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``` More notes about education, design, conservatism, and cheap pens.
It's fall, and time again to circulate my how-to's. Following this message I will send out fresh copies of "How to help someone use a computer" and "Advice for undergraduates considering graduate school". Please forward them to everyone who can use them. I'm also hoping to reenlist you in my grandiose project of getting "Networking on the network" into the hands of every graduate student in the world. It is too big to distribute as a plain text message, but its URL is:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/network.html
If you have read "Networking on the network", perhaps you can send a raving testimonial about it to any graduate students you might know.
And it being fall, graduate students are looking for work. If you are hiring new assistant professors, or really any job in the general vicinity of RRE's subject matter that requires a new PhD, send me your job ad (as a plain text message, not as an attachment). I'll send a batch of ads to the list in perhaps the second week of December.
Are you still complaining about spam? Contrary to the best and worst of predictions, the spam problem has not changed appreciably since the FTC cracked down on the online pyramid schemes. Predictions that this enforcement action would have no effect because the scamsters would go offshore have not come true, but then neither have predictions that spam would grow infinitely unless it is crushed altogether. I don't know if the current situation represents a stable supply of spam or whether it represents an equilibrium between increased motivation to supply it and increased measures to suppress it. In any event, please let me encourage you to resume your anti-spam activism. Most of the information in my "How to complain about spam" is still operational:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/spam.html
Although I have not committed to keeping "How to complain about spam" up to date, let me know if you find any outright wrong information in it and I'll fix it. From my own experience, the major focus of the problem right now is in Argentina, where spammers operate on a large scale and ISPs never respond to complaints (or at least to complaints in English). I (and no doubt many others) have written to several of the US ISPs that handle traffic from Argentina, but nothing has happened that I know about. Another focus of the problem in my own experience is an ISP called flash.net, which has failed to suppress some chronic spammers on its system or to respond to numerous messages documenting the problem.
My short article on "Information technology in higher education: The 'global academic village' and intellectual standardization" has now appeared in print, and my home page has a link to a couple of Web versions of it, one public and one proprietary. The public one is:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/global.html
Even though I circulated an early draft of it on this list, I still want to advertise the finished version. It's much better, due mostly to the impetus of the referees' comments. It concerns a phenomenon that I consider very important: the centralizing tendencies of the Internet. You've probably heard that the Internet is history's most powerful force for decentralization, shattering hierarchies etc etc. And that's true sometimes, for some purposes, under some conditions. But mostly it's false, and this article explains very concisely one of the reasons why. Briefly, much of the economic leverage from the Internet comes from economies of scale. Economies of scale require using the same information at many different points in the economy, and this in turn requires making those many points similar enough that the information is meaningful and useful in all of them. In the case of higher education, it means a much higher level of standardization. Standardization need not be a bad thing, and it need not necessarily lead to homogenization. But the scenario that leads from our current situation to a global intellectual monoculture is discouragingly easy to describe, and I describe it in this article.
The general consensus was that my last "What I'm interested in" list of books was too long. So at least we've narrowed down the point of overwhelm to somewhere between 500 and 800 books. For what it's worth, and by popular demand, I have gathered all of my book lists, including some older ones never before seen on this list, into one great huge file:
http://dlis.gseis.ucla.edu/people/pagre/interesting.html
This is a very long (about 500K bytes) Web page listing nearly every book that I have found interesting enough to write down a citation for in the last ten years. I do not necessarily endorse these books, but perhaps you will find something of interest. In fact everyone who has scanned these lists has reported hearing about numerous relevant books that they had never heard about before.
