Bill's Book Reviews and News

A weaker Barnes and Noble could raise questions about the future of book publishing

2012-01-30T07:33:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Business Section yesterday, in Sunday Business, offered a big story by Julie Bosman, “The Bookstore’s Last Stand” about Barnes & Noble and its introduction of the Nook as an answer to Amazon’s Kindle -- and as a way to stop BN's own business decline. The article is called “The Bookstore’s Last Stand” with link here.

CNET offers a buyer’s comparison of Kindle, Nook and iPad, by John Falcone, Nov. 23, 2011, link here. I’ll add that I haven’t purchased any device yet: I still travel with a Windows Notebook and hardcopies, but I am seriously considering the iPad.

Bosman discusses the impact that a weaker Barnes and Noble would have on the mainstream book publishing industry. The independent bookstore has taken a hit from the larger chains (we’ve lost Lambda Rising), but the chains (Borders) are losing out to the Internet in multiple ways. A place for book signings and cultural events is in jeopardy.

Publishers can make great profits on big hits like Harry Potter and Stephen King novels, but it is harder now on midlist authors (it has been for some time), and non-fiction, outside of memoirs by celebrities and some how-to books like cookbooks, tend not to sell well. The loss of bookstores makes it even harder.

A newer generation is conditioned to expect visual entertainment and has less patience for reading.

The legal and cultural environment of the Internet is certainly a factor. It might be a different world, as I’ve noted (even on the previous posting) if there weren’t as much downstream liability protection to service providers for user-generated content.

When I self-published my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book with a printing in July 1997, I expected to sell hardcopies by word-of-mouth. At the same time, I did a transfer to Minneapolis. Once in Minnesota, that did happen to an extent; I even made a cable television appearance there. Authorship then was still a source of celebrity. But as the Internet and the Web 1.0 environment supported by search engines grew, I quickly turned to “fame” generated by Google – which could mean that a few hundred thousand people worldwide would get to know me online, even if they didn’t have to “pay”. That did happen. I think my book and Internet strategy was a significant, if little known, part of the eventual repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell”. But I haven’t transitioned to Web 2.0 and the heavily segmented social media environment so well. Okay, I’m 68.

But what if it hadn’t been able to use the Web this way? Would I have sold more copies instead? Very likely, I believe, yes. Word-of-mouth efforts and symposiums would have gotten even more attention. The original book (with its glaring typo error on the back cover about the “age” of the Bill of Rights) was carried in the LGBT section of the downtown Minneapolis store for most of 1999, and BN then had a regular LGBT book forum there. It was also carried in various Lambda Rising stores.

In the meantime, the publishing world has gravitated toward cooperative or supported self-publishing, where the author takes on more of the expense and risk (as I did in the 90s). At the same time, knowledge management compendiums like Wikipedia say they don’t like to see articles turning to self-published works (except when from material about the subject).

iUniverse still promotes author discounts and encourages authors to try to volume-sell their own books (after buying larger orders from print-on-demand), either through conventional (now) social media networking, local advertising, or even mentorship. The problem is that, in most cases, older non-fiction just doesn’t sell. (In my case, people are rapidly forgetting that “don’t ask don’t tell” could come back in a different administration, and that isn’t good.) Newer work can be sold. Authors have to stay busy creating and polishing new content. That’s a reality. Never rest on your laurels. But you don't need to become a huckster.

Here's the Los Angeles Times on the Nook Tablet:

New book from St. Martin's details the problems of online reputation, online security for visible individuals and almost all businesses

2012-01-28T16:57:00.000-08:00

On my blogs, I have written extensively amount online reputation. Much of my concern has been based on an older risk, in the Web 1.0 world, that manager, teacher, or anyone who makes decisions about others in the workplace, could demonstrate prejudice in front of search engines merely by expressing well-intended views or opinions about political and social issues (like race or gay rights) in an unregulated public space. Over time, the issue of reputation became more complicated, especially with Web 2.0 and the growth of social media, where others could so seriously injure someone’s standing in front of others, causing job loss or even worse.

A new book carries this further, showing that many companies, and many people whose own reputations depend on how well they run these companies, as well as politicians and celebrities, have to spend a tremendous amount of attention to digital reputation. Attacking the reputations of competitors has become an “accepted” way to do business. This may be part of the “cheating culture” already presented here before (March 28, 2006).

Here are the details:

Authors: Richard Torrenzano and Mark Davis

Title: “Digital Assassination: Protecting your Reputation, Brand, or Business Against Online Attacks”

Publication: New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2011, ISBN 978-0-312-61791-2, hardcover, 289 pages, 11 chapters, with endnotes and index.

The Amazon link is here.

(Just a quick note on the title: Microsoft Word tells me that “from” is the right idiomatic preposition, not “against”.)

The book is outlined around “seven swords” (of) and “seven shields” (against) digital destruction.

The swords include volume bad-mouthing (leveraging search engines), impersonation, anonymity, placing “truth” out of context, and (with the most detail of all), hacking. The shields involve a careful approach to online presence.

Since the advent of social media, it has become clear that almost no one can simply stay offline in order to escape “conflict”. There is no call to “run away” from the problem of online reputation by becoming a Luddite. One has to contemplate carefully just how much material (and about what) to put online, as that will affect his or her search engine results. The authors recommend that people blog or write about only their areas of expertise. In my case, because so much concentric material is “generated” from the way one particular incident in my life was interpreted, and because I’m not in the business of volume-selling to people, I do think my own “best practices” would differ from those of most other people. In fact, the best behavior of “content generators” (such as artists or musicians) would differ somewhat from those whose living depends on selling the work (or political stakes) of others. The old, trite soap opera question “Who do you work for?” really matters, I think.

The authors offer an interesting comparison of the cultures of Google and Facebook. Google was originally more concerned with public self-broadcast, which can result in social connections (as it did very much for me). Facebook was more concerned with the friendship rings within which components of information circulate. One problem is that “Facebook culture” could wind up creating a climate of social conformity if misunderstood by employers and families (as it has been). On the other hand, “Google culture” (until more recently), could eventually result in anarchy, which can in turn generate new forms of exclusionism, maybe even fascism. The authors could be clearer on the significance on both Google+ and Facebook (especially the latter) that account holders use their real names or identities, precluding leading a "double life" online.

The authors, at least indirectly, do take up the problem of downstream liability, discussing both the DMCA safe harbor and Section 230 at the end of the book. The authors do not argue for public policy changes to increase downstream liability, but rather argue that individuals and businesses (especially) must learn how to work in the topology or “analytic measure” of the global digital world. They seem to think that major policy changes are unlikely. The book apparently went to press before SOPA and Protect-IP proposals became controversial. The authors do say (p 171) that under current law it’s illegal (in the US and the west) to hack or set up a company just to hack or to counterfeit or to pirate. But there’s no legal penalty for using materials stolen by others (a point that gets caught up in SOPA).

The author’s longest “sword” chapter deals with hacking and the near impossibility of defending against very determined attackers. They discuss the risk to critical physical infrastructures, including nuclear power plants, the general power grid, and the entire petrochemical industry. I remember that these grim possibilities were discussed in the Minneapolis papers in early 2002, shortly after 9/11. Why are the systems associated with critical infrastructures (or even national security, including nuclear weapons launch) reachable from a public Internet? (Banks seem to be different and more secure, but I wonder, given the identity scams.) This does sound like a public policy question. The proposals by Thomas Friedman and even our president to build a smart Web to manage all home energy use could be undermined by the vulnerability to hackers.

The risk that all this poses to “ordinary users” is quite variable. Again, people who must “sell” or whose own contributions to the content involved online may be more vulnerable. The authors warn the reader about the desirability of disconnecting home wireless routers when not in use, and in taking other measures that could increase the risk of ordinary technical problems and disruptions.

In my own mainframe information technology career, I had few concerns. I worked "internally" and "retired" at the end of 2001; I had published my first "controversial" book in 1997 and become active in Web 1.0 by 1998. In my day, one could lead multiple lives. No more.

There has been controversy over how much “moral responsibility” or “karma” ordinary “amateur” web publishers should accept given that they are accepting the risks (along with the low cost) of a technology where it is very difficult to prevent deliberate malicious behavior and where some people (usually more vulnerable and less savvy or less intact) get badly hurt. Should a home wi-fi owner be held responsible of a criminal drives by and uses it to disseminate child pornography? Should computer users be held responsible if their own computers are hijacked to launch attacks?

A world where there is more downstream liability (or, in some prosecutorial circles, “absolute liability”) would mean a world where “average people” can do much less on their own without the supervision and approval of third parties (or at least without the equivalent of an Internet “driver’s license”). There would return the higher barriers to entry of the past. It would be less “democratic” or “egalitarian”. It also might be safer and more sustainable, and force people to take more responsibility for others. There’s another debate just under the surface of this book.

Richard Torrenzano speaks in this YouTube video by Leading Authorities. He says he and Davis approached the book from the viewpoint of reputation, not just technology. (Daniel Solove’s book on Reputation is reviewed here Jan. 12, 2008.) I’m surprised he doesn’t specifically discuss Michael Fertik and his company “Reputation Defender” (or “Reputation.com”) in more detail.

Would this book lend itself to documentary film? "Online Reputation" certainly would make for a good PBS POV segment.

William Patry: "How to Fix Copyright" follows earlier book; he takes the concept of "gatekeeping" and attempted monopoly head on, but is short on specific policy solutions

2012-01-03T15:32:00.000-08:00

Author: William Patry

Title: “How to Fix Copyright”

Publication: 2011: London, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-976009-1, 323 pages, hardcover, Introduction and twelve chapters.

Amazon link:

On Oct. 2, 2009, I reviewed an earlier similar book by Patry, “Moral Panic and Copyright Wars”. The new book certainly seems timely given the recent appearance of Protect-IP (Senate) and SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”, House) in Congress, which I have been following in detail on my main “Bill Boushka” blog.

But Patry is still short on specifics as to how to draw the legal lines – apparently he even had some disagreement with his publisher on this. What Patry does explain – more cogently the second time around – is how copyright law probably doesn’t serve the public interest very well. Instead, it protects “an establishment”.

Patry spends a lot of space explaining how the music, movie and publishing industries have functioned for years (particularly book publishing, far back into European history in the previous millennium) as “gatekeepers”, maintaining artificial scarcity in media so they could maintain cash cows with maximum profitability for producing a relatively narrow range of and volume of media works for the public. The whole model fell apart in the 1990s as the Internet generated first efficient platforms for UGC (user-generated content) and propagated mechanisms for users to download music and other content and circumvent the established bricks-and-mortar retail mechanism.

“Oversupply leads to gatekeeping”, he writes. Gatekeeping had led to a world where established companies and agents could determine what could “get published”. But there are really two problems. One is that “amateurs” or at least neo-professional newbies produce media for lower cost and compete with legacy media, possibly threatening it. This is really possible only because legal mechanisms (Section 230 and the DMCA Safe Harbor) largely shield service providers from potential downstream liability. The concerns over Protect-IP and SOPA largely come down to fear that these downstream liability protections could be undermined or gutted, basically ending the ability of service providers to support “amateurism”.

The other problem is what really gets more attention in most legal actions. Content providers get the law to regulate how devices can be used to copy content even for person use – leading to provisions in the DMCA that, with digital content, preclude what would have been Fair Use in the past. Consumers can be precluded from making even their own personal copies. This moves out into areas trying to regulate P2P networks and mass litigation against users (the RIAA lawsuits, and more recently suits concerning movie downloads by the US Copyright Group) which music producers have found just don’t work.

Patry doesn’t get into the copyright troll problem illustrated by the litigation brought by Righthaven against bloggers for reposting content from client newspapers, mostly smaller papers in the South and West.

Patry points out that at one time legacy media wanted to protect news facts from republication and sometimes wanted to charge search engines for showing links! I think this went on around 2000, about the time the courts were deciding that html hyperlinks could not constitute copyright infringement because they are basically bibliographic attributions. Video embeds, I think, could raise interesting questions.

