I had a great time presenting on my work with the Bot2.0 project earlier today at ASIS&T; you can find a copy of the talk here [.pdf]. Thanks to Miguel Ruiz for organizing the panel, moderating and presenting, to my co-panelists Bryan Heidorn and Nathan Hall, and everyone who came out to listen and ask some great questions.
Posted in research, Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Thus does a large group of eminent scientists frame a pretty gloomy assessment (ScienceDaily summation here) of the failure of multilateral cooperation on a wide range of threats facing Earth, including,
Energy, food, and water crises; climate disruption; declining fisheries; increasing ocean acidification; emerging diseases; and increasing antibiotic resistance are examples of serious, intertwined global-scale challenges spawned by the accelerating scale of human activity. They are outpacing the development of institutions to deal with them and their many interactive effects
Depressingly, there’s nothing to argue with there. But the fact that the authors feel the need to follow the above with the caveat that they are not advocating for countries to abandon sovereignty is troubling for two reasons. First, that scientists are so jumpy about charges of elitism that they feel the need to preemptively defend against the insane (and inevitable) charges from cranks (e.g., some U.S. senators) that global warming is some kind of hoax being perpetuated in the service of a one-world government. Or something.
Secondly, the caveat makes me itch because the authors leave the door open substantially for something similar in their conclusion:
The institution of the nation-state has helped improve the well-being of many individuals, but at the cost of reduced global resilience. To address our common threats we need greater interaction among existing institutions, as well as new institutions, to help construct and maintain a global-scale social contract.
Their proposed solutions on global climate change, fisheries depletion and increased drug-resistance among drugs are to strengthen existing institutions (e.g., WHO) and introduce new institutions along similar lines (e.g., following the WTO). That’s fine as far as it goes, but the thrust of the editorial is to point out the failures of existing frameworks, and the frustration at free-rider problems and the inadequacy of current decision-making processes for addressing these issues. I don’t think it’s reading too many tea leaves to focus on this sentence and parse it out further:
The major powers must be willing to enforce agreements, but legitimacy will depend on acceptance by numerous and diverse countries and by nongovernmental actors, such as civil society and business. [emphasis mine]
I try not to get too paranoid about these things, but this taps pretty deeply into one of my fears with how the conversation on climate change is going to develop over the next 10-20 years. Scientists are rationalists and many are either very bad at or just can’t quite understand the functioning of politics (or are continually frustrated by the results – rightly so, often). Politics, indeed, isn’t very rational. And at the same time, for anyone who cares to look, we’re at a pretty grim moment for the continuance of human civilization along the lines which we’ve grown used to. Many scientists are getting pretty tired of pointing out this fact. As our institutions of shared collaborative decision-making (or not-making, as it may be) continue to dither in the face of planetary doom, it’s a great fear of mine that scientists will look for alternate means of addressing what they see (correctly) as increasingly dire climactic instability. In short, business: the actor with the means and motivation to address these issues on a massive scale, but not answerable to a larger (and often-annoying) polity. The thing is – and I’ve got plenty of dystopian SF narratives to back me up here! – it might work. Multinational corporate rule might save us from planetary self-destruction (or not), but at the great expense of human liberty.
I think that would be a Bad Thing. What would be a Good Thing, would be if scientists would get more engaged in politics. It’s a messy irrational business but that’s how it goes. Rather than pre-emptively defending themselves against Inhofian nonsense, why doesn’t a physics prof at the University of Oklahoma run against him? Or any and every other anti-science, climate-change-denying buffoon out there?
Would they win? Most likely not. But politics isn’t all about winning – or at least, not about winning one particular election. It’s about narratives, and the narrative of a widespread, grassroots effort from scientists to directly address the problems that they see – rightly – as threatening our continued survival as a species would be a compelling one.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged politics, science | Leave a Comment »
This story got a lot of buzz on the web the other day, and has stayed in the news cycle since. The long and the short of it is this:
“The film has no distributor in America. It has got a deal everywhere else in the world but in the US, and it’s because of what the film is about. People have been saying this is the best film they’ve seen all year, yet nobody in the US has picked it up.”
That’s according to Jeremy Thomas, who produced the Charles Darwin biopic Creation, and that’s fine and all, but let’s put this into some perspective. He’s the film’s producer. That means that he’s making money off the film: indeed, that he’s on the hook for the financial success or failure of the film. I’m sure there are some people who’ve said it’s the best film they’re seen all year but, you know: my mom says I’m cool, too.
It’s possible that there’s some great conspiracy of film distributors – all film distributors in the United States, based largely in those hotbeds of conservatism, Hollywood and New York City – who support a right-wing, anti-science agenda, and who would spike a great film that would make them tons of money just to keep Americans ignorant of the true story of Charles Darwin.
Alternately, it’s also possible that the film is a low-key costume drama about a 19th C. English naturalist and his internal struggles. Or as the review of the film in Variety puts it:
“Creation” feels somewhat static in storytelling terms. Once basic conflicts are established, we simply wait for Darwin to come to terms with his grief, marriage and imminent notoriety. Not much “happens,” though the pic does its best to maintain energy in both physical presentation and mixed-chronology structure.
