Daily Office:
Thursday, 9 September 2010
¶ At Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong tackles a muddle — if we may propose an awkward image to reflect a category mistake that has flooded the intellectual territory once overseen by the mainstream media — “Of Writers and Activists — Are Science Bloggers Being Ambitious Enough?”
My goals are different – they are not to change the way research gets done or they way policies are set. I lack the experience, background, energy and time. I can only hope to do what I do best – talk about science in a way that encourages people to listen. My goals are: to inspire people about science by providing good writing (well, communication, but primarily writing); and to improve the quality of science journalism by providing an example and by engaging with the science writing community, at conferences and on social media.
Is blogging the most productive way I could be doing this? Sarah Kendrew asked me this question at Science Online London 2010 (15:00 in the third video), and I thought it a fair one. I can only answer: it is for me (leaving aside the fact that I also try to be active on social media, speak at events, and so on). It’s the best way I can make use of my abilities. If people had infinite time, skills and opportunities, I’d probably tell them to be science teachers; Alom Shaha makes an able case for why our need for science educators surpasses our need for science communicators.  But I am not a teacher; I’m a writer and I’m a journalist.
As a journalist, being an advocate can be detrimental to my job. Dan Vergano from USA Today says, “Science reporting ain’t advocacy. That takes the field in the wrong direction, back to the 1950’s.†Nobody would benefit from journalists who cheerlead for science without holding it to account when necessary.
All writing is advocatory. Some writers advocate taking political action, while others advocate developing a rigorous understanding of the world. The two groups are often at temperamental odds even when facts are not in dispute; one fact that is always in dispute is the urgency of taking action of one kind or another. We think it sufficient for writers to be clear about which kind of advocacy they’re engaged in.
¶ The Jewish High Holidays prompt Miles Hoffman to discuss the lack of anything like the classical liturgical music that serious Western composers went on composing long after the Age of Faith. (NYT)
It’s certainly strange that their very liberation as Jews led to composers’ leaving the substance of Judaism behind, at least artistically. But is it realistic to expect brilliant Jewish composers, exposed to some of the most magnificent artistic creations of Western civilization and struck by the universal impact and appeal of those creations, to be satisfied setting Hebrew texts for their local congregations?
Yes, it’s possible that if some of these great composers had written monumental works for the synagogue, those works might eventually have found a broad public. And some have: Ernest Bloch’s “Avodath Hakodesh†(“Sacred Serviceâ€), for example, is widely performed — in concert halls more than synagogues — and Leonard Bernstein’s settings of Hebrew texts have not lacked for mixed audiences.
More recently, contemporary Jewish composers like Paul Schoenfield, Osvaldo Golijov and Max Raimi have made compelling use of traditional Jewish tunes and styles in music for the concert hall and found a sizeable audience.
But historically speaking, many Jewish composers simply felt compelled to strike out well beyond their parochial origins, and to avoid at all costs the possibility of being pigeon-holed as composers of “Jewish music.â€
There is more here than Mr Hoffman seems to realize. The musical tradition of Western Christianity is weighted toward triumphalism; even non-celebratory music (such as Requiem Masses) are grand more often than not. This reflects not only the overwhelming dominance of Christianity in Western history but also the imposing churches that, beginning with Hagia Sophia, have no counterpart in Judaism. Â
¶ At Weakonomics, Philip takes issue with the notion that the recession has hurt blue-collar workers the most — or, in educational terms, that workers with the least academic attainments have been hurt the worst. His figures suggest just the opposite, and, indeed, people with some college education have witnessed the highest increase in unemployment rates. (For our part, we believe that the unemployment problem is so structural that it preceded the recession and will outlast it, but that’s a discussion for another day.)
Every recession is referred to as a blue collar recession because many blue collar jobs rely on the economy itself. Manufacturing is very much cyclical, in that when the economy is good so is the sector. When the economy suffers, they get laid off. But the truth is white collar workers have it just as bad, and may have it worse.