Patry argues that legacy media are turning to the law to regulate a marketplace to their favor, instead of relating to new technology by being willing to price media properly and creatively. Music companies, for years, lazily sold CD’s at higher prices than low-income consumers could afford, when these consumers could afford singles. Steve Jobs forced them to accept “singles” pricing with iTunes. Companies cannot save inflexible and outmoded business models, he argues, just by turning to the law to regulate away low cost competition or even “off the books” borrowing of material.

Is “intellectual property” to be viewed by policy makers as a traditional “property right”? Patry says supposedly libertarian construct is a canard. Creativity is not encouraged by a copyright system that encourages “winner take all” and a few superstars, and recycling of old material (like movie sequels) for short-term profits. Creativity also involves some legitimate amount of “copying”. Patry explains how this works in classical music (variation forms), and it’s obvious he has a background in formal music. (It’s a stretch to say that the finale of the Brahms First came from Beethoven’s Ninth, but certainly the artistic and social “context” did.)

Patry discusses a facile metaphor (“The answer to the machine is a machine” from an obscure book by Charles Clark) and shows how it could be misused to support legacy regulation.

There’s a degree of social responsibility called for. Content owners are rapidly learning that it is often in their best interest to price according to ability to pay. Even Verdi dealt with that in the 19^th Century.

Visitors will want to visit the website for Creative Commons, here.

Here is some of Patry’s Feb. 2010 NYC lecture, “Law is not a business solution”.

Here's an interesting piece on Slate by Matthew Yglesias, "Should we stop online piracy: why a little copyright infringement is good for society and the economy", link here. The relevant economic concept is called "deadweight loss".

Corey Robin: "The Reactionary Mind": a subject I have personal experience with

2011-12-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

Author: Corey Robin

Title: “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin”

Publication: 2011: London, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-979354-7, 290 pages, hardcover, Introduction, Conclusion, two parts, eleven chapters

Amazon link is here.

I mentioned this book (which is a bit expensive) on my main blog Dec. 9, with particular respect to the idea of personal agency. That is, the notion that “someone like me”, an outlier, speaks for himself and draws attention, and separates or precipitates out from authority, insoluble, unreachable by it.

The author, a CUNY political science professor, has pretty well explained a line of thought I have been examining all my life, and that I thought I had nailed in my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book (1997), but indeed my own understanding of it has somewhat unraveled since then.

The two parts of the book are titled “Profiles in Reaction” (don’t confuse with JFK’s “Profiles in Courage”, which I had to read in high school history) and “Virtues of Violence”, but his line of argument is fluid (rather like a Dutch Defense in chess without the Stonewall) and the two movements (rather like an Op. 111) overlap.

Here’s the gist of his argument. Conservatism resents the loss of authority it has over subordinates. In its sense of loss, it can generate a real fight. But conservatism, even during “Republicrat” Bill Clinton’s 90s, has become so successful that it has lost its energy. It needs the fight, it needs its objects of derision. (Hence, libertarianism dies away in morendo.)

Throughout most of human history, social position, wealth, and political authority have largely been “inherited”. But as conservatives, ironically spurred by the Left, perhaps, take hold of the moral vacuum of such a situation, they invent a new way of thinking: authority is to be generated by meritocracy. Some of the notion of merit can be expressed in money, in terms of financial success. But some of it consists of proving your intrinsic worth, of going through your rites of passage. My name for this idea has been “pay your bills, pay your dues”.

There is something insufficient about believing that self-worth (and subsequent responsibility and “authority”) is every completely “earned”. Yup, it’s like the Bible’s (Jesus’s) “man shall not live by bread alone”. Society is an ongoing community, and no personal achievement would mean anything without if, if others didn’t benefit concretely, tangibly. So one needs a connection to what came before and what comes after – call it “sustainability”. The radical Left used to call this idea something like “the will of the People”. But even “The People” will need a political hierarchy. Generally, history has shown (and Robin is not willing to admit) that the tyrants on the Left are just as corrupt (and brutal) as those on the Right. Look at North Korea.

So, concepts like "freedom" and "equality" become Janus-faced. Robin points out that the reactionary sees "freedom" in terms of one's right to maintain a station in life of superiority to others.

The best way for me to give a more comprehensive assessment of the book is to wall through what I think he is saying in terms of my own experience. And I must admit, I have trouble closing a perfectly logical circle.

Growing up in the 50s, I was a bit of the “sissy boy”. Yup, you know where this is headed. I quickly showed an aptitude for piano and music and, after a rocky episode in grade school, suddenly was quite verbal. I liked the idea of attracting attention with my own artistic efforts. But I found that others (starting with my father, and then teachers, etc.) were demanding tribute, in terms of performing according to the expectations of gender complementarity. (“Girls first!”) I came of age during the time of the military draft – and student deferments. It seemed as though “doing your part” – which included sharing risks – was the prime moral imperative. In a world governed by external threats (Robin’s “national security” paradigm) and the demands of nature – in a time when women took real risks in just having kids – it was essential that everyone did his part just so there could exist a future. If you could not do your part because you weren't physically competitive (according to gender), you were regarded as dependent on or potentially a hazardous cargo for the "group", so you had to do what the more "able" people told you to do. That was the "logic" of it.

Then, of course, came the issue of homosexuality. I’ve detailed this difficult period in my college years and early adulthood (and the irony of my own “successful” military service) elsewhere, as in my own books. But in review, it’s really striking to me now that my declaration of latent homosexuality as a freshman in college (let alone any practice of it) would seem like a greater “wrong” than its inverse, causing a baby to be born out of wedlock. True, I was (am) an only child. My statement probably sounded like a death sentence for my family, a repudiation of the permanence of my parents’ marriage (even if they did enjoy 45 years together until my father’s death in 1986).

Robin has a chapter, the next to last, “Potomac Fever”, on the anti-gay witch-hunts of the period of McCarthyism, defying all logical explanation to the modern person. (He briefly continues the discussion into an account of the military gay ban, now finally repealed.) Homosexuality had become a proxy for Communism and even treason, an idea that seems “grotesque” today, as he writes, quoting H.L.A. Hart criticizing the collectivist “moral philosophy” of Patrick Devlin. But this way of thinking still seems to animate anti-gay thinking in parts of the world today, especially in Islam and in countries like Uganda. The Vatican is well known for pressing the view that sexuality must come with the price of exposure to (or “openness to”) the future intimacies as risks of procreation. (The Catholic priesthood can hardly live up to its own teachings.) In a broad view, one can see how sustainability (and now, population demographics) raises the idea that everyone must have a personal stake in those who will follow before being listened to.

One interesting aspect of homosexuality, at least in my experience, was its irony, or upward affiliation. I became concerned with “who” was indeed the “ideal man” or Nietzchean or Rand-like hero, and what attributes such a hero must exhibit (and not lose – say, remain perfect forever, become an angel and violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics – entropy – and you don’t have to reproduce, or run the risks of procreation – which drag the idea man down – when it is really age and time that do so – and it’s a shared future – progeny—that make a sexually continuous lasting marriage possible. (Okay—we can get into the findings that fatherhood reduces a man’s hormones – but so will age.)

When I grew up, "morality" definitely invoked a double standard. It was about much more than taking responsibility for individual "choices" (like causing a pregnancy). It meant readying oneself to live as part of a social structure, and to share responsibility for other generations -- first by having the capability to do so (according to gender) and then following through. Life really wasn't just about "choice" or "personal expression". Parents had both the power and responsibility to bring their children up to both continue their families and live in a community. But of course all of this idea (that you can state moral rules at all) presumes that society is good enough for individual moral behavior to be meaningful. So I have to presume that the world I grew up in, while in many ways "unfair" and "flawed", as still better than most other societies that had preceded it.

Here is where my closed circle finds a kink – the search for the “ideal man” implies an obsession with authority, and a desire to see the “best people” in charge of everyone else – bringing back the “conservative” ideas that oppressed me. I do remember resenting the idea that my father and others did some things “just for authority” with no other rational purpose. I was to be subjugated. But meet the ideal 21-year-old, I would want to be subjugated, and find it exciting. There’s another unpleasant corollary. Yup, as my Fort Eustis (Useless) Army buddies said, my perfect Ocelot could develop clay feet some day (or balding legs). But it’s more that I would become cut off from emotion or feeling for the imperfect, for “people as people” (as my father would say, during all the psychiatric mess of the early 1960s). I would refuse to give people feeling when they genuinely needed it. There would develop not just a healthy aloofness and impartiality but a coldness, a deletion of empathy. That’s harder to take today than it was fifteen years ago, before 9/11 and then all the recessionary hardships hit the media.

Robin talks about upward affiliation (a favorite term of socially conservative writer George Gilder when he wrote “Men and Marriage” in the 1980s with a more general term, “sublimity”. We admire those who can harm or destroy us (I could be more explicit with a word starting with the “failing grade” letter). We lose respect for those who no longer can challenge us. (I suspect that in giving his own college students essay exams, he asks them to discuss the concept, particularly with respect to Edmund Burke.)

He also has a chapter where he critiques Ayn Rand. He really doesn’t have much use for her, and calls her work “kitsch”. As to a thinking she was both a novelist and philosopher, she was “neither”. (That’s been said about me as neither a conservative nor libertarian.) In fact, check out this piece on AlterNet by Bruce E. Levine, “How Ayn Rand seduced generations of young men and helped make the U.S. into a selfish, greedy nation”, link here.

Robin maps all this into our experience of national security in an expected way. He notes that after 9/11, it was no longer easy to mobilize the population into organized shared sacrifice. But I can remember that resumption of the draft was proposed , not just by Charles Rangel (because it was the poor and minorities who enlisted and bore the risks of American policy) but by Charles Moskos, who found in 9/11 a good reason to drop the military gay ban. (Moskos actually emailed me in late 2001, “Gays must come out for conscription; then the ban would be lifted. “ Moskos, remember, had been one of the authors of “don’t ask don’t tell”.) Robin points out that the majority of us are made to feel more secure by bargaining away the rights of the politically weak and vulnerable.

I close this review with a quote from someone who misread some of my own writings (Chapter 4 in my 2002 book “Do Ask Do Tell: When Liberty Is Stressed”) and made these angry comments to me in an email about six years ago:

“The war on terrorism is the war for *FREEDOM*, and compromises of our liberty are much more our casualties in that war more than any one (or thousand) person's death. Tolerance, privacy and protection of the civil rights of whoever is touched by our country's laws should be (and WAS, before Bush) our most sacred trust. Laws that do not protect the right of the individual, as a rule, oppress the rights of the many. By letting terrorists make us change our lives and laws to make ourselves less free, we concede defeat to them.

“How many women and children in Afghanistan and Iraq have died for the sins of a few dozen terrorists (assuming it was not a false flag operation by the Bush administration)? There is no question that tens of thousands of civilians have died from acts of violence--that many deaths have been documented and corroborated by multiple press reports of western media--and it appears to be hundreds of thousands have died due to violence, disease and the general disruption that comes from living in a war zone... Saddam is a terrible man who killed hundreds of his own citizens. He used chemical weapons to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of Iranians. We have descended upon Iraq like a plague, causing the death of one in thirty-five. Is that part of the price that you are willing to pay for your security from terrorism? Would Christ say that your security was more important than peace? “

Time offers "Special Ops: The Hidden World of America's Toughest Warrirors"

2011-12-20T07:45:00.000-08:00

When you’re in a local supermarket you may see a notebook-sized booklet from Time, “Special Ops: The Hidden World of America’s Toughest Warriors”, by Jim Frederick, with an introduction by Bob Kerrey, 96 pages, very heavily illustrated, nine chapters.

The book opens with a detailed account of the hit on Osama bin Laden the night of May 1, 2011, with “Operation Crankshaft”. It ends with an epilogue on how a special warrior can even had a normal family life. There are many inserts, such as on p 31, Ryan Zinke writes “How the SEALs trained me for life”.

