Jam Today

Monday March 15, 2004

Al-Qaeda's Residual Capability

Mark Kleiman says, in an update to his post on 11-M, that "[t]he clear implication of this attack for the US that al-Qaeda is still capable of mounting something major." It seems to me that his emphasis is misplaced.

I don't normally post on current events. It's too easy to look foolish doing so (and I'll avoid making links from this sentence). But in this case I do want to be somewhat contrarian.

Since 9/11, al-Qaeda has had two and a half years to plan, prepare and execute an attack. The attack they have finally mounted is trivial compared to their previous attacks. I don't want to minimize the shock and grief from 11-M, but it must be conceded that it suffers from comparison with 9/11. 9/11 required suicidal execution; 11-M required operatives who were willing to get on a train, drop a prepared backpack or two and then get back off within a two-minute scheduled stop. 9/11 required flight trained operatives; 11-M required probably a single bomb maker and a few mules. 9/11 involved considerable expense; 11-M was probably fairly cheap. The targets on 9/11 were internationally known and internationally resonant: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, probably CIA Headquarters. Atocha station is scarcely known outside Spain; the other two stations scarcely known outside Madrid. A full wedge of the Pentagon was burnt out and took a full year, with crews working flat out, to restore. The WTC was completely destroyed. Material damage in the Spanish attack was a few dozen railroad cars. By great good luck, the death toll from 9/11 was no more than 3,000. The death toll from 11-M will remain in the low hundreds. It is not surprising that many people at first assumed 11-M was committed by ETA. Its scale was larger than previous ETA attacks, but it was the same sort of scope. It was not immediately obvious it was an al-Qaeda attack because its scope and ambitions were so much smaller than previous al-Qaeda attacks.

On the one hand, this is a good thing. Al-Qaeda is less capable than it was. This is undoubtedly a result of the war against the Taliban. They have become comparable to other terrorist groups without a state to back them. On the other hand, it widens the risk.

If I'd been asked, a couple of weeks ago, to come up with a likely al-Qaeda target list within the US, I'd have come up with a fairly small list in at most six cities: Wall Street, Times Square and the NASDAQ building, Rockefeller Center, Black Rock, maybe the Empire State building; maybe the Sears Tower; Disneyland; Disneyworld; the Pentagon (again), CIA HQS, the White House, the Capitol; McDill AFB (Central Command HQS and Special Operations Command HQS). All internationally known, all internationally resonant. 9/11 equivalents. A successful attack on any of these would be propaganda of the deed indeed.

But after 11-M, one must ask if al-Qaeda is up to these targets. It didn't, after all, try to attack the Spanish Ministry of Defense or the nearby Stadium, for these would have been defended. It blew up commuter trains in obscure commuter stations. It is a cliche, but this was a cowardly and despicable act. As a gesture, it doesn't rate. Again, I don't want to minimize the very real pain and grief suffered by the victims, their families and friends, Madriders, all Spaniards, and indeed all of us, but we must evaluate the attack coldly. And it was, as opposed to 9/11, a pointless attack. This time, there were no shots of rejoicing Palestinians.

If al-Qaeda has lowered its ambitions, paradoxically, more of us may be at risk. If it can't bring itself to attack defended targets, then the local mall becomes more dangerous. Precisely because it can no longer mount something major, it may vent its frustrations in meaningless random minor attacks. And more of us are vulnerable to those than are vulnerable to internationally resonant major attacks.

(2004-03-15 20:52:55.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Monday February 09, 2004

Books The Educated Person Should Have Read

Over at Crooked Timber, Harry Brighouse set us the task of coming up with candidates for those books, published since 1970, that should be on a list of 100 Books Everyone Should Have Read. At writing. there are over 110 comments. Two of them are mine. This post is to elaborate on those comments.

1. The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Luigi Cavalli-Sforza. Cavalli-Sforza changed the way we think about population history. This was a genuine paradigm change: one that everyone should read about. There are nowadays popularizations (one of them by Cavalli-Sforza himself). But it seems to me to be worth listing the original.

2. Inward Bound, Abraham Pais. A record of a paradigm change. The history of particle physics from 1895 to 1983, by someone who was involved in it. The second part (post-1945) is labeled a memoir, rather than a history. One of Brighouse's commenters listed Feynman's QED. Reading QED will tell you what the theory is. Reading Pais will tell you how the theory came to be.