Leads are also a little monotonous: Bettany is appealing but this Charles is at times nearly a sickly bore, while Connelly, not an actor with much lightness, is OK but emphasizes Emma’s grave concern and disapproval to the exclusion of nearly every other quality.
In other words: maybe it’s just kind of a boring movie.
I know it’s fun to beat up on Americans for being a bunch of crazy know-nothings, to point out as the author of the Telegraph story did, that “only 39 per cent of Americans believe in the theory of evolution” and that there are message boards full of nutty anti-science kooks who call Darwin a Nazi, etc. It’s certainly a favorite past-time of many Britons, and there are a lot of folks here who get in on the game, too. And, you know: yeah, it’s pretty frustrating that there are so many Americans who are kinda nuts.
But let’s keep this in perspective. Hollywood likes to make money. Lots of it. They’re perfectly willing to produce and distribute eye-poking nonsense like Religulous – which the right wing was a lot more pissed off about – if they can count on $13 M receipts on a $2.5M budget, with a $3.5M opening weekend. That’s a very nice margin, and Religulous got pretty wide distribution to get there – not just indie theaters but a fair number of multiplexes, too, opening on over 500 screens and staying at over 400 screens for a month. There’s no way Creation opens that big, so to even approach those kinds of numbers, it’d have to not just do respectable business but really blow the doors off of the art-house circuit – sellouts, $60K screens, etc. – and given what it appears to be, I’m not really shocked that it failed to find a distributor willing to roll the dice.
We’re getting into Oscar season, both in big-budget and Oscar-bait-indie vintage. The screens are crowded and you need a pretty hot property to get into the conversation. The fact that Creation doesn’t rise to that level doesn’t say anything about Darwin’s theory of evolution being “too controversial for American audiences” and everything about some pretty banal economic realities of the movie biz.
Posted in media | 1 Comment »
Hunh:
A Russian Internet investment firm has invested $200 million in Facebook, giving the social networking company a cash buffer during the recession and pegging its value at $10 billion.Digital Sky Technologies, which has invested in leading Russian web properties like Mail.ru and Vkontakte.ru, will take a nearly 2 percent stake in Facebook in exchange for preferred stock, the two companies said on Tuesday.
…Digital Sky won because its founders Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger have strong experience running Internet properties in Eastern Europe and Russia, and “a deep, advanced understanding” of social networking technology, Zuckerberg said.
“Ultimately (it was) this deal and my comfort with Yuri and the team,” said Zuckerberg, 25, who founded Facebook in a Harvard University dorm room five years ago.
My immediate thoughts were that Yuri and Gregory must simply be frontmen for Hubertus Bigend, but that’s probably not right. Tumblr is much more Blue Ant’s speed.
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Education reform means a lot of things, but one of the biggest problems is the gap in post-secondary educational opportunities (particularly the affordability of those opportunities) created by the staggering increases in cost for university education. President Obama wants to change this:
President Obama’s health-care goals may be garnering attention, but his higher-education proposals are no less ambitious.
…
At stake is a plan to expand the Pell Grant program, making it an entitlement akin to Medicare and Social Security. Key to the effort is a consolidation of student lending that would give the U.S. Department of Education a near monopoly over the practice — a proposal that has mobilized the private loan industry, which lent $55.3 billion to 6.4 million students in the 2007-2008 school year.
…
He wants to terminate the private Federal Family Education Loan program, the primary source of student loans. Advocates say the move is a formality: The government already effectively controls the program by guaranteeing the loans, paying a special allowance to lenders, and in recent months, buying back loans by the billions from struggling firms.
Shifting all lending authority to the government through its Direct Loan program would save $94 billion over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Obama would use that windfall to expand the Pell Grant program, created in 1965 to cover most tuition costs for low-income students.
The Department of Education would not, actually, get a “near-monopoly” over college loans. Rather, the federal government would simply stop fully backing private loans – private lenders could continue to do whatever they wanted! The college loan industry – a large chunk of which exists as, essentially, a free government giveaway – responds by saying:
“The only reason they’re doing this is the government can make a lot of money,” said Kevin Bruns, executive director of the trade group America’s Student Loan Providers. “Private-sector lending built this entire industry, and now the federal government has piggybacked off of it.”
Kevin Burns, and the people he represents, are selfish jerks. The federal govenment does not “make a lot of money” off of college loans. The federal government is not a business. It is a collective trust that in this case is acting prudently in the specific interests of millions of citizens – in making college afforable for them – and more generally in the interests of all citizens, by making the U.S. a better-educated nation with more competitive workers and a more informed electorate. America’s Student Loan Providers did not build the entire industry, but rather have sucked at the government teat of totally-secured loans for decades, skimming pure profit without risk off the top. They are advocating for their own interests, of course, the “free money for us forever” lobby, but there’s no reason any of the rest of us should support that agenda.