The most interesting part is the discussion of the grueling training (not only the well-known survival escape-and-evasion where you live off the land, but also preparation for extreme rendition, and exposure to things normally unhealthful, such as extended periods of high-pitched loud noise. The physical fitness requirements would of course be extreme (most of all the swimming and underwater tests -- the photo on p. 27 is certainly appealing), but there probably are civilians who could pass them. It is amazing how well some men survive these. (I didn’t see women discussed.) How would professional athletes (football, baseball, basketball, ice hockey) players match up against Special Forces requirements? How would very fit actors (Taylor Lautner or Ashton Kutcher come to mind)? Probably they could pass most of them. Even some musicians (classical performers, singers) say that they have to remain extraordinarily fit. (Kutcher played a Coast Guard rescue swimmer in the 2006 film “The Guardian” from Touchstone.)

There is, on p. 55, a Chain of Command Chart, listing the Army Special Operations Command, the Air Force Special Operations Command (including "The Green Berets" – yes, a John Wayne movie in 1968, Warner Brothers), the Naval Special Warfare Command (SEALS -- “Navy Seals” was a 1990 Orion film with Charlie Sheen and Michael Biehn), the Marine Corps Special Operations Command, and the Joint Special Forces Command (in red). The combined Delta Force selection and training is kept quite secret.

Oh – the head shots are on p. 5. A few of them are “cute”. Any entry into Metro Weekly’s contest?

Marc Kaufman: "First Contact": the case for abundant extraterrestrial and probably intelligent life

2011-12-14T20:48:00.000-08:00

Author: Marc Kaufman

Title: "First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth"

Publication: 2011, New York, Simon & Schuster, ISBN 978-4391-0900-7, 213 pages, hardcover, indexed, 10 chapters.

Amazon link.

Kaufman makes a good case the hope that there is intelligent life besides us within striking distance, probably in our galaxy, maybe out galactic neighborhood, and certainly the Universe, and certainly in a Universe. In the end, he does answer “anthropic” or “Rare Earther” arguments that the Earth as a habitat for us is fortuitous indeed.

The range of possibilities is quite large. But Kaufman spends most of his book on concrete evidence within our own solar system. He spends a lot of space on Mars, going back to the 1976 landings, as well as discussing the Mars Meteorite. He discusses extremophiles on Earth, including the organisms in Mono Lake that substitute arsenic for phosphorus. I would like for him to have spent more space on Europa and Titan.

The news media has made a lot recently of the discovery of planet in the “Goldilocks Zone” around a star similar to our Sun about 600 light years away. But the large distance to that example raises the question why we don’t have more of them in the 30-50 light year range. (That particular planet may still be too large, and much hotter deeper in the atmosphere, if thick.) Most stars likely to have stable planets are small stable M Stars, which would have been around long enough to give life time to develop (such as Gliese – the G planet is still in dispute). Planets around these stars usually have one side facing their suns because of tidal lock. This does not preclude intelligent life, and, science fiction writers could have fun describing the politics of an “annular” civilization on such a planet. Do all advanced civilizations have money for exchange?

The New York Times series on the Goldilocks Problem dates to Dec 3 and is here.

I think there is something to the idea that life develops as a way to counteract entropy. A conscious being with Free Will and the requirement to absorb the consequences of its actions would be the ultimate challenge to entropy. So “nature” might have an incentive to let this develop where possible. The universe may be relatively new in developing advanced civilizations; ours may be an early one with many more to follow over billions of years. The “soul” or element of Free Will, may be an “object” in physics, somehow related to thermodynamics, that cannot be destroyed and somehow persists, to reappear in other civilizations – maybe in other universes through black hole wormholes. Maybe the Law of Karma applies, and the Afterlife, in that sense, is real. It’s hard to see how a being in one universe becomes permanent and immortal – either an Angel (locked in physical perfection, like what you want to see on a disco floor) or a Christ figure – without violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics (hence we need biological reproduction). But maybe there is some mechanism. Does the birth of stars and galaxies and new solar systems represent some sort of anti-entropy process that is somehow self-conscious and alive? Are souls somehow processed by Black Holes after death?

I sometimes wonder if artistic works, especially musical compositions, have a consciousness of their own that survives forever. Because music is based on universal mathematical relationships, a Beethoven sonata would work for sentient aural beings on any world.

There is something interesting about conventional religion: it’s insistence on only one specially created World, and yet Heaven and Hell (and maybe Purgatory) that by logic must be specific extraterrestrial places (even if in other universes).

Here’s Marc Kaufman’s lecture at Authors at Google (46 min), May 27, 2011.

I did see "Contact", directed by Robert Zemeckis, on July 11, 1997, the day of publication of my first book, with Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey. I remember the discovery of the signal, the code, the trillion dollar machine (which explodes once), and the travel to the other planet. I also remember David Bowie as "The Man Who Fell to Earth". While in Minnesota, I met Timothy Johnson, director of "Six Days in Roswell".

What would happen politically on Day One after "Official Contact"?

Wikipedia attribution link for Mono Lake picture my last visit, 1985, also a couple of visits in the 70s. I’ll do it again. US 395 is cool, one of my favorite highways.

Matthew Connelly: "Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population" (review)

2011-12-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

Author: Matthew Connelly, Professor of History at Columbia University, New York NY.

Title: “Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population”.

Publication: Belpnap Press, Harvard University Press, 2008; ISBN 978-0-674-02423-6 paper, 520 pages, heavily indexed; major text ends on on 384; Introduction, nine chapters, Conclusion.

I had been under the impression that the book is new, but it was originally published in hardcover in 2008 and in paper in 2010.

The author gives a textbook-like detailed account of the population issues in modern history. He notes that many nations, at different times, have promoted increasing population, imposing a responsibility on adults (especially married women) to bear children and on men to sire them, that goes beyond even the idea that people have personal rights to make reproductive choices at all. But much of the time, in the past century and a half, there have been many organized efforts to reduce birthrates, particularly among poor populations and in less developed parts of the world. Connelly covers many attempts at eugenics (not at all limited to Nazi Germany), and the more “modern” history of China’s one-child-per-family policy.

These efforts have sometimes contradicted earlier moral teachings against contraception, let alone abortion. The author gives an interesting history of the legal problems France faced when it incorporated north African areas (Algeria) as part of its sovereign territory, because it suddenly wanted to control Muslim reproduction within its legal framework.

He also notes that at times, some moral interests have drawn little or no difference between contraception (or avoidance of having children deliberately) and abortion or euthanasia (p 148). The teachings of the Catholic Church figure in, as the Vatican has always presumed one has an intrinsic responsibility to participate in raising a new generation, by parentage if possible (unless one took a vow of celibacy/abstinence and poverty).

The author, in a few places, notes the possible coincidence of arguments concerning equal rights for homosexuals with the aims of population control.

In his conclusion, Connelly notices the subtleties of today’s arguments about population. Having already noted that fertility rates in many parts of the world (even the developing world) starting slowing in the 60s, he goes on to note that wealthier nations have been shocked to discover the difficulties they will have supporting aging populations with fewer children. He soft-pedals the obvious potential political problems: If western nations see an increase in immigrants (especially Muslims) with higher birthrates and a lower standard of living, western freedoms as we know them could be at eventual risk. So most European countries (much more than the US) have offered parents special benefits (which the childless would potentially pay for). In a few cases, like Singapore, countries have tried to encourage only those with more education to have more children.

Connelly notes that lowering the growth of population does not directly reduce the strain on the environment. Families may be smaller, but more people may live and consume resources alone; there could be fewer people but more households. People may become dependent on hiring services from those who have more children. In the end, Connelly supports a rather libertarian position on birth issues. Political attempts to control the reproductive behaviors of other people through coercion just won’t work in the long run, he argues.

Here is Connelly’s own web page for the book.

The author appears in this YouTube Cross Talk by Russia Today.

Ted C. Fishman: "Shock of Gray": the sudden challenges of an aging world

2011-11-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

Author: Ted C. Fishman

Title: “Shock of Gray: The Aging of the World’s Population and How It Pits Young Against Old, Child Against Parent, Worker Against Boss, Company Against Rival, and Nation Against Nation”

Publication: New York: Scribner, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4165-5102-7, 401 pages, hardcover, indexed, ten chapters with Introduction; also, poem “You Are Old, Father William” by Lewis Carroll, from “Alice in Wonderland”

Amazon link.

In the Introduction, on p. 17, the author makes a blunt statement, that summarizes it all: “An aging world is an increasingly dependent world. It will demand that a growing portion of the population devote their lives to the growing share of people who need care.”

An then, on p. 309, in Chapter 9, on China, he mentions that today China’s law allows parents to sue their adult kids for “alimony”, and then in a footnote discusses Singapore’s filial responsibility laws in some detail. Later he discusses the practice of younger adult workers sending money to parents, comment in most non-western cultures (particularly when they emigrate). Curiously, he never mentions that in the United States, about 28 states have such laws (rarely enforced, although state budget crises could change that).

Fishman’s book has blocks of comparison. He starts out with a chapter on senior life in Sarasota, FL. Later, he has a mirror chapter on Rockford, IL. In that chapter, he latter discusses the growing and heavily franchised home health care industry, and the tricky problems that come up when clients practice racial discrimination.

He also has separate chapters on Japan and China. Both countries have dealt with, in different ways, Asian traditions of family solidarity, bending them as necessary for economic (and in China, political) necessity. Japan has offered 50 year mortgages to encourage extended families to stay together but then has to contemplate taxing adult children who don’t leave home to start families of their own. China, during Maoism, wanted large but socially weak families. The one-child policy in 1979 would complicated everything, meaning fewer children, but eventually fewer old people. But “little emperors” would grow up and work in a get-rich but autocratic culture, and forget that they would have to learn to take care of people.

Fishman also has a couple chapters of the process of aging. I didn’t realize that cognitive solstice takes place as early as age 27. After that, while knowledge may increase, the days get shorter (as well as the ability to play speed chess). People (and all animals) age – and therefore must reproduce – because of a process in physics called entropy – decay. By around age 30, in most (not all) people, the effects of age, however gradual, can be noticed on visual inspection. Men may show a widow’s peak, then frankly receding hairlines (not always) and in time even lose hair from the legs. Everyone shows facial lines as tissue underneath the skins slowly receded. (Dr. Phil used to call all this “tissue death”.) Keeping the partners of a marriage “interested” in one another for life requires social support – procreation and the belief that one is passing on the same sense of socialization onto one’s kids. It doesn’t always work.

The right wing talks about “demographic winter” as part of a murky strategy to restore the psychological imperative of the heterosexual family and “rule of reproduction” for everyone. It’s also a term aiming at the politics of what is going on in the West: immigrant (often racial or religious) minorities have most of the children, ultimately threatening a political unraveling of western secular democracy (see Bruce Bawer, “While Europe Slept”, discussed here July 25, 2011).

The fact is, however, something has really changed: wealthier populations are living longer, with longer periods at the end of life with marked disability, particularly Alzheimer’s. At the same time, individualistic values of “personal responsibility” along with rising costs have discouraged wealthier populations from having as many children. No wonder we will have a Social Security and Medicare crisis here, and that Europe is in trouble now. Statist welfare programs, in an era of weaker emotional ties within extended families, are not sustainable. Earlier, less wealthy and more collective societies, had to have more children, to build enough mass to protect a population from external (natural and manmade) dangers. They relegated the unmarried to staying at home to take care of filial responsibility, but, paradoxically, the elderly usually did not live long once they got sick. Today, the system has flipped.

Second picture: law school at Penn State. In 2005, Pennsylvania tried to strengthen its filial responsibility laws. See my Retirement Blog, July, 2007.

Sherry Turkle: "Alone Together" (review)

2011-11-02T17:54:00.000-07:00

Author: Sherry Turkle (MIT, professor of Social Studies of Science and Technology)

Title: “Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other”

Publication: 2011, Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01021-9, 360 pages, indexed, hardcover, two parts, introduction, fourteen chapters, conclusion, epilogue

Amazon link.

Imagine, if you will, standing on a ramp above the dance floor at a gay disco. It’s late. Down below, “love trains” form. Then, a little blink at the waist area on one of the guys, and the train breaks apart. The guy looks at the limelight glow of his smartphone. A CIA spy could probably hack it.

A sentence on p. 280 may summarize Turkle’s thesis well. She writes, “The ties we form through the Internet are not the ties that bind. But they are the ties that preoccupy.” Remember that hymn, “Bless be the ties that bind” that we (I at least) used to sing when Sunday night program services broke up in the 50s, when people talked about “fellowship”?