3. The Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias. Cheating a bit, since Elias wrote it before the war, I think. But it wasn't published until 1978. Elias changed the way we look at early modern European history. He's been argued with, of course. Some hold him refuted. But you can't understand the argument unless you've read him.

4. The Face of Battle, John Keegan. Another "change the way we look at something" book. Military history divides into pre-Keegan and post-Keegan. (Though even nowadays, there's an awful lot of pre-Keegan military history around.)

5. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, Zhores A. Medvedev. Technically outside Brighouse's time period, since it was published in 1969. But Lysenkoism was probably the worst irruption of political pressure into working scientific institutions ever. It remains a cautionary tale. And one that all working scientists (and those who support working scientists) need to keep in their minds. Politicians always want to pressure scientists. They want the results they want. Trofim Denisovitch gave them the results they wanted and destroyed Soviet Biology in the process (and destroyed individual Soviet biologists, too).

6. On The Shoulders Of Giants, Robert K. Merton. Further outside the time period: published in 1965 (though my "Vicennial Edition" was, of course, published in 1985). OTSOG has been described as Romantic Scholarship. It's scholarship gone mad. And it's wonderful. I think of it as a test of an educated person: if you don't fling it across the room, you've derived something from your education.

7. The Essential Gombrich. Cheating. Because I couldn't pick an individual book by Gombrich and most of them are outside Brighouse's time period, anyway. But he is essential, and you should have read him.

The interesting part, though, of this assignment is what I and others left out. One of the major lacunae is poetry. Larkin's High Windows was mentioned. Adrienne Rich. Elizabeth Bishop. But that was it. I like Hecht, Hollander, Gavin Ewart (one of these things is not like the others). But I wouldn't say that every educated person should have read them. Maybe Christopher Logue's War Music falls into the category. It shows, I think, that modern (post-1970) poetry-reading, perhaps writing, is fractured. The same thing seems true of plays. No-one, I think, nominated a modern play as something that had to be read. No Caryl Churchill. No Stoppard.

The books people listed were mostly anglophone. Calvino and Calasso were the only Italians. Raymond Aron's Memoires the only French (though there were a couple of attempts to smuggle in Proust). That's surprising.

(2004-02-09 23:43:46.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday January 30, 2004

The Sound You Hear Is The Establishment Closing Ranks

Poor David Kelly. He probably thought he was part of the Establishment. It turns out he wasn't. Hutton was almost as hard on him as on the BBC. He was just an expert.

(2004-01-30 21:48:50.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday January 25, 2004

Meaning and Aesthetics.

We went to see the new Altman movie, The Company, yesterday. It strikes me that what one thinks the movie is about depends on what one thinks of the merits of the Desrosiers ballet.

For those who haven't seen the movie, let me explain.

Two choreographers are credited as performers: Lar Lubovitch and Robert Desrosiers. During the movie, we see each of them rehearse a ballet and we see much of the ballet being performed. The Lubovitch is a pas de deux to My Funny Valentine. It is a fine, elegiac piece which serves as the vehicle by which the heroine, Ry, gets a featured role. The Desrosiers is a much larger piece to a commissioned score. We do not see it whole, but it has six or seven scenes and at one point we overhear the stage manager giving light cue 930. The Lubovitch is simple. A bare stage, a cellist and pianist, a grey dress. The Desrosiers is complex. Two mechanical sets, smoke, multiple fantastic costumes (Ry's parents in the audience ask "Is that her?").

If one assesses the Desrosiers as empty, bereft of ideas, bereft of feelings; whose emptiness is camouflaged by its theatricality: the costumes, the sets, the lighting (this was my reaction, but I can adduce a scene between Alec and Mr. A to support that it's Altman's intention); then, I think, one is going to take the movie as showing the capriciousness of success in art. The process by which the two ballets come to be is the same. The movie shows us parallels in their rehearsals. Well meaning, talented people give their all and sometimes lightning strikes, sometimes it doesn't.

But I read a review which took the Desrosiers ballet as a symbol for Altman's movies. The process of creation looked aleatory, but at the end, something pretty good emerged. This led to an identification of Mr. A with Robert Altman (as well as with Gerald Arpino). Clearly, such a reading requires that one think the Desrosiers ballet good.