It all comes down to how you market the data. It’s easy to spin the employment data to fit the blue collar recession headline. One common citation is unemployment divided up into educational attainment. The categories are: less than high school diploma, high school diploma, some college or associates degree, and college degree or higher. The unemployment rates start high and work their way down: 14%, 10.3%, 8.7%, and 4.6%. By this metric it does look like a blue collar recession since blue collar jobs typically require less education. But what if we measured the % increase in unemployed from 2007 to today? Do the numbers tell the same story? Hardly
¶ We’re not sure that we know exactly what bothers Jonah Lehrer about the ease of e-readers, or how the problem that he foresees can be addressed, but we’re going to file away the distinction between ventral and dorsal reading, one of the rich cognitive findings associated with Stanislas Dehaene.Â
So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s the point: Only then will we process the text a little less unconsciously, with less reliance on the ventral pathway. We won’t just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.
My larger anxiety has to do with the sprawling influence of technology. Sooner or later, every medium starts to influence the message. I worry that, before long, we’ll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a literate clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.
Mr Lehrer concludes with an interesting sidenote: in order to proofread his writing, he has to print it out. If our experience is applicable, it isn’t the printing that’s key. Nothing enhances our attention to detail than reading something that we have published something online. OMG!
¶ Bess Levin (Dealbreakder) and Jessica Pressler (Daily Intel) chat LOLlingly about Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps. As Bess says in her introduction, “ I’m not going to say it’s so bad you shouldn’t see it, but that’s just because it’s so bad it needs to be seen to be believed and we want more people to be able to share in our collective trauma.” The movie does promise some unintended fun for Wall Streeters.
ohbabyitsbess: We should get into all of the characters who were real but not real. Like the head of Not Bear Stearns, Not Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: Yeah, Not Jimmy Cayne was more like Ace Greenberg than Jimmy Cayne.
jessaballs: He dressed like Ace.
jessaballs: in a bowler hat and bow tie
ohbabyitsbess: And he had a dog he loved
jessaballs: And he had not idea what was going on at his own bank.
ohbabyitsbess: But you felt bad for him anyway, especially when Not Jamie Dimon was like, “I will buy Not Bear Stearns for $3 a share, AND NOT A PENNY MORE.â€
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon was kind of amazing
ohbabyitsbess: Not Jamie Dimon wears leather and rides bikes
jessaballs: And wears red velvet smoking jackets and hosts opera singers in his Upper East Side mansion.
ohbabyitsbess: and throws Goyas across the room when he’s angry
jessaballs: And after Jake starts spreading rumors that bring down Not JP Morgan’s stock in order to punish him for what he did to Not Bear Stearns, Not Jamie offers him a job at Not JP Morgan.
ohbabyitsbess: Because even though he lost him money, Not Jamie Dimon is the kind of guy who likes moxie
jessaballs: He wanted to hate fuck him, in a business sense
ohbabyitsbess: And then later Jake becomes a star at Not JP Morgan, because he is also the only one who knows about Chinese customs
ohbabyitsbess: And knows to give a gift for the Chinese guy when they come visit to potentially give them capital
jessaballs: That’s what its all about, really, these billion-dollar deals
jessaballs: Toblerones, and being polite
¶ We try not to go out of our way to be gloomy in these pages, but we must admit that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address to the Council on Foreign Relations — her sixth, personally, and her second as Secretary — is a disappointment, for failing to be specific about much of anything in general, and for discussing the narcotrafficking issues that plague our hemisphere without even a whisper about the decriminialization of drugs. Here is her entire response to a question asked by Carla Hills. (via  Real Clear World)
CLINTON: Well, first, Carla, thank you for asking about this hemisphere, because it is very much on our minds. And we face an increasing threat from a well-organized network, drug-trafficking threat that is, in some cases, morphing into or making common cause with what we would consider an insurgency, in Mexico and in Central America.
And we are working very hard to assist the Mexicans in improving their law enforcement and their intelligence, their capacity to detain and prosecute those who they arrest. I give President Calderon very high marks for his courage and his commitment. This is a really tough challenge. And these drug cartels are now showing more and more indices of insurgency — you know, all of a sudden car bombs show up, which weren’t there before.
So it’s becoming — it’s looking more and more like Colombia looked 20 years ago, where the narcotraffickers control, you know, certain parts of the country — not — significant parts; in Colombia, it got to the point where, you know, more than a third of the country — nearly 40 percent of the country at one time or another was controlled by the insurgents, by FARC.