Sen. Ben Nelson (D[ish]-NE) supports their agenda:
“It’s not just thinking about your state,” he said. “I have a fundamental difference in opinion thinking that all student aid ought to come from the government.”
Of course this proposes nothing of the sort – college loan providers are free to continue their business, just with a higher level of risk involved (which is to say in this case, any risk at all). It’s worth noting that Nelson also opposes expanding health care for Americans for similar reasons:
Nelson’s problem, he told CQ, is that the public plan would be too attractive and would hurt the private insurance plans. “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the game,” Nelson said. Including a public option in a health plan, he said, was a “deal breaker.”
Nebraska is of course home to a number of large insurance companies that would stand to lose their sweet business model of “making gobs of money by making sure not to insure sick people.” And it’s further worth noting that, of course,
Nelson’s state is home to Nelnet, a Lincoln-based corporate loan provider that employs 1,000 people and that has contributed generously to his political campaigns.
So that’s fine, too. Just as long as it’s clear that Sen. Nelson favors the narrow interests of one company and their 1000 employees over the future lives and possibilities for millions of Americans and the nation’s long-term economic competitiveness, as well as favoring the interests of several other companies and several other thousands of people over the health and well-being of several tens of millions of Americans who lack health care. Because he has to represent his “constituents.”
Narrowing the gap in educational access is absolutely one of the most important possible steps towards creating a more just, egalitarian society. The G.I. Bill – along with a strong labor movement and a government willing to enforce labor laws – created the United States’ middle class and drove our prosperity in the half-century following WWII, by giving formerly poor people access to good education and good jobs. Similar measures on both fronts would do the same for the beginning of the 21st century.
Posted in education | Tagged politics | Leave a Comment »
Phil Edwards pointed this morning to an excellent article from Inside Higher Ed on the impossibility of keeping up with current scholarship in academia, and asking what the way forward might be:
We have collectively created the equivalent of an academic monsoon over the past three decades, with no change in the forecast for the coming years. Without a major reconsideration of how we share and use information, how we keep up with the field, and how we recognize academic accomplishment, we will continue to add to the floodwaters, all the while spending less attention on whether or not anyone reads our work, listens to our presentations, or appreciates our professional contributions. Academe 2.0 offers tools to build more effective dikes and even to regulate the flow. But we need to realize that the lakes at the end of the bloated academic rivers – our faculty, researchers and students – have finite capacity, in terms of time and ability to assimilate information. Controlling the scholarly input is crucial to ensuring that we actually learn from and about each other, and ensuring that our academic work truly makes a difference.
Hill Taylor notes that the University of Michigan Press is moving away from monograph publishing and towards a digital approach, and that
uses and practices of literacy will change because of this too. Preferences for consumption and organization of such information will drive these new literacies. Of course, policy and pedagogy must recognize this change, driven by digital literacy, and accommodate accordingly.
While I’m not sure if this is a generalizable example, research into online activities does point out one way that we might square these circles. In my current research into tagging and folksonomies, many of the seminal piece of research and commentary – including the coining of the term “folksonomy” itself – occurred not in the pages of a peer-reviewed journal but in self-published and mediated online discussion: blogs, forums, mailing lists. Most of this was inherently dispensible, but some of it has stood the test of time, and what distinguishes the memorable from the forgettable is not the imprimatur of a journal’s nameplate but the usefulness of the information and analysis.
This is not a plea to abandon the peer-reviewed journal process – for the highest quality research, I believe it can and should serve a valuable purpose in disseminating knowledge. Rather, I would suggest that digital monographs and online self-publishing present a potentially better model for the actual exchange and construction of knowledge than a massive conference with an unreadable proceedings – the program referenced in the first piece above ran to 180 pages, never mind any of the papers presented. I am more likely to read, cite, and comment on a piece of scholarship if it’s actually available to me, and pushing out digital monographs via non-DRM’d .pdfs is a better model of accessibility than far-flung conferences with dozens or hundreds of unattendable sessions.
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…New York having been in those days seemingly not a part of the United States but something simultaneously autonomous and interstitially abandoned.
When I first visited New York as an adult (so to speak) at the start of my writing career, it seemed to me that it couldn’t possibly go on, that way. All of it, I suggested to the supposedly futuristically-concerned New Yorkers I was meeting there, would one day be equally unaffordable, post-interstitial. As Jack would soon have it, Regooded. At which suggestion I was invariably recognized as a hick from Hickograd.
But lo.
Not just an I-told-you-so moment, this brings up an important point – every interstitial is followed by a new solidity; every post-____ism concedes its ism the status quo, and acknowledges that it will be, one day, the same as what came before: irrelevant.
This is something to keep in mind during our current transitive, liminal, interstitial moment. Terrible and wonderful things are happening, will happen, but out on the other side of tomorrow things will be different. Whatever else happens, things will stabilize into something, better and worse and mostly else.
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