There is, of course, much more to the movie than this. It is, as usual for Altman, thick movie making. There are all sorts of stubs of stories that the filmmaker could have pursued, but chose not to. Stories of characters; stories of ballet-making. But it is more focused than most Altmans.

Of Altman's previous movies, the one it reminded me most of was McCabe and Mrs. Miller. A sunnier mood, though.

(2004-01-25 21:12:57.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Wednesday December 31, 2003

Happy New Year

Ah yes. The holidays. I have just enough time before we go off to wish everyone a happy new year. We're headed off to the Kennedy Center to see Cooking With Elvis (which the KenCen is very nervous about: For Mature Audiences Only) and then to sip overpriced Champagne in the Grand Foyer until we're assured that the year really is over.

Thy wars brought nothing about
Thy lovers were all untrue
'Tis well an old [year] is out

Dryden was right about the wars, anyway. Perhaps the new year will bring us better. Let us hope so.

(2003-12-31 17:30:59.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Monday December 15, 2003

Fallingwater And Servants

I was rereading Terry Teachout's piece on Fallingwater. Especially his summary:

All these cavils notwithstanding, I think it would be a profoundly soul-satisfying experience to live in Fallingwater—if you were rich enough to afford a staff of servants

and I tried to envisage how Fallingwater would work with servants.

The Kaufmanns brought four servants to Fallingwater. Two are identified: a chauffeur and a cook. Most likely the other two were maids, assuming the chauffeur valetted Mr. Kaufmann. The servants quarters were above the carports. The carports have been converted to a theater in which visitors are given a pitch on the work of the Conservancy and Fallingwater. The servants quarters have been converted to offices for the Conservancy. So one doesn't get to see the servants quarters on the regular tour.

But the existence of servants quarters is the only concession Fallingwater makes to the existence of servants. Fallingwater is not built for servants.

Fallingwater has one great room for day use. It functions as morning room, dining room and drawing room. So servants are in it laying the table as you gather for meals, clearing the table as you relax over coffee and drinks, cleaning up the debris of the evening while you're eating breakfast, and so on and so on. Servants are constantly working in the room while the family is in it. No matter how much one trusts one's servants, surely one doesn't want them overhearing every conversation.

I did not see a separate kitchen entrance. It appears that the kitchen is only accessible from the great room. The cook must schlep the kitchen waste past the family.

There is no backstairs. Servants and family must share the narrow corridors, narrower doorways and "labyrinthine" stairways. One hopes that Mrs. Kaufmann didn't want any sort of complex breakfast in bed. Carrying a laden tray from the kitchen to her bedroom and manipulating it through the doorways would have been tricky. Backing off to let through a family member heading for the great room would have complicated the task.

I realize that in the US one is informal in the country. But Fallingwater enforces a level of informality that many would find uncomfortable. The Kaufmanns brought selected servants that had been in their employ for many years. Few of us nowadays have such long-term retainers. And living so intimately with ones servants might well make the Fallingwater experience less soul-satisfying.

(2003-12-15 08:57:50.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday December 14, 2003

Fallingwater

A couple of weeks ago, Terry Teachout talked about his reactions to a visit to Fallingwater, the famous Frank Lloyd Wright house on Western Pennsylvania. Last August, there had been a flurry of arguments in the blogosphere about Fallingwater. TT remarked that most of the participants hadn't been there. City Comforts picked up the TT post and attracted useful comments.

I visited Fallingwater a few months ago. I'd been at a conference in Western Pennsylvania and it seemed sensible to make the detour on the way home, rather than just jump straight on the turnpike. I'd like to react some to TT's post. Mostly I agree, but I think there are useful additions to be made to what he said.

TT:

everything you’ve read about the house is true. It's a Cubist painting in ochre, sandstone, and Cherokee red, and it seems to melt into the surrounding landscape as if it had somehow grown out of the stream and rocks.