But it’s going to take a combination of improved institutional capacity and better law enforcement and, where appropriate, military support for that law enforcement, you know, married to political will, to be able to prevent this from spreading and to try to beat it back.
Mexico has capacity, and they’re using that capacity, and they’ve been very willing to take advice. You know, they’re wanting to do as much of it on their own as possible, but we stand ready to help them. But the small countries in Central America do not have that capacity, and the newly inaugurated president of Costa Rica, President Chinchilla, you know, said, we need help and we need a much more vigorous U.S. presence.
So we are working to try to enhance what we have in Central America. We hear the same thing from our Caribbean friends, so we have an initiative, the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative. And our relationship is not all about drugs and violence and crime, but unfortunately that often gets the headlines. We’re also working on more economic programs, we’re working on Millennium Challenge grants, we’re working on a lot of other ways of bolstering economies and governments to improve rule of law. But this is on the top of everyone’s mind when they come to speak with us.
And I know that Plan Colombia was controversial. I was just in Colombia, and there were problems and there were mistakes, but it worked. And it was bipartisan, started, you know, in the Clinton administration, continued in the Bush administration. And I think President Santos will try to do everything he can to remedy the problems of the past while continuing to, you know, make progress against the insurgency.
And we need to figure out what are the equivalents for Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean. And that’s not easy, because these — you know, you put your finger on it. I mean, those drugs come up through Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, through Central America, southern Mexico, to the border, and we consume them. And those guns — you know, those guns, legal and illegal, keep flooding, along with all of the mayhem — it’s not only guns; it’s weapons, it’s arsenals of all kinds that come south. So I feel a real sense of responsibility to do everything we can. And again, we’re working hard to come up with approaches that will actually deliver.
¶ A brief profile of reluctant entrepreneur Tim Waterstone. Alex Clark begins: “A man who went on to sell the company to the firm that had made him redundant, and then bought it back; and who, after apparently parting ways with his bookshops for good, made four separate attempts to gain control of them once again? This strikes me as almost a dictionary definition of an entrepreneur. So what’s the beef?” (Guardian)
His quibble, it turns out, has its basis in good manners. “I can’t bear the self-congratulatory thing of applying it to oneself, really,” he says: softly spoken and courteous, he appears, in tone and bearing, far more like a gentleman publisher than a cut-throat boardroom monster. Indeed, our semantic discussion has been prompted by his description of the bankers whom he met during a deal he was working on a few years ago and who make up a major strand in his new novel, In for a Penny, In for a Pound, an everyday tale of high finance, newspaper dynasties and the world of books. They were, he says, “so awful” that he started jotting down their conversations during meetings, and soon began to form an idea for a fictional parody of them. He was particularly struck by what seemed to him “like this endless drive towards the accumulation of personal wealth”, a motivation at odds, he is at pains to point out, with his own impulses.
“You know, as an entrepreneur, and I hate calling myself an entrepreneur” – here our digression begins – “you don’t do it for the money at all, really you don’t; you’re doing it because you get caught up in an idea and you want that idea to work.” The ultimate achievement, according to Waterstone, is to see your vision realised, often against the odds: almost all entrepreneurs, he thinks, are fighting against received wisdom.
¶ President Obama has deplored Rev Terry Jones’s plan to burn copies of the Qur’an on Saturday. We wish that the president had done something this exciting before now, but we’ll take what we can get.
“If he’s listening, I just hope he understands that what he’s proposing to do is completely contrary to our values as Americans,†Mr. Obama said in an interview shown Thursday on ABC’s “Good Morning America,†referring to Terry Jones, a pastor from Gainesville, Fla.
“As a practical matter, as commander in chief of the armed forces of the United States, I just want him to understand that this stunt that he is pulling could greatly endanger our young men and women in uniform who are in Iraq, who are in Afghanistan,†the president said.
Mr. Obama said that the Koran burning would be a “recruitment bonanza for Al Qaeda†and other terrorist groups looking for people willing to “blow themselves up†in American or European cities.
¶ Eraserhead — in a one-page panel. (HTMLGIANT)
¶ So that’s it! We’re supposed to like and admire Vincent Karthesier! (Well, we do.) (Thanks, Greg X!)
¶ How many points of Helvetica would it take to stretch from the Earth to the Moon? If you have to ask, you can’t apport it. (kottke.org)