During a difficult period in my life, the college years, my father (and more than one psychiatrist) said, “You don’t see people as people.”

But today, according to the author, nobody does.

Her book is well bifurcated into the two parts (rather like a two-movement piano sonata). The of these is “The Robotic Movement: In Solitude, New Intimacies”, and then the second is “Networked: In Intimacy, New Solutions.”

The first half of the book takes where the movie “2001” with the robot spaceship leader HAL (“IBM”) left off. People really take seriously the idea that robots can help raise kids (or keep them company), and particularly, now, take care of the elderly, freeing us from involuntary filial responsibility. Kids may have a hard time learning the difference between a “living soul” (as my father called it) or a machine – or a symbol, something psychiatrists (even in my case) call a “part-object” (which she mentions).

In the second half of the book, she gradually migrates toward the now common discussion about the total gutting of privacy as we used to view it, in a social networking world where teenagers have to design whole strategies around getting to know what amount to avatars rather than real people – just to have a chance to compete in the world of real people. She provides a lot of parallel diversions, such as a discussion of Second Life, as a total substitute for what my mother called "real life". (She called herself "Rachel" there; in more recent times, social networking sites have discouraged pseudonyms or anonymity, as I've discussed elsewhere.) She makes the odd comment that kids don’t see bullying as an unforgivable transgression the way they see observable political disloyalty. The former is normal social combat. The latter exposes one to the roving cameras of others – the tagging, the matching, the archiving, the timelines, and the assessment of future (or even current) employers. Yet kids barely understand the real implications of online reputation in the adult world – whole countries can fall on it.

We may, despite the compulsive behavior that social networking sites may drag us into (almost as mandatory) be losing our ability to live as social creatures. If so, our sustainable future could be bleak.

Google presents an hour long interview of the author on YouTube about the book.

Helen Schulman's "This Beautiful Life" shows the perils to a teenager from one careless moment online

2011-10-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

Author: Helen Schulman

Title: “This Beautiful Life”

Publication: Harper, ISBN 978-0-06-202438-1, 222 pages, hardcover; no chapter numbering, no table of contents (fiction)

Amazon link: The Amazon page includes "A Novel" as a subtitle.

While the media has focused somewhat on the dangers of teen cell-phone “sexting”, this novella is based on the same concept, but with ordinary laptops (Macs, in fact). In a nutshell, an upper class teenage boy, Jake Bergamot, goes to an unsupervised party, things happen; an eighth grade girl films some of it (involving him, her, and other minors) and emails him the video. Titillated, he forwards it to one friend. It goes viral. His school suspends him, even though the entire incident happened off campus and had nothing to do with the school. There are business consequences for his parents, and so on.

The setting of the book is a kind of literary “Gossip Girl”, a notorious CWTV series that shows how a rogue blogger can pull strings in the social world of Manhattan (and upstate suburban) preppies (even pre-Facebook). The author brings to life the emotions of family and peer life in this world quite graphically, and uses particularly adept metaphors and soliloquies in dealing with the physical coming in age. For example, a couple of times she mentions the surprise of Jake and even his mother at the sudden pubescent appearance of thick hair on his lower legs and feet, where in one scene Jake is curiously disgusted by his own maturation. Jake's (heterosexual) urges, driven by emerging hormones, seem quite immutable and driven by underlying biology, without much conscious supervision. (I can remember my own father's saying to me, "One day, blue eyes will confuse you..." From the viewpoint of my parents' progeny, they were the wrong eyes.)

In communicating the compelling biology here, the author shows a tendency to repeat the same words or phrase; my proofreader caught this when I worked on my own books.

Later, Schulman describes pretty well the issue of taking final exams when you’ve been out of class and suspended, and wondering how many points you could drop and still pass. Jake had been a good student. What happens to him is almost a tragedy. All he did was forward an email to one other person; he didn’t even create the video or consent to it. It seemed as though the school and authorities could have been going after a lot of other kids and parents. (The legal question has to do with possessing and disseminating “child pornography.”) But Jake could bear the worst consequences. Order off the web, maybe get sent to a military school, or something.

It's interesting here that the risk came from a single "private" email transmission, not from what one posted on one's own to a blog or website available to search engines. "Online reputation" companies (like Dan Fertik's "Reputation Defender") and other psychological consultants like Dr. Phil are always warning kids of how one mistake online can sink them; digital files never go away. Dr. Phil is always reminding us that teenagers can't see around corners; their brains are not developed biologically well enough to calculate and weigh all possible consequences. But even the grownups here have difficulty grasping what happens and gets out of control.

There was a story today on AOL that comports with this novel: a customer wrote a rude comments about a server's weight on a restaurant bill (with tip of 0), and the server posted it on Facebook; other people with the same name as the customer caught flack; story here.

Human Relations Media has a video on the danger to teens from the issues here:

I couldn't find a YouTube interview by the author.

This book could generate an interesting film, maybe for Lifetime, maybe HBO, or maybe the festival-arthouse market. I hope Schulman tries to sell it or develop a screenplay.

Readers might also enjoy the review of this book in the Washington Post by Michelle Singletary, here.

Martin Millette's "Stormy Whether": a curious "autobiography" and history lesson; a pitch for "Certainism"

2011-10-07T10:37:00.000-07:00

Author: Dr. Martin H. S. Millette, apparently speaking for David Tolstoy Hugenberg

Title: "Stormy Whether: Certainism: Reason over Morality"

Publication: S-Star LLC, ISBN 978-0-61540023-5 304 pages, paper, ten chapters

Amazon link:

Author’s site. I received a complimentary copy of the book to review. The book title contains a homonym; "Stormy Weather" could have worked as a working title.

First, I have to deal with the “observer” in the book. In the first person, it appears as though the author is telling the story of David, born in 1920 in Massachusetts, as if he had been David. It’s not clear from what find that he is David. The author is said to have started his own career in Christian education.

The boy grows up in a home with an authoritarian father of German ancestry. The grandfather, however, was protective, and the family had enough money for David to go to Yale, despite the Depression. However, when David, as part of class homework, finds evidence that the mother’s side of the family is partly Jewish, a family crisis ensues, but the father soon dies.

The younger brother enlists in the Marines first, skipping college, after WWII breaks out, and argues that the world would not be worth living in unless freedom is defended. David eventually is commissioned as a 2LT himself and storms the beaches on D-Day, and then is part of a party that liberates a concentration camp, accounts that are quite riveting.

Throughout this “autobiographical” narrative, the author teaches us quite a lot of history, starting with turn of the century matters that confronted him in school as term papers. Much of it is just the “usual”, but he is always adding a lot of obscure detail, such as how Jews were affected by the English civil wars in the 17^th Century (part of his family secret) and how the Boer Wars affected Nazi thinking. Gradually, he gives us his own interpretation of the two great World Wars and what drove the establishment of National Socialism in Germany. In a plain word, religion. In fact, back in 1951, Dr. Edward Pruden, the Richmond-raised progressive pastor of the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC had written about some of the same problems in his Judson Press book “Interpreters Needed”.

His writing style is guilty of a lot of “author intrusion” (as literary agents call it). The randomly alternates his theory of history with his explanation of “Certainism” as a rational answer (and agnostic) to religion. Certainism comprises familiar elements from libertarianism: the idea of personal autonomy, of “different strokes for different folks”, of localism, and scientific pragmatism, perhaps just short of objectivism as Ayn Rand sees it. But do all of these have to be “incompatible” with religious faith?

He spends some space talking about the Ninth Amendment of the 1791 Bill of Rights. From that, he deduces a mid-90’s style “classically liberal” theory on gay rights, more or less centered on privacy and the right to be left alone, pretty much what would go into the 2003 decision “Lawrence v. Texas” on the sodomy laws. All of this is put forth as he described his own personal heterosexual epiphany with “Olga”.

There are many today who question whether a society based on “hyper-individualism” is sustainable, but the context for posing these questions seems to have recirculated. Various theories are advanced regarding getting the individual to anchor himself in goals shared by a larger (if still locally accessible) group, in order to guarantee a “sustainable” civilization. Not all of these tomes are based on religion, but certainly the “religious right” has its hands in the “natural family” movement as well as in preaching about “demographic winter.”

The author, however, pays particular heed to an aspect of National Socialism, namely, that only certain peoples would be able to carry civilization on. We all know the horror this led to, with the eugenics and eventually the “Final Solution” which caught an incredulous world by surprise. This sort of idea, of contraction of the people, may have been unwittingly encouraged by various “well-meaning” 19^th Century intellectuals (Nietzsche – and Spencer more than Darwin, and of course Maltus) and the author here notes the dangerous power of the “pen”. It’s not so clear that this idea of elimination was a critical to secular (or areligious) forms of totalitarianism – Communism, from Stalin to Mao and even Pol Pot. Mao, however, remember, was very determined that all intellectuals (except him) would learn physical sacrifice. And “radical Islam” seems to be carried away with the idea of self-righteousness for its own sake, to the point that anything remotely sinful is to be eliminated.

The author mentions the sacrifice of the younger brother Georg, and at least once talks about the military draft, voluntary service, and deferments. That caught my eye as particularly interesting.

As a supplement, check out Lisa Miller's columns in the Washington Post about faith v. reason, and even as to whether atheists are "smarter"; here on Oct. 8.

I couldn't find an author interview on YouTube, but I'll offer my own video of a visit to "Occupy DC" yesterday. It's distantly relevant.

On my TV blog there is a coordinated review today of BBC's "Nietzsche: Human, All to Human" (1999, 2007).

Perseus offers new service for self-publishing of e-books; questions rise about conflict of interest for literary agents, even about 'amateurism"

2011-10-03T17:59:00.000-07:00

Julie Bosman reports in the New York Times today on a “New service for authors seeking to self-publish e-books”, link here.

The new service will come from the Perseus Books Group, which will structure a service that offers 70% royalty to authors. It will be called Argo Navis Author Services. This seems to refer to Kindle-like books and not to print-on-demand. The Perseus site, however, mentions its doing POD.

Another account of the new service is at PaidContent, here where there is mention of possible conflict of interest for literary agents (or maybe eventually “third parties” that agent screenplays).

This last story links to another story at the same site, “The Rise of Agent-Publishers Is Bad for the Book Business”. There can be a serious conflict of interest if one is an agent and a publisher at the same time for the same client, not for different clients. The long piece, by Jason Ashlock, describes an evolving “tragedy of the commons” and seems also to allude to concerns about amateurism that we’ve seen discussed already with respect to Web publishing.

Announcing my booklet "Do Ask Do Tell III": for right now, self-distribution only

2011-10-01T08:10:00.000-07:00

As I noted on my main “BillBoushka” blog on Friday, I have recently (as of Sept. 19, 2011), posted an online version of a new “book” in my “Do Ask Do Tell”.

You may find the book by keying in doaskdotell.com (by http) and looking down the right column for “Do Ask Do Tell III” a few lines. (There are reasons why I don’t give links to my other sites, having to do with concerns over “link farming”; this one is easy to find).

The title is “Do Ask Do Tell III: Speech Is a Fundamental Right; Being ‘Listened To” Is a Privilege”.

The online index leads to eight PDF files: a title-TOC, an Introduction, five chapters, and an Epilogue. The document adds up to 87 pages. I have given two ISBN’s from my DADT series established with the ISBN agency RR Bowker (0-9656744-4-4 and 0-9656744-5-2). I have printed copies with two slightly different versions of Chapter 5, and posted online the slightly “smaller” version because of the possibility of potential disclosure sensitivities.

I may consider making this an Amazon Kindle later.

This is very “personal” material, and I published it intending to make a “definitive statement” before moving on with resurrecting my music and trying to sell my motion picture plans, in “retirement”, my mother having passed away in December 2010, at age 97. I’m planning to post another “high level summary” on my main blog in a few days.

The five chapters focus on specific “images” from my life and generate discussions in a few specific areas, with the purpose of generating fresh interpretations. These are: (1) Why I didn’t or pursue a music (composition and piano) career (2)The “meaning” of my homosexuality (3) My “second career” as a self-publisher (4) My mainframe IT career and what really happened to it, leading to the personal tugs at me to follow (5) My experience caring for my Mother .