Yes. This is true. But Michael Blowhard in his comment to the City Comforts post points out:

There's the celebrated approach to the house. You walk to the house through the woods. At a certain point on the path, you turn a corner and see the house, perhaps an eighth of a mile away, from just the perfect perspective. It's a beautiful moment and a beautiful sight. It's also a wildly over-art-directed one -- even as you gasp in admiration it dawns on you that the master whose hands you're in is quite the domineering control freak.

and if you walk a few yards downstream, along the left bank of Bear Run, you can find another, perhaps finer, view of the house. It is said, I don't know with what truth, that Kaufmann originally wanted the house positioned there, so that the house, perhaps a terrace or balcony, would take advantage of the fine view of the waterfall that used to be available from that point. Wright, to paint his Cubist painting in ochre, sandstone and Cherokee red, obliterated the natural, perhaps overly traditional, one in brown and green and white-topped water.

Indeed, the waterfall is not actually visible from any point in the house. One does wonder if this is because Kaufmann thought a view of the waterfall would be nice.

I cannot myself envisage living in Fallingwater. I am not much one for stairs. TT says it is not a house for old people (though the Kaufmanns weren't young). I would add it isn't a house for fat people either. The doorways are uncomfortably narrow. We were told by the guide that Wright made them narrow so his clients couldn't bring in unapproved furniture. The control freak again. But whether I or TT can imagine ourselves living there is, I think, irrelevant. The house was built for Edgar Kaufmann. Neither he nor Wright ever envisaged anyone but Edgar, Lillian or Edgar Jr. living there.

Which is (partly) why it had such a short useful life. There elapsed only about 25 years from the time it was completed to the time Edgar Jr. turned it over to the Conservancy. A double-wide lasts longer.

(2003-12-14 17:13:38.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Monday November 03, 2003

Evelyn Waugh

With the Waugh centenary, there have been multiple conflicting appreciations. Arts and Letters Daily pointed to Bill Deedes's in the Spectator. The TLS (subscription only) published a longish one by Geoffrey Wheatcroft. So I thought I'd add my bit.

Waugh wrote three sorts of novels. There are three therapeutic ones: Decline and Fall, Handful of Dust and Pinfold; there's a bunch of comic ones ranging from Vile Bodies to The Loved One; and there's four serious novels: Brideshead and the Sword of Honour trilogy. A basic disagreement about Waugh is which group to prefer.

I find a peculiar tone to the therapeutic group. It isn't simply that Waugh's authorial stance towards his characters is heartless. It is in his other comic novels, too. It's that he piles humiliations on onto the character which most closely resembles him. There's a certain loss of balance. Wheatcroft in the TLS deplores downgrading Handful of Dust because it was written in reaction to Waugh's divorce: "What difference does that make?" Not a lot. But the result is a certain queasiness.

The pure comedies, on the other hand, while probably never politically correct, are (and everyone, I think, agrees) delightful. The best of them is Scoop. Even today, with only minor changes, it could be made into a satire on the coverage of the Afghanistan war. Wheatcroft grumps that calling Scoop Waugh's best novel is like calling Merry Wives Shakespeare's best play. It's not, though. A better comparison would be calling Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare's best play.

But the greatest disagreements come with the serious novels. There are those who call Brideshead Waugh's worst novel. I regard it as his best. There are those who exalt the trilogy. I have never been able to even get it started; I find it unreadable. Perhaps I am missing something.

Brideshead is a true decline and fall. Ryder falls from his earthly paradise of Oxford and Sebastian to the post-Dunkirk British Army in garrison/training (lower than which it's hard to go). The only thing that makes his situation bearable is religion. And the novel is done very well. All of Waugh's comic technique is brought to bear.

(2003-11-03 09:15:37.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Friday October 31, 2003

Gentlemen's Clubs

Long gap.

A couple of weeks ago, I found myself in London. I stayed (as I usually do) at the Oxford & Cambridge Club under a reciprocal arrangement with my NY club. The club has added a couple of computers with broadband connections, which are heavily used, despite being disguised as desks. It was hard to find them, since they've been installed in a small drawing room on "The Ladies' Side" (the townhouse next to the main clubhouse that the club acquired when it started letting women in, to keep them segregated).

Mention of the Ladies' Side of course brings up the notion that Gentlemen are opposed to Ladies. Gentlemen's Clubs exist to keep women out. Except that nowadays they don't (though the Reform still doesn't have enough women's toilets).

