May 2006 Archives

I went out for the first Wiscon dinner party this evening, even if it's actually my second Wiscon. It's fun to meet new people interested enough to make the pilgrimage to Wiscon. I met Rain from Ann Arbor, Kasi from West Virginia, and others. Conversations ranged through biology, science journalism, paganism, women's studies, etc. Opening ceremonies were delayed by technical delays, once the projector was working we watched a short slide show featuring previous GoHs. After that was the traditional opening program.

I went to two more panels this evening, one on what speculating about what a feminist think tank would look like, the other on James Tiptree, Jr. aka Alice Sheldon. There's a feminist sf/f wiki soliciting contributions from interested people.

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I arrived yesterday afternoon after a 7 hour drive from Ann Arbor, met up with Adrian to get the key to the room at the hostel, and then went out to dinner at an excellent Nepalese restaurant on State Street. Today Wiscon kicked into high gear with panels starting at 10 a.m. and running continuously for the next four days. I think Wiscon is the only convention I've attended, except for Worldcon, that can maintain such a crazy pace for four days.

So far today I've been to two panels. The first was “Books you Bounce Off Of.” Chery Morgan was on the panel and posted her reaction. Some of the reasons for bouncing off of certain books mentioned were: inability to identify with the character, becoming overidentified with a character who is put into a horrific situation, lacking the literary experience to understand how a story works, being an expert in a field and being turned off by the portrait of the field or details that are incorrect. And more. There are probably as many ways to be turned off a book as there are readers.

One that happens to me, especially with fantasy, is being bogged down by too much material. This has happened to me in a number of fantasy series or trilogies that I've tried to read but ultimately given up on: George R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire, Thomas Harlan's Oath of Empire, Robin Hobb's Farseer Trilogy. For Martin there were characters that I lost interest in and who were taking up more than half of the alternating chapters, for Harlan it was similar - there were just too many things going on that seemed unessential or were there just to draw out the plot a bit further, some of the battle descriptions went on for page after page without adding much to the novel. The second volume of Hobb was the worst I remember. I still liked the main character enough to finish the trilogy but the second book seemed like the ultimate filler to just make the villain more villainous.

The second panel of the afternoon was on constructed languages, in particular Klingon and Laadan by Suzette Haden Elgin. The conversation wandered into a number of interesting byways, including the wonderful statement by Suzette that English has become the most successful language in the world because it is the most deniable and the easiest to lie with. A large portion of the discussion focused on whether women needed their own language or not. John M Ford made a joke about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that got a chuckle out of me at the beginning of the panel. By the end I was wondering why SF/F seems to attract so many people who are interested in language and seem to accept some kind of Whorfian view about how language affects our worldview? Is there something about the genre that makes such a theory so plausible to its readers?

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Henry Gould wrote the following it about the radical nature of democracy.:

But the question got me thinking. Perhaps democracy is only realistic as a radical commitment. By that I mean one must be - thoroughly - a committed believer in popular sovereignty and the intelligence of the common person and ordinary opinion - radically so, despite the debilitating processes & events so conducive to despair & cynicism. Because only such a commitment is strong enough to say nay to the centuries - millennia - of elite thinking on politics (from before Plato, to Plato, to Macchiavelli, etc. & beyond). One has to be radical enough - & sceptical enough of intellectual pretension - to regard the elite discourse on politics - no matter how intelligent, informed by hard experience, and persuasive - as wrong-headed and out-of-date.

There is something happening inside the soul of man right now and it doesn't look good. Fundamentalism and rationality are coming into conflict more directly than ever before.

One of the worst bits of cant I heard after 9-11 was that the world had changed completely on that day. I thought that was a stupid thing to say then and it's still rather silly today, but I'm beginning to see that the change for some was very real. The change that everyone felt was doubt. Doubt about the power of America, about our own safety, our protection. For me that change had already happened. I doubted America long before 9-11. I didn't resent America or hate it, I was just skeptical of it. I knew and felt that there were always more sides to the story than what we saw on television or read in a newspaper. But there were some people who never doubted America before that day and they resented having doubt thrust upon them by terrorists.

That doubt has metastasized into fear and fundamentalism. As Andrew Sullivan writes at Marxism and Christianism:

The key defining divide of our time is no longer that between right and left, I think, but between fundamentalist faith and humanist doubt. I favor the latter, with a non-fundamentalist kind of faith to sustain it. And the struggle within conservatism right now is essentially between those who see history as without direction and those who see history as an unfolding of divine Providence. For these reasons, a conservative will reject Marxism and the eschatological Christianity of Paul and the extreme Whiggery of some neoconservatives. And he will find in Darwin and Jesus two natural allies.

Sullivan calls this creeping tide of fundamentalism, Christianism. More by Sullivan, Christianism, Debated

The difference between a world-view, based on empirical evidence or reason or personal experience and open to debate, and a religion, based on an inerrant text or revelation or church authority and closed to doubt, is that the religion demands to be taken much more seriously. It insists on its own divine authority - as it must - and that authority cannot be held hostage to the results of a political conversation or debate or election. It rests on God Almighty. By definition, therefore, the conflation of our politics with the will of God makes political discourse largely impossible, because we don't all believe in the same God or even in God at all. And so the introduction of religious authority into politics makes all our political dealings inseparable from profound differences over the deepest things - the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of God, and so on.