Picture: (below): Some people have no shame!

Below: Tidal Basin near MLK Memorial in Washington DC : (mine, 9/27/20011)

Update: Nov. 25, 2011

I've updated Chapter 3 with information about SOPA, the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act, in Section 8. I've also added a few details to Chapter 5.

A note about Amazon image icons

2011-09-16T11:43:00.000-07:00

I have, until recently, used the icons from Amazon Associates to display images of the books I review. Recently, the gadget has stopped working. Here is one explanation which I will have to experiment with, from the help forums (link): I could not get this to work today.

The problem appears to be related to programming within the Amazon widgets, with some problems with “instances” of the email address. Maybe there is a problem in that my gmail address is used by the gadget, but my regular Amazon account uses an AOL email address.

Icons previously created by the gadget on this Book Reviews blog still display.

In the meantime I’m displaying my own image of the cover and giving an Amazon link manually.

Mitch Pearlstein: "From Family Collapse to America's Decline"

2011-09-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

Author: Mitch Pearlstein (president of the Center of the American Experiment, Minneapolis). (link)

Title: “From Family Collapse to America’s Decline: The Educational, Economic and Social Costs of Family Fragmentation”

Publication: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.; paperback, 165 pages (also available hardcover), indexed, Introduction and seven long chapters; ISBN 978-1-60709-361-9

Amazon link.

I sometimes visited the sessions of the Center of the American Experiment when I lived in Minneapolis from 1997-2003. One time, John Stossel spoke there for a luncheon.

The book, which is a bit expensive, has a “mouthful of words” for a title, suggesting the conservative message that America’s economic problems are the result of weak families rather than corporate “exploitation”. There’s no question that the recklessness on Wall Street in the last decade contributed to our current mess, but there’s also no question that a lot of people in trouble with “pineapple upside-down cake” mortgages “tried to get something for nothing”. If you want to look for blame, there’s plenty to go around. All the current presidential candidates know that.

The book is also somewhat dense in writing style, compared to the earlier collection “Closer to Home” from the same source (Mitch Pearlstein and Katherine Kersten, reviewed here March 28, 2006; I had made a major comment about an essay in this earlier book on my “Issues blog” Feb. 3, 2011.)

In this book, the term “family fragmentation” and the synonym “family collapse” largely refer to people having babies out of wedlock, or getting divorced and leaving single parents. (At the start of his last chapter, Pearlstein, somewhat painfully, tells the story of his own daughter.) But a corollary process is the reduction in family formation in the first place. This trend has many causes, including the accumulation of males who are seen as “unmarriagable”. Toward the end of the book, Pearlstein discusses the way people with relatively minor criminal records get effectively blackballed, with the Internet making it worse (grazing on the “online reputation” issue I have covered at length before).

He also discusses, in a few places, discusses the notion that individual goals have changed over the years, with an outlook we might call “expressive individualism”. Here, it gets tricky. Once people have children, they need to be prepared to put their kids first (and stay together in a marital relationship); that idea itself is not controversial (or maybe it is to some people). But in recent decades there has been a tendency to postpone marriage for career or “self-advancement”, resulting in lower birthrates among people who can probably afford children (the “demographic winter” problem), and a greater likelihood people will grow old alone (he discusses on p 71) – which ties into another notion of “family fragmentation” discussed by Jennifer Roback Morse and others – that extended families are made weaker by single people who leave the nest and leave eldercare to “government programs” like Social Security and Medicare (that gets into a complicated and controversial area that I have covered a lot elsewhere – Morse’s idea is oversimplified, to say the least). Pearlstein pays heed to gender-specific problems, that boys are affected a lot more than girls by deficient environments, and notes that we seem to be heading toward a society where women don't need men -- an issue George Gilder had written about in the 80s.

Pearlstein doesn’t address gay issues in this book much, beyond the same-sex marriage debate on pp 21-23. (In his native Minnesota, a blue state, there is a proposed state constitutional amendment to limit marriage to one man and one woman.) But I have, in my own mind, done a lot of introspection, as to why over the years others made so much of my own homosexuality, and personal aloofness, which in me are hard to separate. I think that a lot of this has to do with an expectation that everyone be ready for the kinds of permanent relationships that can both raise children and (especially recently, with longer lifespans) take care of the elderly and disabled, without so much government intervention. I took myself out of the game, in the minds of many people; if too many people were allowed or particularly encouraged to opt out this way, a free society could not sustain itself and could “slouch” toward totalitarianism.

Albert Brooks: 2030: Until debt do us part

2011-09-03T11:52:00.000-07:00

Author: Albert Brooks

Title: “Twenty Thirty: The Real Story of What Happens to America”, a Novel (aka “2030”)

Publication: New York: St. Martins, 2011, ISBN 978-0-312-58372-9, 375 pages, hardcover

Amazon link.

Want to know what happens to America? It’s not like “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “2010” (already passed). No, shortly after 2030, the US gives up its sovereignty (and a lot of people’s civil liberties) to China. Donald Trump told us so.

In fifty-seven short chapters, Brooks lays out, in real time, docudrama fashion, how America unravels under its first Jewish president.

Cancer and (more or less) heart disease have been “cured”, and the elderly, with their clout, are living forever. Medicare benefits have been slashed, and their adult children are getting stuck with the bills. (Brooks could go into detail on filial responsibility laws if he chose to.) And the health care system is still fragmented into islands of self-interest.

Most of the US budget is taken up paying the debt. Then, one June morning in 2030, LA is leveled by a 9.1 earthquake. Flash mobs rule the city, and the US cannot afford to rebuild. So it enters into a political “parthership” with China to rebuild, eventually jeopardizing its sovereignty.

For newly homeless seniors in LA, the new powers that be come up with an ingenious “final solution”: retirement ships. Seniors turn over their lives for little cubbyholes on a ship that carries 2500 of them at a time out of harms way forever. But that sets up the climax of the “novel”: the hijacking of the ship by the rogue “young people” who, among other things, demand that no one be allowed to vote after age 70.

Brooks does allude to various other issues, like how the news media has become fragmented by bloggers and amateurism (p 38). He mentions gay bars and a gay conservative writer at one place (is that me?, or is it “Gay Patriot”?). He could have talked more about the “demographic winter” issue, but his view is that the senior care crisis is coming anyway (he could have gone into Alzheimer’s more). At one point, a younger character expresses the view than an elderly person has lived his life and it's the young person's turn. But the young people have been assigned the filial debt of their parents and grandparents.

There is something about a catastrophe of the size of the LA earthquake in the book: it makes the monetary system and paper wealth rather irrelevant.

Michelle Singletary, Washington Post financial columnist, wrote a review and dire warning based on this book Aug. 7 here, "'2030': This financial horror story could be our future", link here.

The AP has an embeddable clip:

Check YouTube also for a NYTimes interview of Brooks.

New book makes pitch for resurgence of the Fair Use doctrine in copyright law

2011-08-25T17:23:00.000-07:00

Amazon link

Authors: Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi

Title: "Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright"

Publication: University of Chicago Press, 2011; ISBN 978-0-226-03228-3; 200 pages, paper, indexed, five appendices

We hear about copyright infringement allegations by Internet users almost every day now, to the point that a few businesses, especially Righthaven, most recently, have been set up to troll the Internet for possible violators. We’ve heard a lot about copyright and P2P with all the older RIAA lawsuits, and about the Safer Harbor provision of the DMCA.

This book traces the history of – the decline and recent resurgence of the Fair Use provisions of Copyright law in the United States, particularly by Internet speakers and most specifically by documentary filmmakers.

In earlier times, legal conventions tended to favor the idea that copyright owners or publishers could monopolize the industry and hinder the appearance of critical and competitive materials.

In film, and in other media projects, there are many practical obstacles for obtaining permissions in many cases, which studio or investor lawyers are likely to demand. For example, a license might stipulate that the filmmaker or writer cannot criticize the source of the media used, which would undermine the integrity of the work.

When one claims Fair Use, one does not ask for specific permission from the content copyright owner.

The book maintains that industry codes of best practices are the best way to win both copyright owners and judges over to more support of Fair Use in practice.

In 2008 American University released the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, link here. There are similar codes at this site, such as the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, link.

Here is Jaszi speaking the Fair Use Keynote at a USC conference in 2008:

(For some reason, Amazon direct link "gadget" from Blogger is not working for me now.)

Cynthia Close reviews this book in the Winter 2012 issue of "Documentary.org", review not available online yet (see Bill Boushka blog Dec. 15, 2011).

Honore: "Survival", family tips for disaster preparedness tag along behind his autobiography: a word of warning, however

2011-08-17T13:50:00.002-07:00

Author: Lt. Gen. Russel K. Honore (US Army, Ret),with Ron Martz

Title: “Survival: How Being Prepared Can Keep You and Your Family Safe”

Publication: New York: Atria, 2009; ISBN 978-1-4165-9901-2, 274 pages, paper, also available as e-book; Prologue, Epilogue and 18 chapters, indexed.

Honore achieved some “notoriety” recently with an op-ed inviting members of Congress to take boot camp and learn the meaning of “physical sacrifice” (Issues Blog, Aug. 3, 2011), after their prolonged partisan bickering during the recent debt ceiling crisis.

He describes himself as mixed race of “mutt” Creole and Cajun, born during a hurricane decades ago. He was the unofficial head of military rescue operations after Hurricane Katrina, although he had much less formal authority than people think, or so he says.

The book starts as an autobiography of his military career, where he admits that writing was not one of his skills – and that shows in the book, which seems episodic. Each chapter is an autobiographic segment (most of the chapters deal with Katrina, and then Rita and Wilma later in 2005), ending with a shortlist of specific recommendations for disaster preparedness, which don’t necessarily follow from the content of the chapter.

But the subject matter is, of course, of critical public interest. Very early, around p 26, he points out that our modern culture of individualistic capitalism is deceptive; we don’t know how to do things for ourselves the way people in earlier generations did, and the market economy doesn’t really take care of everything.

He has an interesting perspective on the behavior of the victims of Hurricane Katrina and other disasters. Most were poor, and left living in vulnerable areas below sea level (and around inadequate levies) after the jobs left. (He doesn’t get into the Army Corps of Engineers’s failures the way he could have.) And their behavior after the catastrophe was driven by survival, not by a desire to loot. He makes an interesting point that people who live in crime-ridden areas do not like to leave home frivolously, and may not be as responsive to evacuation warnings as needed.

He does suggest that it is constructive to have better building standards for low-lying or vulnerable areas, but it is not wise to put too much stock in expecting people not to live in hazard-prone areas. People may have less choice in these matters than others think. Furthermore, the range of disasters that could occur is very great. He mentions the risk pandemics (without discussing the need for vaccines, for example, for smallpox and H5N1), and also talks about the earlier efforts to have the public prepared to survive nuclear attacks (which probably was not very realistic, given the dangers we faced during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962). The list of other dangers includes not only earthquakes and wildfires, but electromagnetic pulse (from a high altitude terrorist blast or certain other microwave devices) and even severe damage to the power grid from coronal mass ejections on the Sun (related to “solar flares” or geomagnetic storms or “space weather” -- more could be done to mitigate these risks by electric utilities than is done now). Other dangers could include a huge East Coast tsunami from the Cumbre Vieja volcano (and undersea landslide) off the coast of Africa, as well as conceivably the Yellowstone or Mono Lake caldera supervolcanoes. On p 176, he mentions the Defense Authorization Act for 2007 which makes it easier for the president to declare martial law when a state is unable to control an emergency. It was not declared during Hurricane Katrina. He also suggests that school teachers should be cross trained as Red Cross workers everywhere. Does this include subs?

Mara Hvistendahl: "Unnatural Selection": the cumulative effect of preferring males in a low birth-rate environment

2011-08-07T18:44:00.000-07:00

Author: Mara Hvistendahl

Title: “Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men”

Publication: New York: Public Affairs, 2011. ISBN 978-1-58648-850-5. 314 pages, hardcover, indexed. 4 Parts, 15 Chapters, with Prologue (roman pages) and Epilogue.