Yet they're still Gentlemen's Clubs. I think this is a notion of class solidarity (rather than gender). Most of the St. James clubs date from the early nineteenth century. The Duke of Wellington seems to have been a founder member of the majority (though not, of course, of the Reform). And it seems to me there was a real effort starting around then to push an ideology of the essential equality of all "gentlemen". As opposed to those who had to work for a living. In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth, who has nothing, says to Darcy, who has an improbable 10,000 pounds, that he is a gentleman and she the daughter of a gentleman which implies there's no social barrier to their marriage. At the other end of the spectrum, in Trollope's Phineas Redux, Phineas is at his club when the Prince of Wales arrives incognito. There's a short pause. Each man stops what he's doing and bows in recognition. Then everyone settles back into what he was doing and the Prince becomes "a gentleman among gentlemen." No more, no less.

The notion of a gentleman has widened somewhat since the nineteenth century, but the St. James clubs are still expressions of class solidarity. The clothing and behaviour banned within the club are clothing and behaviour associated with working class mores. The demand for formality--one must come down to breakfast in a coat and tie--is to set club members off from the informal, Americanized hoi polloi.

(2003-10-31 15:42:21.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday July 27, 2003

Proust on a Plane

I can't even get to blog every Sunday. Last Sunday I was on a plane coming back from a trip. Athough I had power in my seat (I'd squandered 15000 miles on an upgrade), I used the time, not to create a blog entry, but to watch Time Regained, the Raoul Ruiz movie derived from several Proust novels.

It's a wonderfully cast movie. Malkovitch will from henceforth be Charlus to me (although my previous image of Charlus was heavier); Deneuve will be Odette, and images of her from earlier movies will be the younger Odette. Muti (from Swann in Love) never became Odette in this way, nor Irons Swann (nor Delon Charlus).

Yet. The movie's US theatrical run was almost comically brief: no more than 7 or 8 weeks in the summer of 2000. During the entire run it grossed $250K. This wasn't (just) a reaction to Proust. Swann in Love had done respectably enough. Why was this one so unappealing?

I think it's because you can't follow the movie without knowing the books. That may have been true for Swann in Love, too, but Swann and his affair with Odette comes at the beginning of the series. Time regained centered around the last four novels in the series. Which, I suspect, most people, even people who have read some Proust, haven't read. People start at the beginning but do not wait until they have reached the end to stop. As it happens, I didn't read Proust that way. I started with Sodome et Gomorrhe. The central role of Charlus provided enough narrative drive and very early in the book there is one of Proust's long set piece social occasions, which fascinate. So I carried on, and later went back to fill in.

The film, I think, captured the structural role of Proust's set piece parties. It's not just that he eats his madelaine while (temporarily) excluded from one. His world explains itself by them. And what happens privately happens against them. It is not for nothing that Proust juxtaposes the scene of the Narrator spying on Charlus jumping Jupien against the scene of the Guermantes' soiree.

Anthony Powell did the same sort of thing. Milly Andriadis's party in A Buyer's Market, the dinner party of the seven deadly sins in the last novel before the war, even the diplomatic dinner in Venusberg have a Proustian structural role.

Which may be why there's never been a satisfactory film of Powell.

(2003-07-27 18:01:38.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday July 13, 2003

When Does Copyright Start?

I seem to just get to post on Sundays, the day off.

John Palfrey has an interesting post on the copyright implications of Mark Pilgrim's Winerwatch site. The actual feud between Pigrim and Dave Winer is not that interesting. But as Palfrey notes, the copyright issues are.

The situation, briefly, is that Winer provides an RSS feed of his blog. Winer, who has in the past proselytized for the "writeable web," writes directly to his blog (actually to a subsidiary blog which is equally publicly accessible), editing it as thoughts come to him. Pilgrim pulled the RSS feed of that blog every five minutes and highlighted that changes that resulted as Winer edited his writing.

Palfrey raised the question: Has Pilgrim infringed on Winer's copyright?

In the comments to his post, I asked: Is what Pilgrim is pulling yet under copyright?

In general, to be protected by copyright, a work has to be "fixed." 17 USCS Section 101:

A work is "fixed" in a tangible medium of expression when its embodiment in a copy or phonorecord, by or under the authority of the author, is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.

"[T]ransitory duration" isn't further defined.

It's clear that once Winer has finished editing his post, it's fixed and therefore protected by copyright. It's not clear that if he's still editing it and it changes within a five minute period, it can be regarded as fixed. Is five minutes a period of more than transitory duration? If it isn't fixed, then, despite having been published (!), it isn't protected by copyright and Pilgrim isn't infringing on anything if he pulls it and republishes it.