These immense lists of books may strike you as odd. They ought to; they strike me as odd. I just keep looking for a way of working that fits with my values and strengths, and what I've found happens to consist largely of reading everything and noticing the patterns. Having made a routine of keeping lists of interesting books, the effort is really not that great. And I find the lists themselves interesting in all sorts of emergent ways. For example, they make evident what lousy systems we have for matching people with the books they ought to be reading. In the idealized neoclassical market, this would not be a problem: every reader would automatically know what book out of the entire universe of books he or she most wanted to read at any given moment. Lots of bad books would never be written because their authors would know that the optimal assignment of people to books, including all of the other books that have not yet been written, would not provide them with an adequate audience. In order to appreciate fully the wonder of this hypothetically effortless matching of people and books, it may be necessary to know a little math, specifically a set of equations that were first written down by Cournot in maybe the 1830's. Or it may not. The point is, the real world is very different from the economists' ideal, and a quick scan of one of my book lists -- lists that would not exist if an eccentric college professor hadn't invested a lot of uncompensated effort over a long period to put them together -- can provide a glimpse of just how different it is.
I am supposed to be an expert on privacy, and in that capacity I try gamely to follow all of the news on the subject. But it's just about impossible. I can be taken by surprise by something as big as my own bank's routine sharing of customer spending patterns with marketers. So imagine the situation of someone who has neither the expertise nor the time to keep track of such things. This came home to me a couple of months ago when, for the first time in my life, I got a membership card at a video rental store. I've seen plenty of rented videos in my life, of course, but the actual renting has always been on someone else's card. I had agreed to write a short paper about "Enemy of the State", however, and so I needed to watch it twenty times on video. Marching into Blockbuster and Hollywood, I felt like I was the last human being who needed the process of renting a video explained to me. But when it actually came time to fill out the forms, I felt a strange calm. This calm, I realized, was due to the Video Privacy Protection Act (18 USC 2710), the notoriously special-purpose American law that prevents video rental stores from revealing who has been renting what. In my daily life I give out at least half as much personal information as any normal person, and 95% of the time, I've realized, I feel that queasy feeling that I don't know where the information is going. Now that I was protected for once in my life by a simple, straightforward, loophole-free privacy law, I finally understood on an emotional level the reason for such laws, and I envied the Europeans and other halfways civilized people who have them.
In response to my wild-eyed proposal for a reflexive approach to information technology in higher education, one person complained that little evidence exists to believe that online communities of practice can be made to work on any scale. Hearing this, I was struck all over again by the insidiousness of the concept of cyberspace -- the idea that the Internet is a parallel reality and not something deeply embedded in the real world. The thing is, I never said anything about online communities of practice. What I said was,
My radical proposal that every community of practice in the world make its conceptual frameworks explicit, and that we use the Internet to organize these communities around a digital library of XML documents that store a vast archive of all of the cases that the community's members have analyzed.
In other words, every community of practice is going to be defined by the conceptual framework it uses, and we should give every community of practice a digital library to collect documents in which students apply those concepts to cases. I didn't say anything about whether the communities of practice meet online or offline. In fact I think that each community of practice should find its own complicated set of practices: some entirely online, some entirely offline, and some that combine the two. A community might have regional groups that meet on Thursday nights, annual conferences that gather in a different city each year, classes that meet one weekend a month on a university campus and ten evenings a month online, internships where the interns both work in physical offices and engage in structured activities in chat rooms, and so on. The dichotomy of online versus offline is most unfortunate when it directs attention to two very simple points in a very large space of design options.
Another objection to my wild-eyed proposal, however, did make sense. I said this:
Shallow reflections on the existing practice will give us shallow technologies that simply pave the cow paths, doing just what we're doing now only with a lot of extraneous hardware.
I shouldn't have. "Paving the cow paths" is an epithet that is best known from the rhetoric of reengineering guru Michael Hammer. You will recall that reengineering was an ignominious failure, and that the traumatic experience of reengineering has inoculated many business people against totalistic "throw it all out and start over again from scratch" types of management fads. When I complained about shallow reflections on existing practice, it probably sounded like I agreed with this sort of totalism, when in fact my point was subtly different, indeed the opposite. I think that the Internet changes things not by creating much that is new, but by amplifying things that already exist. The choice is simply what you want to amplify. There is plenty about today's university that I would not want to amplify, and my point is that superficial reflection will at best amplify the whole package -- the bad along with the good. I was going for a deep analysis of what is really good about a university education, so that we could amplify that and not all of the accidental stuff around it. I probably didn't succeed, but that was the idea.