Probably the most important benefit of this book is the way if makes us think about individual rights, in a way that extends how we used to think about abortion. Decisions made for individual or familial personal benefit, when incentivized in certain ways, have enormous global consequences for future generations. Call this a concern about ‘generativity”. In fact, late in the book she speaks of a balance between the rights of parents and the unborn, not just in the usual sense, but in right of a child to be born with an “open future”, not encumbered by previous familial goals.

The book, of course, deals mainly with the cumulative effects of population control along with social customs in many countries, mostly in Asia, resulting in parents trying their best to have boys. There are many reasons, of course, based on custom, such as the expense of paying a female dowry. Many countries have been involved, most visibly China with its one –child policy. Many techniques are tried by parents, most of all gender-specific abortion, but more recently PGD, or preimplnatation gender diagnosis, for parents who cannot conceive. Although usually sex selection favors men, there are counter trends: gay and lesbian couples are reported as preferring daughters. Many countries are trying to make prenatal gender determination illegal, and South Korea has actually become the first country to reverse the trend for too many males. She mentions the group called “Generations Ahead” (link)

Sociologists, going all the way back to conservative writer George Gilder, have written about the dangers of too many unmarried men. The author goes over ancient history in this regard, as well as conventional anthropology. She also discusses some interesting biology that I had never heard. Married men, and men with children, generally have been found to show lower testosterone levels than bachelors and/or childless men, even when relatively young adults. I can remember the jokes about this in Army barracks back in the late 60s. When men got married, they gained weight and grew pot bellies, and maybe even lost some body as well as pate hair, so the conventional bachelor wisdom read. “You’re going to lose hormones”, one guy said. I still remember that moment. He may have been right. I can remember, when growing up, thinking about future emasculation as one of the worst things to fear.

She has a chapter on prostitute and then trade in young women overseas, which increases if there are too many men, as does HIV infection through a process that she calls a “bridging population”. Her work here seems to overlay the effort by Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore to fight human trafficking ("real men don't buy girls").

On Aug. 7, 2011, the New York Times has an “Economic View” article in Sunday Business, p 4, by Robert . Frank, “Supply, Demand and Marriage”, link here. Chinese bachelors need to how that they have three-story homes to attract brides, and often construct unused attics to show they have spaces for families (which are still to be small).

I could not find a YouTube video by Mara Hvistendahl on the topic, but here is a similar one on sex selection in China (“Infanticide in China”) by Talia Carner (“Jerusalem Maiden” and “China Doll”). Try also her report on this in PDF format here.

Amazon offers inexpensive downloads of textbooks to Kindle

2011-08-01T20:31:00.000-07:00

Amazon is offering students the opportunity to rent many textbooks by downloading them onto Kindle for up to 80% off, link here. The cost of new textbooks has become a nettlesome problem for college students.

I remember carrying my textbooks in a brown leather briefcase, in the days before backpacks. In fact, we did not have lockers in high school in the 50s.

I have a few of my graduate school textbooks in mathematics lying around. Rudin’s “Real and Complex Analysis” from about 1965 (McGraw-Hill), starts out with a definition of the “exp” function (that is, e to the power of the number) as a series, and says it is the function undergirds all of mathematics. Mathematics texts – definition, lemma, theorem, proof, still look very densely written. What’s interesting is how much was known in the 1960s – almost everything (except how to solve the “four-color problem”) of algebraic topology.

1st Picture: Strong Hall, University of Kansas, Lawrence, site of the math department, at least in the 1960s when I earned an MA there.

Bruce Bawer notes that his work ("While Europe Slept") is mentioned many times in Brevik's "manifesto"

2011-07-25T16:48:00.000-07:00

Author: Bruce Bawer.

Title: "While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within".

Publication: New York: Doubleday, 2006. ISBN 0-385-51472-7. 244 pages, hardcover, indexed

I reviewed this book on my “doaskdotell.com” book section back in 2006. Mr. Bawer is well known as a “gay conservative” and for his book “A Place at the Table”.

In this book, as I noted, Mr. Bawer discussed Western naivete about the social values of much of the Islamic world, especially as it impacts Europe. This is particularly focused on concern over increasing Muslim population in much of Europe with its higher birthrates, with lack of fertility and replacement among European “Christian” (and Jewish) populations, a development which could eventually undermine democratic values in Europe. Philip Longman and others have written about this.

It is also focused on the ability of westerners to understand Islamic psychological values, which seem more collectivist or tribalist, and which view allowing dissent as an assault on honor. In some ways, though, radical Islam is not so different from some forms of extremist or White-supremacist “Christian fundamentalism” in the U.S.

Bawer, in fact, noted that he happened to be in Norway on 9/11, and has lived in Amsterdam and watched dangerous trends in Dutch society.

Today, Bawer wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal and noted, with dismay, that Anders Breivik (whose now notorious 1500-page “manifesto” is called “2083: A European Declaration of Independence”) had studied and “admired” Bawer’s “While Europe Slept” and noted that Bawer could not be a “cultural conservative”. Bawer notes that his name is mentioned many times (at least 20) in the “manifesto”.

Bawer makes many other observations today about Europe’s troubles, noticing that “Muslim gay-bashing is driving gays out of Amsterdam.”

The link for the Bawer piece is here.

Georgia State University involved in copyright litigation as it builds an e-library for students

2011-07-11T19:57:00.000-07:00

Here is a curious story about litigation between the Association of Academic Publishers and its litigation against Georgia State University for setting up an “e-reserve” for students, a piece by Tom Allen, link here.

He does make some interesting points about Fair Use and the apparent ease and low expense of a university’s obtaining permissions from Academic publications through normal channels.

Katie Keane of Trylon Strategic Media Relations (link) brought this paper to my attention.

The GSU e-reserve may have been part of a strategy to deal with escalating textbook costs for students.

"Rainbow Rumpus" offers 3 children's downloads; families headed by LGBT people

2011-07-03T15:15:00.000-07:00

A site called “Rainbow Rumpus” offers a few children’s books about the dynamics of families headed by same-sex couples and other general kids' issues.

“Baby Maria” by Mark Huber, illustrated by Jackie Urbanovic. A child anticipates his mother’s going to Guatemala to pick up a baby sister. Even in this short piece, the idea that parents shape their kids’ own interpersonal loyalties through family comes through clearly.

In “Same, Same” by Amy E. Brandt, the idea of peer rivalry comes into play. What happens when one kid can’t do what his friend can? I have seen criticisms of my own “performance” as a kid in the area of independence from others in my own grade school report cards. They are a bit of a personal mystery.

“The Boy Who Captured the Moon”, by Pratt Ligman, same illustrator, presents a challenge to imagination. A boy imagines he can bring the Moon down to Earth with a lariat, or rope (vocabulary lesson). You could say the story is a bit of a metaphor to how we learn modern physics.

Each booklet is 32 pages and downloadable now as a separate PDF.

The link is here.

ARROW provides digital libraries and publishers ability to locate rightsholders for orphaned works

2011-06-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

Those concerned about the orphaned works issues (whether or not in conjunction with projects like Google books) would do well to listen to the podcast at the bottom of this “Beyond the Bookcast” link, concerning ARROW, Accessible Rights and Registries Information, developed by the Italian Publishers Association (AIE).

The link is here, about 40 minutes.

There is a link to a PDF transcript.

Alexander Woo wrote the following to me, which I will pass along here:

“I thought you might be interested in this new “Beyond the Book” podcast from Copyright Clearance Center from the 2011 Global Market Forum (featuring Publishing in Italy) as part of BookExpo America 2011 in which CCC’s Chris Kenneally interviews Piero Attanasio and Michael Healy. They discuss ARROW(Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) and how it will allow for an evolutionary change in the publishing business. ARROW a system to help libraries with the identification of rights status and rightsholders in digital library programs. It is based on a pro-active search of rightsholders for works eligible for inclusion in any digitization program, and indirectly is a tool for the identification of ‘orphan works’.”

This appears to related more to European copyright law issues, which are not necessarily the same as in the US (they generally are a bit stricter).

There is a general comment that technological innovation always occurs in an environment where existing legal and ethical boundaries can be challenged, and where people can be affected in unforeseen ways.

The podcast says that in the US we don't have an adequate legal mechanism to distribute orphan works legally; the Google Book Settlement is discussed. He says that any legislated solution from Congress would probably be "opt out", where as the Settlement tried to be "opt in". The speakers say that copyright has become much more sensitive politically than had been expected.

One possible result of publishing a little-known work online and making it searchable is that, in a practical sense, the reputation of parties (or their descendants) previously obscure becomes easy to discover publicly, and sometimes this turns out to be unwanted.

Here is Adrian Johns from the Massachusetts School of Law (start at 4:38 for discussion of orphan works)

Ross Perlin's "Intern Nation": Are employers (and universities) getting slave labor out of young people?

2011-06-08T14:49:00.000-07:00

Author: Ross Perlin

Title: "Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy"

Publication: New York, Verso, 2011. ISBN 13-978-1-84467-686-6

Professional, academic, or work internships sound like something we take for granted. College students may think of them as a way to “pay your dues” to get into the white collar world, and (for the rest of your life) "get out of things".

Perlin argues that the system of internships invites widespread abuse by employers and universities, depending on “academic credit” in lieu of pay, creating situations where “the rest of us” are lowballed out of jobs, the perennial “race to the bottom.”

On the other hand, apprenticeships have long been valid arrangements to learn trades (and not just on Donald Trump’s reality show). And back in the 1950s, many tech colleges had developed coop programs, where students take five years to graduate but gain valid work experience.

Perlin gives a lot of discussion of how the Fair Labor Standards Act works, and notes that many employers are failing to comply with many of its provisions in the way they run internships, inviting big time lawsuits some day.

Some of his discussion of specific internships is quite striking. He starts out by describing internships at Disney World (“the happiest interns in the world”), living under almost military conditions.

My first job, after my mandatory Army hitch, started in 1970 with RCA, as an” operations research trainee” at the David Sarnoff labs in Princeton, NJ. But I was paid a reasonable starting salary for that era, $13,500, so one could call it an “apprenticeship”. The first year was broken into assignments at various plants, one of them in Indianapolis. One problem was that some assignments really couldn’t be completed in a short time with 1970 technical computing resources. Another was that, while we were given per diem to travel, it wasn’t really adequate to pay fully for secondary short term housing.

Perlin’s Appendix includes an Intern’s Bill of Rights.

I'd love to hear Barbara Ehrenreich's reaction to this book! Is this another "bait and switch"?

One could compare this book to Bob Weinstein's "I'll Work for Free: A Short Term Strategy for a Long Term Payoff", from Henry Holt in 1994. Again, this sounds like a race to the bottom.

In this YouTube video, Ross Perlin talks at Google:

Michio Kaku: "Physics of the Future": telepathy, yes; rapid space travel, no

2011-05-23T14:13:00.000-07:00

Author: Michio Kaku

Title: "Physics of the Future: How Science will Shape Human Destiny and our Daily Lives by the Year 2100"

Publication: Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-53080-4, 389 pages, hardcover, indexed, Introduction an nine chapters

Kaku is well known on television as he often appears in documentaries talking about climate change and the other issues from the perspective of physics. He teaches at the City University of New York.

Well, we probably won’t see “The Event” or “Flash Forward”. But Kaku is big on how far information technology will take us, here on earth, to the point that all our devices will be so smart, that we’ll get Internet access (and Facebook, probably) through our contact lenses. We’ll get information and move objects with telepathy or thought. That’s a scary thought. A hacker could change something on your computer or even your home devices with an evil thoughts. Private lives as we used to know then will be gone. The limit to the communications revolution is Moore’s Law, which is already being approached by the physical sizes of molecules and atoms.

And I’m not sure I want my vulnerable bod being surveyed by instruments all the time, telling me about my first colon cancer cell. There is some relativity here: constant observation and monitoring of bodies will change them, and change the way we perceive them, even in sexual situations. Old fantasies may give way.

Getting to other planets, terraforming them, and getting to the stars will take much longer. He goes into the theoretical discussion of Type 1, 2, and 3 civilizations. We haven’t even gotten to Type 1 yet, and we’re in a dangerous phase.