This is counterintuitive, of course, because we think of publication as inextricably linked to copyright. Historically, publication has been the act which started the copyright clock. But it seems to me that the Berne Convention went out of its way to make publication irrelevant to copyright. Creation is the clock-starter. And creation is a lot harder to define than publication.

I am, of course, not a lawyer. I am certainly not an IP lawyer. This is an argument, not a legal opinion. Still, it's an example of how technological progress makes laws murkier.

(2003-07-13 11:46:44.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday July 06, 2003

Advowsons and the Adjunct Problem

Via the inimitable Invisible Adjunct, we find that D-squared Digest has proposed (post of Friday, July 04, 2003) a market in tenured professorships to solve the "adjunct problem." He adduces two precedents:

[He would] return to a system that has already been thoroughly tested and worked very well. Commissions to be an officer in the British Army used to be bought and sold in the nineteenth century, and so did "livings" for parish priests.

I don't know anything about the purchase of commissions. My sense is it was a mechanism for preventing the lower classes becoming "officers and gentlemen." Which doesn't make it a useful precedent for Davies's proposal. But I could easily be persuaded otherwise. The parish priest situation, though, has some resemblances. So I'd like to go into it further.

The first thing to say is it wasn't the living that was bought and sold. It was the right to present to the living. The word for it is "advowson." It's actually the right to nominate to the bishop a candidate whom the bishop must institute unless he can use one of a very limited number of excuses. It's very old. There was a great deal of litigation about advowsons in the 13th century already. Originally there was a notion that the man who owned the manor and had probably bult the church ought to say who preached in it. But early on, the advowson could become detached from the manor. A typical scenario is the lord of the manor grants an advowson to a religious house. When the living falls vacant, the monastery appoints one of its monks to be the parish priest and takes the tithes for itself. The lord has given the monastery something of considerable value to it at little or no cost to himself. Over several centuries, a lot of advowsons got given to religious houses; the dissolution put them back in lay hands: the people who bought monastic property from Henry VIII. Through the 18th century this wasn't a problem. Advowsons were just another form of patronage. There was little conflict with the church hierarchy: bishoprics were national-level patronage, livings county-level.

But in the late 18th century, early 19th, the system began to break down. Some county families had little use for or interest in church patronage, so were willing to sell. Oxford and Cambridge colleges (and Durham, too) started buying advowsons so as to be able to place their graduates. A typical "good" early 19th century clerical career begins with undergraduate prizes, moves on to a college fellowship, and when a college-owned living opens up, moves into it, which permits marriage. Trollope was mentioned in Davies's post: think Mr. Arabin.

But this creates friction with the hierarchy. A bishop cannot tolerate the appointment of the most articulate spokesman for the opposing church-political tendency to the richest living in his diocese. And the hierarchy strikes back by itself buying up advowsons. If the local interest isn't to appoint vicars, then bishops must.

Davies suggests

If anyone really thinks that there would be a terrible problem of impoverished geniuses being excluded, then I daresay that people like the MacArthur Foundation could buy up a few professorships every year to distribute among the needy.

The reaction of chairs and deans to this would mirror the reaction of 19th century bishops to college-owned advowsons. Just imagine Stanley Fish being faced with a MacArthur sponsored traditionalist appointment.

So the precedents aren't particularly encouraging.

(2003-07-06 15:48:44.0) Permalink Comments [0]

The Invisible Adjunct pointed to an old Chronicle piece by Robert Wright which argued that reduction of the salaries of tenure track assistant professors would result in reduction of demand for tenure track assistant professorships and thus reduce demand for graduate studies and (eventually) resolve the "adjunct problem." I don't think this is true. My sense is that a tenure track assistant professorship is not an end in itself but merely a means. The end to which it, together with graduate studies, is a means is the "life of a tenured professor." In her post, IA says:

Psst...Hey, you. Over there. Yeah, you. You're an "A" student, and you love history, and the life of a tenured professor looks pretty sweet, and your undergraduate professors are encouraging you to continue your pursuit of history in graduate school. Don't do it!