In other words, there is a sense in which paving the cow paths is a good thing. After all, my correspondent pointed out, Boston -- the epitome of the paved-cow-path city -- is much more liveable than most of the designed-from-scratch cities where everything is laid out in a sprawling grid. You don't need a car in Boston, for one thing. There was wisdom to the cow paths. The point, I hope, is not that we uncritically accept the cow paths, assuming in the classically antirational conservative style that they must necessarily have had more wisdom than we could have today. Nor should we automatically ignore the past and what it has to teach -- doing so, as we all know, will condemn us to repeat it. The point is that serious design, and especially the serious redesign-in-place of institutions, requires a kind of reflection that reaches down below the ugly surfaces to the positive essence of the institution. You'd better hope that the institution has a positive essence, because your redesign is going to amplify something. You may have to reach to find it. The point is, you do not have a choice.
Here is the quote of the week:
Several times companies have called up and said basically: "we have this ad campaign planned. It is $20 million. We have already shot the commercial and booked the air time. But we have discovered our Web site is no good. What should we do?" The answer is, you are sort of doomed.
-- Jakob Nielsen, NY Times, 11/2/99
You may recall in the early days of Internet hype, we all went around saying that the Internet is not like television, and that the Internet would make television obsolete. But now that the revolution is here, now that multizillions of dollars are being spent on Internet commerce start-ups, many if not most of those dollars are going to television. The venture capitalists who are parting with this money all share the same theory: that brand is everything in Internet commerce, that first- mover advantages are overwhelming, and that therefore if you do not want to spend $20 million on a brand-building ad campaign in the 1999 holiday season then you should just give up now.
The, ahem, quality of a lot of those ads would make a good topic for another time. But for now I want to focus on the economics. Should we feel just a little chagrined that it's television where those bucks are being spent? Okay, you say, this is the transition: we're using television to kill television. But does anyone believe that? We have discovered something important in the five-plus years since Internet hype got going, and that something can be summarized in three words: economies of scale. Just about everything that goes into a Web-based electronic commerce business is a fixed cost that has to be distributed across a large number of customers. If you have two sites that cost $10m each, and site A has 1 million customers and site B has 100,000 customers, then site A only needs to recover $10 per capita on top of the cost of the goods, whereas site B needs to recover $100 per capita. That's an overwhelming competitive advantage for A. It follows that the name of the game is gathering a large audience for your site. But where to get that audience? Television networks (and movie studios) have faced the economies-of-scale logic for decades, and as a result they are basically giant machines for assembling audiences. They are still much bigger audience-assembling machines than anything that is happening on the Internet, and in fact the biggest Internet companies are increasingly run by people who learned the audience-assembling trade in the traditional media -- a trend predicted right on this list by Dan Schiller in June 1997 . This is why it's wrong to think of the Internet as a competitor to television. At least insofar as it is a place where information goods are sold, the Internet and television are part of the same system.
In my last few notes I have investigated the rhetoric of some of the more extreme proponents of technology in higher education. This is not because I oppose technology in higher education, or because I support it, but rather because I want to open up a middle ground that is based on realism and analysis rather than on simplistic dichotomies. Some of this reflection was provoked by the response to the paper summary by Rob Kling and Noriko Hara that I circulated on this list, and that caused quite the uproar on the Internet. I recently had an chance to see Hara present this work at a conference, and I came to understand one more reason why communication on this subject so often fails.
