Tech Active

There is lots to blog about while in London and Paris, but I am saving most of it for when I’m back in the States. (I really cannot justify sitting at a machine when I could be running around the streets of London and Paris, sorry.) However, this one event will be over by the time I get back to regular blogging so I wanted to post about it.

The Stanhope Centre for Communication Policy Research is sponsoring a panel discussion next Mon (28th) in London on “Tech Active” or the promises, successes and challenges of both using the Internet to change the world and using social policy to change the Internet. Both scholars and activists will engage in this discussion including Cory Doctorow, Gus Hosein, Lisa Nakamura and Bill Thompson. Thanks to Christian Sandvig for organizing the event. I am sure he will have interesting thoughts to add as well. I am sorry to miss it, but my flight leaves London a few hours earlier. The event is free and open to the public so I hope people will take advantage of it!

A Piece of the Pie

Via Nathan Newman, Kevin Drum links to an EPI graphic showing differences in the growth of corporate profits, labor compensation and private salary income between the current business cycle and the average of the last eight recoveries. This time round, Kevin summarizes, “workers have gotten almost nothing while corporate profits have skyrocketed.” Then he asks,

But how can anyone defend this? Easy. The free market extremists at the top of the modern Republican party argue that economic growth is caused by the risk-taking executives of Fortune 5000 companies, and therefore they deserve the benefits of that growth. Worker bees don’t make any contribution — they just work — so why should they get anything?

Treating labor like a commodity is a morally bankrupt policy, but it’s one that’s become an epidemic in the Republican party …

The thing is, the “free market extremists” Kevin complains about have it backwards. Treating labor like a commodity is a way to transfer the burden of risk away from businesses and on to workers. In general, CEOs of big corporations do not engage in the kind of risk taking that they typically ascribe to themselves. Or more precisely, there is plenty of evidence that they do not have to suffer the consequences of the risks they take. The United States has always been ahead of other advanced capitalist democracies in this department, because it offers less in the way of social insurance than its counterparts. (Instead of a welfare state it has a prison system.) But much of what got called “downsizing” in the early ’90s and the New Economy a few years later can be seen as a new round of risk-redistribution noticeable in even the U.S.’s nominally unregulated labor market. The stuff you see these days in the Business Section of Barnes & Noble about the brave new “Free Agent Nation” and its creative class is the optimistic spin the disappearance of defined-benefit pension funds, the decline of decent health benefits, the rise of temp work, and other changes in the employment bargain that push more of the risk onto workers.

Dealing with the Parliament

If you believe the conventional wisdom in transatlantic policy circles, a Kerry administration won’t make much difference to EU-US relations. Kerry would differ from Bush more on style than on substance: Europe and the US would still be divided on the important security and economic issues. Whether this argument is true or not (personally, I’m dubious), the transatlantic relationship is likely to enter a period of turmoil regardless of who occupies the White House. The reason: the increasing interest and involvement of the European Parliament in international affairs.

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Bargains at Night Shade Books

Night Shade Books, one of the best small press publishers around, is running a special offer until midnight tomorrow - order three or more of their books, and you’ll get a discount of 50%. I’d especially recommend M. John Harrison’s extraordinary novel, The Course of the Heart, and his short story collection, Things that Never Happen, which I’ve blogged about previously; NSB has also done very nice reprints of Dunsany’s Jorkens stories.

Are private schools charities?

An interesting think piece from Mike Baker, the BBC’s always interesting Education correpondent (for some reason the BBC insists on having a correspondent in place for many years so that he actually knows something about his topic, I can’t think why). The (UK) government is proposing a bill on which private schools might have to do something charitable in order to earn charitable status (which, as Baker implies, basically operates as a subsidy to parents who would simply find more money for the higher fees if charitable status were removed). Currently the main charitable activities of private schools are inexpensively making some facilities available to the wider community and providing scholarships to children many of whose parents could already afford the fees, and who are selected on the basis of ability (so that their presence is a benefit, not a cost, to the full-fee-paying children).

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Canadian Internet policy; tapping into the zeitGeist

Ahead of next week’s federal election in Canada, Michael Geist has a revealing piece in today’s Toronto Star that compares the positions on Internet/technology issues of the main Canadian parties. The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at the University of Ottawa and Digital Copyright Canada surveyed the Liberals, NDP, Conservatives and Greens on their views on IP protection, file-sharing, open source, identity cards and use of Internet materials in education. The results are not what a classic right-left divide might predict.

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Crooked Timber's Greatest Hits

In the course of the recent great database fiasco, I took a look at the history of traffic to this site. The AWStats program gave me a the number of unique visitors for every day from our launch last July through to June 16th this year. I was interested in which posts had made the biggest splashes. Now, if I just looked at the posts that got the greatest number of visitors, there would be a bias towards posts from later in the year, because we get far more visitors these days than six or ten months ago. How can we get a fair estimate?

It’s possible to statistically decompose a time series into three components. First, there’s the seasonal component: in this case, it’s the regular ups and downs caused by what day of the week it is. Generally, traffic will dip every weekend, regardless of how many visitors we’re getting on average. The average number of visitors from week to week net of the seasonal ups and downs is the second, trend component. This has grown consistently over the year. And finally there’s the remainder or “irregular” component, which is whatever spikes and dips are left over once seasonal fluctuations and the underlying trend are accounted for.

