short term “easy in, easy out” contracts with multiple factories. Allowing them to use the threat of moving to another manufacturer in order demand the lowest possible per unit price, and to chop and change factories at will if one proves unable to meet requirements for unit price and quantity. Thus creating a low security, high competition, environment in which factory owners must compete with each other for thin margin contracts, and in which they feel forced to cut corners, or to infringing regulations, as a way of staying in businesses.
It depends on your concept of responsibility, of course. If you think your responsibility ends with your signature at the bottom of a contract that includes quality standards, then the US firms are relatively blameless. If you think you are responsible for the conditions and temptations your greed — um, competitiveness — predictably establish, then the US firms bear some of the blame. The second point of view is, arguably, the realistic one, especially if the widespread nature of the violations indicate a systemic problem. (Thanks to GlobalVoices for the link.)
August 27, 2007
Edward Rothstein of the NY Times reviews Shakespeare & Co.’s Antony & Cleopatra alongside their production of Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing. I saw both and think Edward works too hard to find a Big Picture analogy between the two. Yes, the Stoppard play cleverly relies on a character mistaking a performance for life, but the play and the characters were too slight to make anything metaphysical of it. And while A&C is obviously about the political and the personal — and, as my sister-in-law Meredith Sue Willis points out, also about the personal struggling to become mythic — I just didn’t believe it. Or much enjoy it.
I blogged about A&C here. Meredith Sue Willis just blogged about Rough Crossing; look for the August 25 post. She’s a poet, novelist, teacher, and a hell of a writer.
I hate to say it, but I also wasn’t bowled over by the new Kenneth Branagh “As You Like It” being shown on HBO.
I’m a big fan of Branagh’s Shakespearean movies, yes, including “Love’s Labour Lost.” But this one was weird, and not because it was set in Japan for no apparent reason. (Oh, there were some nicely framed indoor shots, but I didn’t think it was worth the distraction.) The first hour of this two-hour abbreviated version seems to be setting us up for tragedy. Touchstone — enjoyably played with exuberance by Alfred Molina — is the sole source of levity in this half, making him feel like the clown in a tragedy. Perhaps Branagh was thinking that he needed to deepen the drama so that the romance would be deepened, and the acting is indeed so good that I was touched by the love of the lovers. But the plot contrivance of this play is so outrageous that it can’t really handle much drama. (A boy plays a girl playing a boy playing a girl, although now of course we have a girl playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl.) And Branagh cut much of Rosalind’s part, so we don’t get a sense of her — an odd choice.
Still, there’s lots to like about the production, starting with the acting. Branagh finds a lot in the relationship of Orlando and his brother, Oliver. The play looks great, even though a forest in the UK plays a forest in Japan playing a forest in the UK, so to speak. And we want Branagh to do more Shakespeare plays. So, go out and buy the action figures and eat the Wheaties with Rosalind on the box.
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