You will recall that Kling and Hara's paper is an ethnography of one distance education class. Although it did not (and probably could not) come across in the brief summary, the full paper consists of a quite thoughtful and subtle description of various things that went wrong in the course. When Hara presented this material at the conference, however, one of the questioners said something like this: "Coming as I do from the biomedical tradition, I cannot see how you can possibly claim to generalize from one single case, and even if you did want to generalize you should have chosen a more representative case, or at least a more sympathetic case, such as a case where the teacher was experienced in teaching distance education courses". I can see how this person perceived Hara's talk the way he did. Someone from an ethnographic background would know perfectly well that Kling and Hara were not trying to generalize from a single case. They would know that the purpose of ethnography is not to generalize to every case but rather to develop the concepts that are required to describe a single case in great depth. Someone from a biomedical background, by contrast, is trained to generalize. The whole point of biomedical research is to evaluate generalizations like "treatment X helps people with condition Y". It's important to evaluate such generalizations, given the emotional and pecuniary incentives that very often exist to believe such things whether they are true or not. From the biomedical perspective, "X" can perfectly well be "distance learning" and "Y" can perfectly well be "wanting to learn psychology" (or whatever).
I am pleased to report that the biomedical guy was perfectly polite about what he evidently took to be an appalling lapse in reason and method. But I can easily imagine others being less polite, especially when they are typing messages on the Internet rather than addressing face-to-face an obviously very nice person like Noriko Hara. This culture clash, basically between qualitative and quantitative styles of research, is widesrpead. I am sorry to say that I have contributed to it myself. But if higher education is going to adopt advanced information technology in an intelligent way, and not a mindless way that is disastrous for the institution and the society, then everyone needs to get along. Here is a rule of thumb. Qualitative methods are good at questions and quantitative methods are good at answers. Every application of every technology has a life cycle. Early in the life cycle you need to do qualitative studies so you know what the questions are, and later in the life cycle you need to do quantitative studies so you know what the answers are. Bad qualitative studies either fail to ask new questions or pretend to offer new answers of a generalizing sort. Bad quantitative studies ask bad questions or extract answers that their numbers don't support. Each side is necessary to keep the other side honest, but that won't happen if each side projects its own presuppositions onto the other.
It being early days for most uses of information technology in higher education, we need lots of qualitative studies. NSF has been good about requiring a wide variety of technical projects to include money for anthropologists to evaluate them, and some very good work has resulted. No institution should be making any big public claims for its use of technology unless it at least recruited an anthropology grad student to hang out and interview everyone. And when people do make quantitative claims for the efficacy of technology-intensive teaching methods, they should be held to the same standards of research as anyone else -- see . Serious discussion of these matters has hardly begun, and it is badly overdue.
A conservative society is a society of orders and classes. It is a culture in which people routinely defer, and are expected to defer, to their betters. This is what conservatism has always meant, and it is what it still means. But you wouldn't know it to listen to the radio, or to read the outpourings of the hundreds of conservative pundits who dominate the media. That's because conservativism has better public relations than it used to. And the key to public relations, in the words of the CPUSA's cultural policy, is always to lead the people by a half-step, not getting too far in front of them. The main problem that conservatives face is that the lower orders have become accustomed to challenging their betters, and have developed a whole elaborate vocabulary with which to formulate such challenges. This is why the public relations directors of conservativism have organized a language war: a very systematic project of taking back words that have gotten out of their control.
The techniques of this war are endless, but one way to slice them is through a distinction between two categories of epithets, transient and permanent. Transient epithets are words that have traditionally been used to criticize conservatives, but are now relentlessly and sophistically applied to liberals instead. These in turn fall into two categories: words traditionally used to criticize the aristocratic rich (e.g., "elites", "authoritarian", "double standards") and words traditionally used to criticize conservative ministers (e.g., "pious", "sanctimonious", "indoctrination"). These epithets are transient because it will one day be necessary to reverse their meaning. You will hear people say things like, "You need some kind of elites, so you should have the ones who are moral." In fact you already hear people saying (if you listen to the right stations) things like, "It's inevitable to have have some kind of indoctrination, so it should be indoctrination into the truth". The transient epithets have several purposes. They serve to portray the rebellious lower sorts and their supporters as hypocrites. Their sophistry tends to discredit the epithets themselves, as well as the people they are applied to. They enable one to engage in projective aggression by directing negative energy at them while telling oneself that it is they who are directing the negative energy at us. And they cause confusion, thus stopping or at least slowing down any attempts to organize a response.