He notes that wars are nearly always started by authoritarian interests; democracies don’t attack one another with violence. So the neoconservative impulse to export democratic capitalism is indeed well founded.

The connecting concept seems to be nanotechnology, which could become the bridge between the living and inanimate worlds. Maybe there is a miniscule risk that the nanotechnology explosion could go awry and change our planet into a strangelet. But nanobots can, in a sense, self-replicate like living things and could be used to explore other solar systems. It will take several centuries at least before human beings could go to other solar systems in a conventional way.

Nanobots (as in “Jake 2.0”, the former series on UPN) raise another issue, consciousness. It’s my own belief that a “soul”, or “unit of consciousness” is another object in the world of physics that one day will be understood as something fundamental and perhaps indestructible, or perhaps subject to entropy, to the point that we know what happens in the afterlife, if anything. My concept of the “soul” is a reference point for self: I make my own choices, and bear the consequences of my own actions, in a manner that is normally irreversible because of the time arrow. My sense of who I am seems continuous back to childhood, to the late 1940s, even if I cannot recreate every day since then, and even if most of the cells in by body have been replaced. Why am I me now, rather than in the time of the Pharaohs? Or perhaps ancient Sparta, which I could not have survived.

Our familiar mammals have individual personalities and “souls”, but I would wonder about, say, social insects. The ant or bee colony raises the question of the “group mind” as the soul, as in the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End”. Can a machine or artificial system develop a soul, as in the “2001” movie? (HAL) Could nanobots generate a soul? Are stars themselves conscious of themselves, since in a sense they are born and “die” (sometimes with supernovae)? What about entire galaxies?

The book ends with a description of the life of a vigorous 70 year old on New Year’s Day, 2100. That would make for a good short film. The ride on the space elevator looks interesting. But the prospect of enormously expanded lifespans and designer babies (by gene manipulation) certainly will raise moral questions, as well as demographic ones. Social Security cannot continue in a world where most people live to be 500. And we won’t need Sophia from “The Event”.

Washington Post runs big article on self-publishing with e-books

2011-05-07T10:25:00.000-07:00

The Arts section of the Sunday May 8 Washington Post will have a big story about self-publishing in the e-book business, by Neely Tucker, “Your novel got rejected? Join the e-book gold rush”, link here.

The story gives a good discussion of how the book business is changing so quickly. It’s true, “midlist” fiction authors, particularly of genre novels like romance or spy, would get dropped “mid-career” by their publishers if they didn’t sell enough. The self-publishing model does, in many cases, encourage the offering of a much lower-priced item with much less overhead above the author, although some kinds of marketing help, editing and cover design really takes up a lot of time and work.

As I’ve written before, I went through the whole self-publishing process from 1995-1997 with an editor-proofreader and a book manufacturer myself. But it’s changed since then. I had also had an agent review much of my work.

But self-publishing, at least of e-books, came into criticism recently when Amazon had made quite a bit of money off an obviously “inappropriate” e-book (story here Nov. 10, 2010).

Nicholas Kardaras: "How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life"

2011-05-01T19:29:00.000-07:00

Author: Nicholas Kardaras, Ph. D.

Title: "How Plato and Pythagoras Can Save Your Life: The Ancient Greek Prescription for Health & Happiness."

Publication: Conari Press, ISBN 978-1-57324-475-6, 240 pages, hardcover, Six Parts, 18 Chapters, 12 Exercises, with a Dissertation Abstract

I received a sample copy of the book from the author. He is a psychotherapist and clinical assistant professor at Stony Brook University and adjunct professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology.

As one could perhaps judge from the forearm tattoos on the dust jacket, the author has arrived at his position in life with a risky road with many setbacks, having worked in the nighclub business and then been through rehabilitation programs, the kind where you share chores in a group home, well before going back and getting his doctorate.

He gets into this worldview pretty quickly as he finishes the autobiographical narrative: the arch of “Philosophy, Science and Religion”, which he calls “the Ultimate Cage Match” (Ch. 5). Philosophy rather comes between the two, but it also shows that religion and science complement one another.

After I moved to Minnesota in 1997, I got to know some college undergraduates who were majoring in philosophy, one of whom, a senior at Hamline University in St. Paul then, set up my own lecture and television appearance about my own “Do Ask Do Tell” book.

In the latter part of the book, the author traces the contributions of the major Greek philosophers to a productive understanding of the point of one’s life. Pythagoras was a bit of a prodigy and a Clark Kent type young man. I found myself wondering if the digits of pi would be random even in hexadecimal (base 16).

Toward the end, he discusses the physics, or metaphysics, of the soul: the idea that one may give up a sense of individual self and join something larger to experience cosmic consciousness (an idea explored also by H. Spencer Lewis with Rosicrucianism). He gets into the question as to how information is stored and propagated in the universe in black holes – holographically, an idea previously explored in a Itzhak’s Bentov’s “Stalking the Wild Pendulum” and Jeffrey Mishlove’s “The Roots of Consciousness”.

Eliot Glazer's anthology: "My Parents Were Awesome"

2011-04-12T17:11:00.000-07:00

Editor: Eliot Glazer

Title: "My Parents Were Awesome: Before Fanny Packs & Minivans, They Were People Too"

Publication: Villard, ISBN 978-0-345-52392-1, 220 pages, original paperback, Introduction and about forty short essays (typically 4 pages each), published April 2011.

The book, in fact, invites you to write a cursive essay about your own parents in the back.

The range of parents includes traditional married (often from somewhat radical backgrounds), and single and divorced people.

I came into the world in a stable home, as an only child, of parents who had married in May 1940. It would be years before I could grasp that they had come from early 20^th Century backgrounds varied from each other and from what I knew. My father was born in Iowa in 1903 and grew up on a farm. He went away as far as possible, after Drexel, to school – at Berkeley decades before its radicalism, overcame his stuttering, became a salesman, bouncing back from not making quotas, and provided a stable world for Mother and me as a manufacturer’s representative for Imperial Glass, a career that would not exist today. He was living in a YMCA in Washington DC in the 1930s, in a day when single people didn’t have their own apartments, when he met my mother, who had been born in Ohio just before WWI. She lived in a YWCA and took a streetcar to work at the YMCA where she met him. If you made a movie about my parents, it would provide a fascinating look at rural Midwestern life up until the Depression, and life in Washington DC (and nearby Arlington) during the Depression and then the War. My parents moved to a one bedroom apartment in the Buckingham Community in Arlington, and then to a larger two-bedroom after I was born in 1943. In those days, apartments in Virginia were segregated.

My mother recently passed away. I’ve just taken on getting old 8-mm home movies of their lives in the 1930s and 40s digitized and preserved on DVD. It could just make an indie hit.

More parental pictures:

Buckingham, Arlington VA apartment, around 1943.

Father prospecting in CA:

Father portrait on bridge in Iowa:

Mother in front of first family car near family farm near Route 20 and Oberlin/Kipton Ohio:

Maternal grandparents, Kipton, Ohio

These BW images are restored from family photos. I own these images and reserve the right to use them commercially in media in the future.

A couple of "handbooks" in the 1990s on sexual orientation had used a "do ask do tell" button on their covers

2011-04-05T18:12:00.000-07:00

On June 5, 2010, I “reviewed” my own “Do Ask Do Tell” books, particularly the first one (1997; 2000).

I wanted to account for two books written in the 1990s by Robert J. Powers and Alan Ellis, originally published by Routledge (and later Baker & Taylor).

The first was “A Manager’s Guide to Sexual Orientation in the Workplace”, 1995, ISBN 0-415-91277-6, 209 pages, hardcover (my copy). There is a tagline “Tackles one of the toughest diversity issues.”

The second was “A Family and Friend’s Guide to Sexual Orientation”, 1996, ISBN 0-415-91275-X, 273 pages, paper (my copy, found at a Barnes and Noble in Minneapolis in 2000). The cover has the tagline “Bridges the divide between gay and straight”.

Both books tend to come across as “handbooks”, and follow a writing style that seemed to be more common in the 1990s than today, especially when dealing with social issues. The second of these has space for readers to write their own comments. Neither is concerned with existential questions.

Both books sport a circular red button with the phrase “Do Ask Do Tell” in white letters, on their respective covers. But a USPTO search shows that a trademark application for the phrase (for use in sale of various paraphernalia or book promotions [movies, maybe?] was (after submission by Powell) abandoned in 1996. Neither book used the phrase as part of the title. In general, movie or book series titles can become trademarks when used in several (at least more than one) books (as with IDG’s “for Dummies”) or movies (“Star Wars”, etc), so that the consuming public thinks of them as “brands”. There is some relevant discussion on my “Trademark” blog Feb. 4, 2010 (see Blogger profile).

The Amazon link for the books is here.

Originals of both books are very expensive (they seem to be regarded as collector’s items).

How to resolve copyright questions for digitizing out-of-print books

2011-03-28T20:31:00.000-07:00

The Washington Post has an important editorial Monday March 28, “Online books and copyright law”, link here.

The Post argues that a non-profit body related to authors and literature, not a for profit-company (as with the Google Books Project), should represent the rights of authors (or their estates) for out-of-print books in determining the opt-in or opt-out issues. There are examples around one can look at: the story of J.D. Salinger, or the many examples of “unfinished” works of composers in classical music literature which are later discovered.

There’s another practical issue. Sometimes an out-of-print book has content that some parties associated with the author may take issue with being available online to search engines, whereas the author may have replaced the out-of-print version with a newer one to remove material previously objected to or perhaps just incorrect. (My own “Do Ask Do Tell” has some issues – including one major historical inaccuracy – in its 1997 printing that were corrected for the 2000 iUniverse version.)

The New York Times has a similar editorial March 30 here.

Picture: remember the days of "slide rule accuracy"?

Lisa Dodson's "The Moral Underground"

2011-03-21T15:00:00.000-07:00

Author: Lisa Dodson

Title: “The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy”

Publication: New York: The New Press, ISBN 978-1-59558-642-1, 227 pages, paper (also available hardcover), Four Parts and an Addendum; Eight Chapters.

My previous readings in this area have centered a lot on the books by Barbara Ehrenreich: “Nickel and Dimed” and “Bait and Switch” (see this blog, March 28, 2006). Particularly in the former, that earlier author had described the experience of “paying her dues” and undergoing the demeaning experience of minimum wage work.

Dodson focuses mainly on how employers (supervisors and managers), teachers, social workers and various others have to “break the rules” to help minimum or low wage workers. She does spend some space, intermittently, on the absolute view of “personal responsibility,” which would maintain that parent should not have had children (or engaged in behavior that could procreate them) until established economically in life.

She describes a concept called “cultural logic”, which more or less distinguishes between how high and low income families view child rearing. It is a little bit like the blue-and-red family dichotomy, but not exactly. Low income families, she maintains, expect their kids to remain tied to extended family but also expect them to learn to fend for themselves. This sounds like a bit of a contradiction. One could say the low income family expects to provide for everyone as a member of a family at a minimal level, but doesn’t feel responsible for letting children get a heads-up on education or career, or on being able to compete on a global board game “individually.”

Toward the end, she makes several points (five of them) of what must change. They seem clear enough. We must pay the people who do the work we don’t want to do (like caregiving) enough. And we must give parents (especially working mothers) equal access to advancement. There are others, as about poverty and education.

In the end, however, an unfair economy is “fixed” only by rethinking the “social contract”, or of what is to be expected of every individual, outside of what a market economy can mediate. That gets into a lot of moral areas, like sharing risk, service, and the cultural battle between families and the childless, and will tend to lead us into recommendations that sound like contradictions, at least with a moral standard based just on narrow ideas of “personal responsibility” inherent in libertarianism. It could get us into discussions about the “natural family” of Carlson and Mero (this blog, Sept. 18, 2009). For example, suppose you argued that if you employ a nanny or caregiver at below a certain level, you could become responsible for her children. Imagine the flow of argument.

