Torturer's Apprentice

“The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘waterboarding’ all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.”

- “Torturer’s Apprentice” by Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic: http://bit.ly/AbAKcW

Google's Book Search Disaster

“That makes for a steep learning curve, all the more so because of Google’s haste to complete the project so that potential competitors would be confronted with a fait accompli. But whether or not the needs of scholars are a priority, the company doesn’t want Google’s book search to become a running scholarly joke. And it may be responsive to pressure from its university library partners—who weren’t particularly attentive to questions of quality when they signed on with Google—particularly if they are urged (or if necessary, prodded) to make noise about shoddy metadata by the scholars whose interests they represent. If recent history teaches us anything, it’s that Google is a very quick study.”

“Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,” in The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/xarb41

The Book on In Our Time

Brilliant five part series on “The Written World” by Melvyn Bragg on BBC4’s In Our Time. Part 3 on world religions is particularly good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/writtenworld

Information Overload?

“Over the past couple hundred years, we’ve had this idea that knowledge is composed of facts about the world, and together we are engaged in this multigenerational enterprise of gathering facts and posting them, and ultimately we’ll have a complete picture of the world. That view of facts as the irreducible atoms of knowledge has some benefit, but we’re seeing a different type of fact emerge on the Net as well. Traditional facts are still there. Facts are facts. But we’re seeing organizations of all sorts releasing their data, their facts, onto the Web as huge clouds of triples [another word for linked data]. They’re a connection of two ideas through some relationship — that’s why they’re called triples — but not only can they be linked together by computers, they themselves consist of links. Each of the elements of a linked atom is a pointer to some resource that disambiguates it and explains what it is.” - Are We On Information Overload? http://www.salon.com/?p=10800301

The Joy of Quiet

“Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once… ‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’ the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ‘and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone… The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential. - “The Joy of Quiet,” Pico Iyer, http://nyti.ms/vY2IFn

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.