Permanent epithets are ones that are used to stigmatize dissent from the judgements of one's betters. A conservative society requires a bottomless reservoir of these. The permanent epithets always start as stereotypes, constructed for example by adducing a long series of frivolous lawsuits, foolish rebellions against authority, ridiculous objections to stereotypes, overreactions to hate speech, or whatever. They are always vague, so that one cannot defend oneself against them. And they are arbitrary, being applied selectively according to double standards. Thus, for example, people are now labeled "victims" in a pejorative sense of the term, but only if they happen to be victims of conservatives. Victims of liberals, for example those oppressed by government regulation, are still considered victims in good standing. The very accusation is so confusing that most people's minds turn off. Even liberal intellectuals cannot clearly explain what the problem is. Another example is "political correctness", a brilliant bit of rhetoric whose workings would require a whole treatise unto itself. What's so brilliant is that the term is used in two different ways: absolutely any insistence on decent behavior can be labeled as political correctness and thereby assimilated to wild stereotypes of Stalinist political repression, but so can absolutely any example of decent behavior. As a result, the very act of (say) recycling trash or avoiding ethnic slurs -- in fact, any good deed at all -- can be made to sound like the worst evil, but only if the person issuing the accusation feels like doing so. In either case, the accusation is so vague and arbitrary that there are no grounds on which one can defend oneself against it.
Here is an example of the arbitrariness. A few years ago I received, as did many others, a long anonymous letter of anti-Semitic filth. Before descending into the usual garbage about Jews casting their lascivious eyes on Gentile children, however, it presented a letter- perfect speech in the idiom of contemporary conservativism, with the Jews being cast as politically correct victims and all that. Take any tirade against "liberals" and simply substitute "Jews" and you would get the first half of this letter. As such it made no more sense, and no less, than any of Rush Limbaugh's monologues. Now, does that mean that conservatives are anti-Semitic? No. What it does mean, however, is that modern conservative rhetoric is completely arbitrary. If conservatives choose not to apply their rhetoric to Jews, that is simply a choice that they have made. Nothing in the logic of their discourse rules the Jews either in or out as targets of abuse, simply because no such logic exists. That is arbitrariness. But it is not sloppiness. It is not an accident. To the contrary, arbitrariness is the central principle of a conservative society, which holds that social order is best maintained by allowing the better sorts to rule arbitrarily over the lesser sorts.
It will be argued that today's conservative movement is more complex, and indeed it is. It is an alliance between conservatives in the traditional sense and a variety of other tendencies, for example the libertarians who have somehow persuaded themselves that their agenda of freedom will be promoted by working with authoritarians. When the votes are finally counted, however, the conservative movement really is conservative. It aims to restore a society of orders and classes. That is how it talks, and that -- and not anything about freedom -- is the only way to make sense of the laws that it is actually passing.
Having reached my actuarial halfway point of 39 this year, my mid-life crisis is under way. It is a new experience: I'm old. I have clear memories of Walter Conkrite reporting Viet Cong body counts from the DMZ in 1965. Oldies stations play songs that were playing on the car radio when I was taking driver's ed. I sent my first e-mail on the ARPANET when it had fewer than 200 hosts. I know what morning was like before leaf blowers were invented. I can remember, back before spelling checkers, when the English language had two distinct words, "principal" and "principle". I cannot imagine any healthy person wanting to eat three-quarters of what people in my culture actually do eat -- and I live in Los Angeles. When I turned 30 I noticed that people who were 40 no longer looked old; now people who are 60 no longer look old. This is not good.
Most amazingly of all, however, I can remember what the Internet was like a few years ago, before the successive waves of technology mania really got rolling, each of them sweeping away all memory of the ones before it. I remember that until early 1997, a prominent feature of Internet culture was the ability of e-mail messages to get forwarded from one person to another and thereby to propagate all around the net. This phenomenon motivated me to publish my how-to essay on the design of online political action alerts in the first issue of The Network Observer. It later became the object of much loathing on the part of private firms who feared that these messages would get out of control and ruin their reputations; you may recall the questionable strategies, circa late 1996, by which companies whose practices had been questioned in this way -- Lexis-Nexis, for example -- began to stereotype Internet users as people who spread rumors.