Politics, as we have come to understand it in the West, cannot operate on those grounds. It did once. And Europe was filled with the smoke from the burning flesh of heretics. The decision to remove such profound issues from politics was definitive of the West's emergence from the dark ages, and it is integral to any understanding of the American experiment in limited government and individual liberty. The absolute demands of fundamentalist faith make the West's tradition of civil compromise impossible; and they constantly push the boundaries of what is acceptable to God, as religious purists outdo each other in proving their righteousness - whether it be keeping comatose patients alive for decades or defining a zygote as a full human person. Hence our politics has degenerated into a “culture war.” Wars are what happens when politics become impossible. And that is the corrosive effect of Christianism; and why it must be resisted - for the sake of American discourse and for the sake of a vibrant, humble apolitical Christianity.

I recently asked my good friend Eric to weigh in on Christianism. He makes a couple of good points about the need to respect each other's beliefs. I agree that belief can inform politics, but respect is just as important. And sometimes that respect means acknowledging the right of another person to be dead wrong, or to believe something you find antithetical to all of your own beliefs. In fact the respect is sometimes more important than the belief. As Sullivan says above the genius of the West was partly based on the decision to remove the conflict over religion out of the public sphere. We cannot agree on everything so we must agree on a little, and that little bit is respect.

My quest for more information on defense technology continues to move through odd paths and unexpected troves of information. Today I followed a single link from Wikipedia to the Federation of American Scientists and discovered a whole set of pages on current military technology, some we know is true and other we can only speculate about There's stuff on space, smart weapons, ballistic missile defense, etc. I've been a subscriber to Stephen Aftergood's Secrecy News email for some time and it appears he's now publishing similar information at the Secrecy News Weblog. There's even this Congressional Research Service report "Data Mining and Homeland Security" that basically revealed the recent NSA phone monitoring program in January, if you read between the lines. Take a look at this quote:

The Novel Intelligence from Massive Data (NIMD) program focuses on the development of data mining and analysis tools to be used in working with massive data.74 Novel intelligence refers to “actionable information not previously known.” Massive data refers to data that has characteristics that are especially challenging to common data analysis tools and methods. These characteristics can include unusual volume, breadth (heterogeneity), and complexity. Data sets that are one petabyte (one quadrillion bytes) or larger are considered to be “massive.” Smaller data sets that contain items in a wide variety of formats, or are very heterogeneous (i.e., unstructured text, spoken text, audio, video, graphs, diagrams, images, maps, equations, chemical formulas, tables, etc.) can also be considered “massive.” According to ARDA’s website (no longer available)75 “some intelligence data sources grow at a rate of four petabytes per month now, and the rate of growth is increasing.” With the continued proliferation of both the means and volume of electronic communications, it is expected that the need for more sophisticated tools will intensify. Whereas NSA once predicted it was in danger of becoming proverbially deaf due to the spreading use of encrypted communications, it appears that NSA may now be at greater risk of being “drowned” in information.

Listmixer has become one of the key parts of my online life in the past few months. It's clearly inspired by del.icio.us but has one feature that has been amazing - bookmark expiration. Bookmarks that haven't been visited within a month disappear from the list.

This works great for me because there are always tons of tabs open in my news aggregator or browser that I think I might write about. Most of them are too ephemeral to merit inclusion in delicious, furl, spurl, simpy, ma.gnolia, newsvine, digg, or any of the other multiplying bookmark sites out on the net. So a site like Listmaker let's me bookmark them for a month and if I don't return to write about them they disappear into the ether.

I officially started my summer internship at Tablus today, although I've been working there part time for the past two semesters. My current project is creating a dictionary/taxonomy of terms connected to ITAR, the International Trade in Arms Regulations. The United States Munitions list has about a dozen categories, from firearms to satellites, and I have to break each one of them down into terms that can be recognized by the Tablus filter programs.

Jessica Litman delivered a paper today to a rump crowd of SI students and faculty about the economic costs of law journal publishing. Her thesis was that the major costs for law school publishing are mostly externalized as the cost of the faculty who perform the research. The actual production and editorial costs of the journal is a fraction of the total cost of production. Given this fact there seems to be no economic reason to suppose that an open access model would do any harm.

To reach this conclusion she uses a hypothetical law journal as an example case. The budget for this journal comes to about $40,000 for printing, which is offset by subscription, royalty, and subsidy spending. Next she estimates the first copy cost, or the cost of research production, and arrives at $311,150, $300,000 comes from faculty salaries, $6000 from students for legal notes, and $5150 for editorial student labor. Clearly the cost of faculty labor is the highest part of the whole, so what's the problem for open source?

The discussion afterwards was lively and started to answer that very question. Litman had hoped to get some similar numbers for journals in other fields but instead the talk started by asking whether the external costs should be counted in the first place because they wouldn't be any different in an open source publishing model, and then proceeded to try to describe the perspectives of all the players involved in the publishing business. Who really benefits from academic publishing? Professional societies certainly generate a lot of revenue through journals. But the harder benefits to measure are the indirect ones such as prestige and reputation. As Yan Chen put it, the central problem is one of coordination - how do you get everyone in the system, from non-tenured faculty through those who have tenure, to risk moving from the current journals to a new open access system.

A paper called “The Economics of Open Access Publishing” is available from the Wayne State law school web, and has more detail on the complete argument.