Indeed, the life of a tenured professor does look pretty sweet. The life of a tenure track assistant professor, on the other hand, is not so sweet. An acquaintance of mine, after getting tenure, remarked that he had "busted his balls" over the previous seven years: publishing and politicking; it is hard to say which was the harder task. The most disgruntled academic I ever came across was a tenured assistant professor (this was in the early '70s, when I was an undergraduate; apparently the insitution had at some point divorced promotion and tenure and one committee had recommended tenure be granted, the other that promotion be denied) who was likely to remain a tenured assistant professor for life.

So if you want to discourage the production of potential academics, what you have to do is make the life of a tenured professor less eligible. Lower salary, higher courseload. But what is happening, as two other Invisible Adjunct posts make clear, is the opposite. Universities and Colleges are creating "star" tenured professorships. The incumbents of these get higher salaries and lower courseloads. And the existence of these will encourage more into graduate school who will end up adjuncts.

(2003-07-06 11:29:41.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Sunday June 29, 2003

The Michigan Cases and Distaste for Partial Ordering

There's been a good deal of discussion of Gratz and Grutter. The Invisible Adjunct pointed to several of the best. I commented on Kieran Healy's argument with Michael Kinsley and frankadmissions was kind enough to call (part of) my comment astute.

The set of applications for admission to any university/college is partially ordered. All elements are dominated by a (possibly mythical) application from a Hispanic female SGA President with 1600 boards, straight As across a program that included 7 AP courses, a sparkling essay and glowing recommendations, who has volunteered at an old peoples' home for the last four years and led the varsity tennis team to its first state championship. All elements dominate a (n equally mythical) candidate with 500 boards, a D in remedial pre-Algebra in the 11th grade, an ungrammatical and incoherent essay and clearly cautious recommendations. But in between, things aren't so clear. And the marginally acceptable candidates have incommensurable strong points. This one has better boards than the general ruck; this one, better grades; but this other one took a stronger program and this one's recommendation shows he impressed someone; that one has flashes of wit in her essay, but this one over here rowed stroke for the winning boat, which surely shows some leadership potential. Here's an oboeist, and the orchestra director points out his lead oboeist is graduating; here's a potential physics major, and the Dean has been worried about the size of physics classes; here's an actor, there a published poet. This candidate is from Eastern Washington and we've never had a candidate from there. But this candidate is Black. It seems to me that people in general have a hard time evaluating across such partially ordered sets. The University of Michigan gave up. It forced a linear ordering on its undergraduate application pool.

Similar problems occur in academic hiring. In general, applicants for tenure-track jobs are incommensurable. There are too many of them and they are all strong, but strong in different, incomparable, ways. And this, again the reference is to the immensurable Invisible Adjunct, leads to dysfunctional behaviour by overwhelmed search committees who try to find linear orderings they can make decisions from.

I don't have an answer, or even a proposal. I don't know any way to deal with evaluating across partially ordered sets except by thinking and arguing about the specific cases. Which doesn't generalize and doesn't scale. But unless we try to find methods of dealing with this sort of problem, we'll end up in the sort of mess the University of Michigan has found itself in as a consequence of Gratz.

(2003-06-29 13:35:24.0) Permalink Comments [0]

Anti-Telemarketers vs. Anti-Spam

So being a good privacy-loving kind of guy, I went off to the National Do Not Call Registry to register my phone number as being off limits to "most telemarketers."

One of the guys on Declan's list had raised privacy concerns because the registration process asks you for an email address and won't complete registration of your phone number unless you invoke the url contained in an email sent to that address within 72 hours. As he said:

I'm not sure exactly what someone could do with a huge database that links phone numbers with email addresses. But it triggered a reflexive concern, especially since I didn't see any notes about how the database is secured.

It's also hard to see why the Do Not Call guys think they need to do this. It may be a sort of protection against someone writing a script to rule all phone numbers off limits.

Anyway, I went ahead and registered. The best is the enemy of the good, and no calls at dinnertime is definitely the good. But no confirming email popped up in my inbox. There had been reports of the registry being heavily used, so at first I thought they were batching emails so as to keep the main page responsive. But after several hours, that didn't seem likely. It turned out that they had sent the email, but Mail.app decided it was spam.

My automated tools are working at cross purposes.

UPDATE: It turns out that I'm not the only one. This Wired story says that Yahoo's spam filter also decided that the Do Not Call confirmation emails were spam. One would like to know which criterion they triggered.

(2003-06-29 11:00:04.0) Permalink Comments [0]