Has anybody else noticed that those days are gone? Messages no longer propagate widely on the Internet. All of the hoaxes have died out. Nobody has ever again done anything approaching CPSR's e-mail campaigns against Lotus Marketplace in 1990 and the Clipper chip in 1994. Why is this? The proximal cause of the problem, in my view, is the tendency of new-generation mail-reading programs to mutilate messages when you try to forward them. They indent the forwarded messages with >'s, they wrap them around to some arbitrary number of text columns, and so on. A message that gets forwarded more than once or twice is now guaranteed to be unintelligible. But if that's the proximal cause, is there also a distal cause? Here's the conspiracy theory: companies that felt threatened by propagating e-mail messages brought influence to bear on the companies (often the very same companies) that produce the most widely used mail-reading programs. Think about it: people hate those >'s, but they don't go away. Why?
I'm not sure whether I really believe the conspiracy theory. I don't have any particular evidence for it. But let's not let the phenomenon go unremarked. In particular, let us note that this example suggests a way that the Internet can be regulated: if a given phenomenon of online culture does not happen unless a critical mass of users can participate in it, and if the phenomenon requires specific technical capabilities, then that phenomenon can be regulated by outlawing those capabilities, which will prevent them from appearing in mass-market software products.
Many claims have been made for hypertext. Serious people have told me in serious tones that hypertext marks the end of a stultifying epoch in which readers are coerced into reading in an artificial linear way and the beginning of a new era of liberation when readers are empowered to read things in any order they like. This is, inter alia, part of the transition from "teacher-centered" to "student-centered" learning that you hear so much about. (You may think that I am exaggerating the rhetoric of the hypertext enthusiasts, but I swear that I am not.) But I personally see little value in hypertext. Among other things it stultifyingly provides only a few top-down choices of the passages one is allowed to read next, as opposed to the liberatory infinity of choices that are offered at one's very fingertips by a book. More basically, I think that experience has shown that it's hard to write much of anything in a genuinely nonlinear way. One recurring problem is that hypertexts, such as Web-based instruction manuals, include lots of links into the middle of a text -- but the links jump over the passages where the crucial words that are used in the middle of the text were defined. So I might click on the link for "How to create a new directory", only to be met with "Issue a 'create' command" and no explanation of what a command is or how to issue one. Yes, of course, they can fix that problem. But the way they can fix it is to linearize the text. I'm not saying that we should ban hypertext, but we should get a sense of proportion. Hypertext is a tool, and the question of what people will make of it can only be answered in a particular context.
Apple lives and dies on industrial design. So naturally I was looking forward to using one of the new iMacs. Imagine my surprise when I did. As I've explained here before, the great danger of industrial design is that the industrial designers tend to be evaluated by their peers on what their designs look like, rather than on what it is like to live with them. That's why designers have been giving one another prizes for decades for designing chairs that nobody could ever really sit in (see Galen Cranz, Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design, Norton, 1998). The iMacs that I've used, sad to say, suffer some clear examples of this problem. I think they look ridiculous, but I'm not an artist so what do I know. What I do know is that *it makes no sense to have a round mouse*. Why? If it's round then you can't orient it without looking at it! And if you can't orient the mouse on the desktop then the mouse cursor on the screen will move in some unpredictable relation to the direction that your hand is moving. Really now. And then there's the miniscule Escape key on the iMac keyboard. Lots of programs, Emacs for example, require that one use the Escape key constantly. But it's not possible to hit the iMac's Escape key without slowing way down and pressing precisely, so that one really enters an Escape and not one of the neighboring keys. I'm as impressed as anyone with Apple's doubled market share, which is an incredible indictment of the last couple of managements there, but I'm not buying any stock yet.