The nice picture above shows CT’s unique daily visitor series decomposed in this way, with the raw data at the top and the three components underneath. (You can also get this figure as a higher quality PDF file [only 34k].) As you can see, the trend is one of healthy growth. These days we typically get about seven to nine thousand unique visitors a day. But what about those spikes in the lowest panel? Which posts brought in the crowds? Read on for the Top 10 list. The punchline is that, even though we’re known for being a bunch of pointy-headed academics, the out-of-the-ballpark hitters on our roster are not the ones with Ph.Ds.

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Choosing the Commission's President

It’s looking increasingly likely that Bertie Ahern, the Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister) of Ireland will become the next Commission President. This is a mixed bag. On the one hand, Ahern is a very skilled politician and dealmaker. He played a blinder on the negotiations of the EU’s draft constitution, managing to build a real consensus on top of some very shaky foundations. The contrast with his immediate predecessor, Silvio Berlusconi, is substantial - Berlusconi seemed to be more interested in reviving his career as a piano-bar crooner than in actually negotiating (more on this soon). On the other, nobody has ever accused Ahern of having much in the way of a political vision. Arguably, he’s the wrong man for the job - the Commission is supposed to deliver on policy implementation, while driving the EU’s legislative agenda. Ahern is neither an administrator nor a visionary - his very real political skills aren’t the skills that a Commissioner needs to have. My preference would have been either Chris Patten (who Maria also likes - a decent right-winger, who knows how to call a spade a spade) if the member states had wanted someone to galvanize the Commission’s political activities, or Antonio Vittorino if they’d wanted a technocrat to run it well. If Ahern does get the job, I suspect that he’s going to be another in an increasingly long line of mediocre Commission Presidents.

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

I’ve spent the last few hours doing something that I’ve meant to do for months; going through the academic blogroll to see what updates and changes need to be made. I’ve marked blogs which haven’t been updated in several months as ‘moribund.’ Those which I’m not sure about, I’ve added a question mark to. Some, which seem to have disappeared entirely, I’ve removed from the blogroll. These include “Chun the Unavoidable,” who I’m sort of sorry to see go - the Invisible Adjunct once remarked that he took trolling to a higher level, and I reckon that’s about right. On the other hand, it’s nice to see that Jeff Cooper is back - and with what appears to be good news.

I’m sure that there are still some inaccuracies in the blogroll - feel free to let me know, either by comments or by email. Also, I know that I’ve missed out on some new academics in the blogosphere during my month of travelling; if you want to be in the academic blogroll, and meet the criteria send me an email.

This is an Outrage

It turns out that not one but two of my students now have Gmail accounts and I — I, what sits on their dissertation committees! I what gives them papers to grade! — do not. Appalling. I am investigating whether I can become a co-author on both of their Gmail accounts despite having done nothing to get one of my own. There’s a lot of precedent for that kind of thing.

Update: Well, that didn’t take long. Two readers generously emailed with invitations: Alex Halavais was first, so I took up his offer. Thanks very much, Alex and Brad. For my next trick I will publicly sulk about not having enough $50 bills.

Guns, smoke, global warming and Microsoft

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following opinions tend to go together:

• widespread ownership of guns saves lives

• tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)

• global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently, at least among thinktanks, these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

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In Search Of Lost Type

Kieran is blaming himself for the fact that somehow it is still last week around here. Some MT import/export thing. SQL data dump. Makes my head hurt. I just want to point out that there are alternative explanations for the mysterious linkrot, it’s sudden disappearance, and the disappearance of a couple days. And it could have been worse.

“Everyone know that in the run of normal uneventful years that great eccentric, Time, begets sometimes other years, different, prodigal years which - like a sixth smallest toe - grow a thirteenth freak month.

We use the word freak deliberately, because the thirteenth month only rarely reaches maturity, and like a child conceived late in its mother’s life, it lags behind in growth; it is a hunchback month, a half-witted shoot. More tentative than real.

What is at fault is the senile intemperance of the summer, its lustful and belated spurt of vitality. It sometimes happens that August has passed, and yet the old thick trunk of summer continues by force of habit to produce and from its moldered wood grows those crab-days, weed-days, sterile and stupid, added as an afterthought; stunted, empty, useless days - white days, permanently astonished and quite unnecessary. They sprout, irregular and uneven, formless and joined like the fingers of a monster’s hand, stumps folded into a fist.”

- Bruno Schulz, The Street of Crocodiles

I’m not saying it was senile, intemperate summer itself that did for a few days of posts. In which case Kieran has just been wasting his time, futzing with computers. I’m not saying that the disappeared days were actually extra days that weren’t on the calendar to begin with, that now the calendar has reasserted itself, that the superfluous temporal … I do not hestitate to say ‘efflorescence’ “lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it.”

I am not saying that comments and track-backs are still being left to these posts we no longer ‘see’ in ‘our’ world. I’m just saying.

Litany of Database Recovery

Queen of SQL statements. Pray for us.
Empress of Emacs. Pray for us.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. Pray for us.
Defender of Write Permissions. Pray for us.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. Pray for us.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. Pray for us.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. Pray for us.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. Pray for us.
Scourge of Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats. Pray for us.
Mother of all the Bloggers. Pray for us.

I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.

My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.¹

So, as predicted in my Don’t Upgrade post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.

¹ Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.

Draft Constitution

Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part - now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …

The (Far) Right Coast

At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common - US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to - it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims

are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be - and proud and happy to be so.

Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt - when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.