Philosophical notes…
Reading Derrida
It’s like stumbling through the front door of what appeared to be a cottage in my neighborhood. I pass a series of rooms along an uncannily protracted corridor paved with parchment. In one room, a couple argues, in another, children at play. No one notices my presence and it is difficult to tell whether I am the spectre or it is they. Finally, at the end, I find a little man behind a curtained closet writing at his desk. I ask if he is responsible for the corridor’s paper trail, but like the others he does not respond. It seems the wizard at the end of this yellow brick road has no gifts to give (and, quite possibly, that is his raison d’etre).
On University Rankings
“There is no right answer to how much weight a ranking system should give to these two competing values. It’s a matter of which educational model you value more—and here, once again, U.S. News makes its position clear. It gives twice as much weight to selectivity as it does to efficacy. It favors the Yale model over the Penn State model, which means that the Yales of the world will always succeed at the U.S. News rankings because the U.S. News system is designed to reward Yale-ness. By contrast, to the extent that Penn State succeeds at doing a better job of being Penn State—of attracting a diverse group of students and educating them capably—it will only do worse. Rankings are not benign. They enshrine very particular ideologies, and, at a time when American higher education is facing a crisis of accessibility and affordability, we have adopted a de-facto standard of college quality that is uninterested in both of those factors. And why? Because a group of magazine analysts in an office building in Washington, D.C., decided twenty years ago to value selectivity over efficacy, to use proxies that scarcely relate to what they’re meant to be proxies for, and to pretend that they can compare a large, diverse, low-cost land-grant university in rural Pennsylvania with a small, expensive, private Jewish university on two campuses in Manhattan.”
“The Order of Things: What College Rankings Really Tell Us,” The New Yorker, http://nyr.kr/uLGaUl
A New Camera
“Imagine, he suggests, a photojournalist covering a presidential speech whose audience includes a clutch of protesters. Using a traditional camera, he says, ‘I could easily set my controls so that what’s in focus is just the president, with the background blurred. Or I could do the opposite, and focus on the protesters.’ A Lytro capture, by contrast, will include both focal points, and many others. Distribute that image, he continues, and ‘the viewer can choose—I don’t want to sound professorial—but can choose the truth.’” - “The Revolution in Photography,” The Atlantic Monthly, http://bit.ly/rKfXXO
What is College For?
“First of all, [colleges] are not simply for the education of students. This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically… Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society.” - http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=115367
Books Printed on Demand
Clive Thompson, author of The Myth of the Paperless Office, wrote an interesting article in Wired this month on the impact of print on demand publishing upon paper book use. He argues that just as the use of paper exploded after the rise of the computer and office printer, so too:
“Print-on-demand” publishing is about to do the same thing to books. It’ll keep them alive—by allowing them to be much weirder… Print-on-demand devices, like the Espresso Book Machine, do just what their name implies: You feed them a digital file and in minutes you have a good-looking paperback with a color cover. - http://bit.ly/tnrNo6
It’s an interesting argument because Thompson isn’t suggesting that paper books will continue in their current form. He recognizes the dramatic shift towards electronic digital reading as Kindle sales already outpace all paper book sales combined. The mass market paperback book will continue to be released via Kindle or some other e-reader format. But, there are forms of the paper codex book that add a kind of cache to the content. For instance, commemorative photo books you can create on your computer, or obscure out of “print” titles, which can now be printed on demand with relative ease. As he goes on:
Granted, few of those titles have been printed more than a handful of times; print-on-demand is still a small fraction of total book production. But the trend is obvious. Mass publishers doing “big” books will continue to shift to the Kindle and its peers, while smaller outlets will use print-on-demand for formats that privilege physicality, like mementos, visually lush books, and custom-designed, limited-edition copies of novels. This trend will accelerate in 15 or 20 years, when, as some observers predict, your average home printer will be able to spit out paperbacks. - http://bit.ly/tnrNo6
We’ll have to wait and see how ubiquitous espresso-like book machines can press paper into the hands of contemporary readers, but it could be that the codex leaf book common in years past will emerge as a specialty item used something like scrolls for diplomas at graduation ceremonies, for the odd scholar’s obsurantist title, for the family photo album, and indeed maybe even by Christian churches and mosques who continue the codex’s historic role in their traditions’ rise and development.
Religious Nones
“Nones are the undecided of the religious world. We drift spiritually and dabble in everything from Sufism to Kabbalah to, yes, Catholicism and Judaism… We Nones may not believe in God, but we hope to one day. We have a dog in this hunt… We believe that G. K. Chesterton got it right when he said: ‘It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.’” - http://nyti.ms/ssLTxN
On Metricizing Knowledge
“Besides, the research tradition in academe has always been to pursue knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Often a scholar has no obvious endpoint in mind when he or she embarks on a particular project but may unexpectedly make a monumental discovery. We cannot predict ahead of time if someone’s research project will be so important that it will win the Nobel Prize, or the Pulitzer Prize, so it would be counterproductive to determine in advance that scholars in any given area should not be conducting research and instead should be teaching more. That applies to every discipline, including those in the sciences.” - “How Not to Measure Faculty Productivity,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/tuSFFH
Metaphysical McLuhan
“I am not a ‘cultural critic’ because I am not in any way interested in classifying cultural forms. I am a metaphysician, interested in the life of the forms and their surprising modalities.” - Marshall McLuhan, Letters of Marshall McLuhan, cited in The Essential McLuhan, pg. 1
On Face Recognition
“…many users do not understand that Facebook’s tag suggestion feature involves storing people’s biometric data to re-identify them in later photos.”
“There are many risks,” Mr. Caspar says. “People should be able to choose if they want to accept these risks, or not accept them.” He offered a suggestion for Americans, “Users in the United States have good reason to raise their voices to get the same right.”