Here's my scenario for the end of Moore's Law. Let us stipulate that no technology barriers exist to the miniaturization of computer chips, and that it will be technically possible to build microprocessors with brain-like numbers of connections on something like the schedule that seeming lunatics like Ray Kurzweil predict. The question is whether the world can digest those chips. Even as we shout from the rooftops the exponential increase in the numbers of transistors on a chip, we don't give nearly as much press to a countervailing phenomenon: the exponential growth of the fixed costs of producing those chips. A new microprocessor fabrication plant costs something like $2 billion to construct and has a useful lifetime of perhaps 18 months. That money is spent before the first chip is made, and whole fixed cost must be distributed across all of the people who buy the chips. If the trend continues then fab plants will soon enough cost trillions instead of billions.
Those costs will not be recovered unless we can find several orders of magnitude more uses for high-powered computer chips than we have now. Yet many people are perfectly happy with 250MHz processors, and in fact I just got done paying money for a Macintosh Powerbook 2400 with an 180MHz processor because it was powerful enough for my purposes and a lot more portable and less doofy-looking than an iBook. That's a real problem. Of course, once we figure out how to get high-bandwidth data connections out to 100M homes, we will have a mass market for a lot of computation-intensive video applications. George Gilder's 1990 scenarios of general-purpose digital machines replacing television sets might even happen. But that is not going to happen soon, and even then we are only talking about low numbers of billions of chips. So my scenario is that the exponential growth of processor power is self-limiting because of sub-exponential growth in demand for high-end processing. Other scenarios are possible, of course. We might keep on inventing exponentially many uses for the exponentially greater processor power. Or new fabrication technologies might be discovered that require sub-exponential growth in fixed fabrication costs. Place your bets.
You've probably heard by now that the poor sad Los Angeles Times, once an adequate newspaper known for its thoughtful features, is being run by extremely stupid people who do not understand what a newspaper is. Their supreme leader is literally a former breakfast cereal executive. Now he has hired as LA Times publisher the stunningly clueless Kathryn M. Downing, who was recently discovered to have countenanced a deal whereby the newspaper devoted a whole obsequious issue of the LA Times Magazine to the new Staples Center and then split the profits on the issue with (!) the new Staples Center. Former publisher Otis Chandler broke a long silence to denounce this amazing bargain, to which Downing responded as follows:
Otis Chandler is angry and bitter and he is doing a great disservice to this paper. And that's too bad because when he was publisher, he did wonderful things.
As part of my new campaign to confront professionally twisted uses of language, I want to draw attention to the first six words of Downing's quote: "Otis Chandler is angry and bitter". Notice how they play with English grammar. They admit two readings: (1) "Otis Chandler is angry and bitter about the mess that his successors have made of his life's work" and (2) "Otis Chandler is an angry and bitter man, independently of any objective reality". The quote "works" by insinuating (2) while not outright denying the truth, i.e., (1). It is a special case of the subrational manipulation of language that I have been describing in recent messages. I call it "separation": breaking the association between two concepts, a cause (the behavior of the new management) and an effect (OC's feelings), in such a way that the effect is made to seem like a perverse inner state of the individual with no real cause, and doing so covertly through ambiguous language whose agenda is obvious but can still be denied.
This trick, it should be noted, is distinct from another common trick that on the surface seems related: applying the word "disgruntled" to a fired employee who issues accusations against his or her former employer. In that case, separation of (claimed) cause and effect is only the first step, the second step being the use of ambiguity to deniably insinuate a new cause.
For now we'll just name these phenomena. But soon their deeper logic will become apparent.
The world consists of two kinds of people: people who understand the point of writing about cheap pens, and people who do not. The people in the latter category are strange, but they're allowed on the list anyway. Be nice to them.
Speaking of cheap pens, I want to thank Mark Warschauer for sending me some pleasantly wide-bodied gift-shop pens from Cairo -- they're covered with Egyptian tomb inscriptions and prominently marked "Micro Ceramic Pen Ares 0.5 Korea", a cultural combination that will raise no eyebrows in Los Angeles -- and Frank Ritter for sending me a Papermate Gel-Writer (which had already been in the mail when I found it on my own) and a Penn State pen that was unusually good for a "stick" ballpoint. Thanks also to Henry Lieberman for reminding me about the Micron Pigma, a plastic-tip pen that comes in sizes from .05mm to .7mm. I used Pigmas for a while when I was first experimenting with cheap pens several years ago, but they're not for me. You have to write very gently with them or you'll mash the point. I do find them useful, however, as a reminder that people can be different from me.
In Sofia the other day I paid a street vendor a couple of new levs for a (take a deep breath) Beifa Free Ink Roller 0.5 Be-A3, which declares that it is made of "Materials from Germany.Swiss", whatever that means. Boy is this pen a loser. It's a cylindrical-tip liquid-ink pen of more or less the standard design, except that writing with it is like trying to write with an X-Acto knife. You know how the X-Acto knife keeps deciding that it wants to go off and cut a nice straight line in some different direction from the one you had in mind? That's what the Beifa is like. I find myself going back to redraw at least one letter in every other word, but then the pen is delivering so much ink that the newly redrawn letter gets swollen and the whole thing looks like a mess, yet a somehow a very precisely drawn mess. I bought this thing about a block from the old Communist Party headquarters, a truly strange building that looks like an aircraft carrier cutting down the middle of a city street. I gotta say I feel for the people in Sofia.
In case you're wondering, when I end up with a loser of a pen, I don't throw it out. Sometimes I give it to someone who is not a cheap pen connoisseur, but usually I keep writing with it until it's done, which with a lot of these pens isn't such a long time.
We're still looking for a source for the recommended Zebra Zeb-Roller DX7. We've had a sighting at Staples, but I haven't been able to confirm it. If you locate a source of Zeb-Rollers, do let me know.
Finally, the mystery of the advanced gel pen technology is starting to affect productivity. Despite what you may have heard, the technology probably does not come from extraterrestrials. Can someone please do a patent search? It makes sense to start with Pilot, whose G-1 is an excellent example of whatever this technology is. The main question, indeed the central design question for all of these cheap pens, is how the ink gets chased down toward the point as you write with it. Does it involve a vacuum, or what?
Have a look at . I do not know if this person's claims are true, and I am mentioning his URL with some misgivings. His claim is essentially that if Microsoft were to account for all of the stock options it has distributed to its employees then it would be insolvent. He writes like a crackpot, so maybe he is one. I don't know. What's interesting is why his claim is so plausible in the first place. You might be aware of a battle that has been going on for some time now about the accounting standards for stock options. It is an obscure matter, to be sure, but it is crucial for computer companies, many of whose books would look very bad indeed if they had to put the value of those options -- which can be priced perfectly well -- down on their balance sheets as current compensation to their employees. Some accountants have been proposing that firms be required to do just that, and the computer industry has been working very hard to prevent any such rule from being adopted. As anybody who reads the business pages carefully knows, there is a book to be written about the financial history of the computer industry -- in fact, AOL would be an even better starting place than Microsoft. Maybe that will happen now that a judge has made it official that computer companies have to obey the law like everyone else. At which point it will be possible to evaluate quite a few interesting claims.
Some URL's.
The Radical Impossibility of Teaching http://www.eciad.bc.ca/~rburnett/rad.html
article on universities "leveraging their brands" http://www.thestandard.com/articles/display/0,1449,7122,00.html?01
proceedings of Int'l Conference on Privacy and Personal Data Protection http://www.pco.org.hk/conproceed.html
Are you a better driver? Insurer's device proves it http://www.cleveland.com/news/pdnews/metro/l25box.ssf
Networks for People Conference and Digital Divide Summit http://www.ntia.doc.gov/
UNext ("we deliver ... superior human capital") http://www.unext.com/
University Access http://www.universityaccess.com/
Proceedings of Int'l Conference on Privacy and Personal Data Protection http://www.pco.org.hk/conprocced.html
Social and Economic Implications of IT Bibliographic Data Base http://srsweb.nsf.gov/it_site/index.htm
How the Internet Ruined San Francisco http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/10/28/internet/
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