Hour-plus interview of Dodson here from YouTube:

Dan Abrams and "Man Down": Women are better than men at almost everything

2011-03-08T08:38:00.000-08:00

Author: Dan Abrams

Title: "Man Down: Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt that Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers, and Just About Everything Else"

Publication: Abrams Image, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8109-9829-2, 144 pages, hardcover, 5 parts and 36 very short chapters, with a “Closing Argument”

Dan Abrams has been chief legal analyst for NBC News (not to be confused with Pete Williams, who covers justice issues). He’s been touting this little tome, which seems to be self-published, on the Today Show. And to show that men wince at pain more (whatever the history of Sparta), he followed the example of Donald Trump’s Apprentice contestant Troy McClain and allowed his legs to be waxed on camera (good thing it would still make a difference). And he mentions the Universal movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” with it’s man-o-lantern.

But it’s true, girls mature earlier than boys, and in recent years it’s become apparent that they will outperform boys when allowed to in school.

That was apparent to me when I was growing up in the 50s. Warren Farrell covered the problem well with his 1993 book “The Myth of Male Power” (Legato). Men were expected to engage in risky group pursuits to protect the women and children – progeny – in a community. Hence, as conservative writer George Gilder has often argued (“Men and Marriage”, 1986, reviewed here April 12, 2006), women are biologically superior and political power for men is a necessary contrivance set up to make them needed; they find meaning only when they settle for monogamous marriage with children.

I wonder if that has something to do with sexual orientation; some boys will perceive that it is in their “self interest” to skip all the self-sacrificial ritual rites of passage and move toward upward affiliation instead.

At least women don't play in the NFL. But it's just conceivable they could show up in MLB some day.

Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker examine why young adults delay marriage; "second demographic shift" as consequences?

2011-03-02T12:43:00.000-08:00

On February 3, on my issues blog, I covered a Washington Times column by Cheryl Wetzstein about a recent book from Oxford University Press by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker. Regnerus (his name reminds me of conservative “Regnery Publishing”) is a University of Texas sociology professor, and Uecker is a postdoctoral scholar at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina.

The book is titled “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying”. Despite the conservative-sounding authorial background, it is not a platform for right-wing talk, and in general it echoes the “Red State, Blue State comparisons of a book by Cahn and Carbone that I reviewed Aug. 2, 2010, and devotes a chapter to that concept (and mentions a common source, New Yorker article by Margaret Talbot). The book is filled with tables (no doubt printed by “SAS”) and discussions of a statistical or almost census nature.

But, no doubt, the central theme has to do with the idea that marriage and family seem reduced in America as a cultural driver, and the book, with considerable preparation, focuses on why young adults put off marriage. There are different variations of thinking according to “Red and Blue” patterns. But statistics show that marriages entered in ages 23-27 may be the most stable, and consort with the biologically optimal reproductive years. Self-definition, hyperindividualism, the cost of education, and the desire for extended freedom and self expression all contribute to the delay of marriage, but not always the delay in having babies.

In fact, as the authors point out, women may control the “price of sex” and it has become cheaper (like electronics), and heterosexual men are less principled about family than many would like. In fact, men generally want “experience” (I remember that from my own dormitory and Army days) and that fact seems a bit immutable.

In the Red-Blue chapter, the authors discuss the concept of “Second Demographic Shift” (SDL, not SNL (!)) and cast this in terms of the “moral hazard” presented by socialized programs that make families more dependent on “society” and less inclined to view their own children as resources to solve the problems associated with aging.

Early on, the book says it will focus on the heterosexual world, not out of any moral conviction but because it is difficult, in terms of logic, to map the political and social arguments on gay rights back onto arguments about marriage, or more difficult than people think. The issues overlap but are not synonyms. (I agree.) But they do return briefly in the Red-Blue chapter, and on p. 210 they write that that Red-state mentality sees gay marriage as “symbolic lunge for their throat, a contest over their identity and the historic centrality of marriage in America and western civilization.”

We should be mindful (as the authors trace), that at one time marriage and parenting were seamlessly integrated into the rest of life, as families (as on the frontier) had to cohere to survive. In earlier times, most people could not "afford" to conceptualize getting married and having kids as an expressive "choice." That has certainly changed, as for many swaths of most middle class life, children become consumers of wealth, not always perceived as the future beyond us. But concerns over “sustainability” could send the wild pendulum stalking back.

I suspect that so much of the “moral” debate, however related to religion, has a lot to do with maintaining emotional stakes a “family bed” with marital partners as both age “in sickness and in health”. Men, especially, can be drawn back to fantasy, and to the idea of a younger, nubile partner (a point that George Gilder made so much of in “Men and Marriage” (1986). Men naturally tend to perceive potential partners at fixed points in the “time arrow” as if looks conveyed permanent moral essence, which we know intellectually to be false (maybe “angels” are excepted, or perhaps the extraterrestrials of “The Event”). The authors talk about this in terms of “real life” which marriage either creates or ends (my mother used to use that term).

Publication data: ISBN 978-0-19-974328-5, 295 pages, indexed, eight chapters, appendices.

George Friedman: "The Next Decade": Foreign affairs, and only then high-tech

2011-02-13T19:57:00.000-08:00

Author: George Friedman

Title: “The Next Decade: Where We’ve Been … and Where We’re Going”

Publication: New York: 2011, Doubleday, ISBN 978-0-385-53294-5, 243 pages, hardcover, Introduction and 14 chapters

I ordered this book from Amazon by “accident”. I thought I was getting “Tech Freedoms” “Next Ten Years” or “Digital Decade” but this book popped up when I searched, and I didn’t see what it was. But it turns out to be most important.

I was lucky enough to have a great history teacher my junior year of high school (see the “BillBoushka” blog, Sept. 24, 2007), and one of his ideas was that countries are somewhat like people.

Nations, after all, are collections of people who generally, usually under political or statist authority, must act cooperatively for some kind of common economic good, even if those “at the top” benefit the most. So discussions on foreign affairs always subsume an indirect discussion of individual rights and “responsibilities”.

The author’s basic premise is that the United States has an empire, somewhat accidentally; it’s always tricky to balance the interests of the “empire” (or euphemistically “the enterprise”) with the interests of democracy, republicanism (not the partisan kind), and federalism. But, the author argues, the U.S. has played a balancing act for decades, preferring to keep powers within any region in balance by sometimes supporting less than ethical regimes. In fact, most of today’s major conflicts can be seen in these terms.

That paradigm, for example, explains all US policy back to the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran. It was in US interest that Iraq and Iran fight each other during the 80s, as long as the oil Straits of Hormuz kept open. I know, for example, that Petty Officer Keith Meinhold, and early “warrior” against the military ban on gays, flew PT-Orion reconnaissance missions in that area for some years, helping to keep the oil flowing.

The Persian Gulf War, and then the later neo-con and “Bushie” invasion of Iraq to depose Saddam Hussein can be understood in these terms, too. But Friedman’s interpretation of 9/11 is genuinely challenging. He calls the Bushie euphemism of “war on terror” as a non sequiter; terrorism cannot itself pose an existential threat to the West, but maybe a group like Al Qaeda could if it could execute.

Friedman provides a bit of a mixed interpretation of the WMD threat to ordinary civilian populations in the West. He covers the “rumors” right after 9/11 that Al Qaeda might have some loose suitcase nukes (or that they could be diverted from Pakistan), but says later fact-finding makes that unlikely. WMD’s are extraordinarily hard to deploy and can be detected by stings and decoys. (Sam Nunn’s Nuclear Threat Initiative might interpret things differently.) In fact, in April 2002, my own website underwent a hack at the exact point where I was discussing this threat, so I really wonder about this.

My own feeling is that “enemies” could destabilize our system by hitting “soft targets” or ordinary (and perhaps attention-seeking) westerners much more seriously than he admits. (Think about the “Salman Rushdie Problem” or the Jylands-Posten Muhammad Cartoon Controversy.)

His interpretation of the Israeli Palestinian problem is interesting. Arguing that Israel had no right to settle its original homeland is like arguing Europeans had no right to colonize the New World. So if Israel has the right to “exist”, then it may reasonably argue it needs to settle some areas for security. But of course, Palestinians can argue property or land was expropriated from them by force. There is no perfect answer here the way individualistic morality would analyze it – so are countries really like people?

His analysis of many other areas of the world, especially Russia, China and Mexico, are more pragmatic. But a common thread is population demographics. In many societies birthrates have fallen and working populations are hard-pressed to support their elderly. The illegal immigration problem for the United States is governed by the needs of Americans and westerners in general to have grubby work done for them that they don’t want to do or are too physically vulnerable to do.

In his last chapter, Friedman talks about statism and innovation of technology, which he thinks has stalled at a fundamental level in the past decades. Our culture has become split between manipulation (financial derivatives) and applications (like social networking), rather than “real” innovation which requires very carefully nuanced public policy. But he may be underestimating the effect of global communications and social networking technology as a democratizing force, which may eventually prove neo-conservative ideas of military intervention for nation building misplaced. Just look at what happened recently in Tunisia and Egypt (after the book was published).

At some point, one has to wonder about how much individual “morality” (in terms of patriotism, self-sacrifice, and “family values” as commonly understood – definitely not commensurate with objectivism or hyper-individualism) can affect the well-being of whole societies striving to remain economically stable and prosperous democracies. Much of the “karma” of individual Americans has been described by hostile elements in terms of American statist (and intentionally manipulative) foreign policy. Likewise, economic turmoil (especially the recent 2008 financial crisis) could be understood in statist support of the idea of “getting something for nothing”. But at some point, you have to wonder about moral fundamentals, like sharing of sacrifice and motivational integrity. Authoritarian politicians, ranging from Hitler to Chairman Mao and Pol Pot, have not been reluctant to exploit this in the past.

The style of the book is interesting. There are many maps, and at a certain level it is like a supplementary textbook, maybe for a high school world history course. Having substitute taught some in recent years, that’s how it strikes me.

Tim Wu's "The Master Switch": Centralization v. freedom in global communications

2011-01-30T17:09:00.000-08:00

Author: Tim Wu

Title: "The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires"

Publication: New York: Knopf, 2010, ISBN 978-0-307-26993-5, 366 pages, hardcover, indexed, n Introduction and 21 Chapters, in five parts.

In time, I will tell the story of what “I did” for the past fifteen years, once I had “free entry” into Internet publication, but as a proprietorship of one, I exercised the “vertical integration” that Wu considers the potentially self-defeating part of “The Cycle”. I wrote, edited (hiring proofreading), self-published and to some extent self-distributed my first book. My Internet activity follows the same general path.

I can go off on a tangent here and say that there could be negative social consequences (or political ones) if one has “too much reach” into the public without a lot of personal commitment or “generativity”. That’s an interesting area, “the privilege of being listened to,” off the track of Wu’s book, although he could have covered it.

Wu (a professor at Columbia) gives a sweeping historical account of the US communications and media industries since the late 19^th Century, with some emphasis on telephone, radio, television, movies, and finally the Internet. Until well into the 1990s with the Internet, asymmetric innovations tended to be engulfed and squashed by corporate monopolism, with a sine-wave cycle of innovation, centralization with elimination of competition, and then political objections leading to some decentralization and more innovation.

His account of movies is particularly interesting. There was resistance to the idea that too many people could make film, and later there was controversy over whether “vertical integration” of functions (including distribution and exhibition as well as production) was a good thing. For a while, the “George Zukor” model won out. The result was a major studio system well able to make big films that could make money. For a long time, independent filmmaking about diverse topics was difficult. After studios could no longer own theaters, it got easier to make indie film. But big studios fell into a system of cookie-cutter content development, tending to depend on established characters or trademarked “franchises” of sequels. The system also fell under the control of a regime of “private censorship” as he explains in the battles with the “Legion of Decency” and the older production codes that prevented challenging traditional values. Wu provides an interesting side discussion of how copyright and trademark law applies to movie and comic book characters.

His history of television was interesting to me, since I’ve worked for RCA (1970-1971, at the David Sarnoff Research Center in Princeton) and later NBC (1974-1977). Coworkers who remember me may find this review interesting. He discusses Sarnoff in detail, even to the point of providing some backdrop to the events during my employment. There were periods when the “establishment” kept television (starting as “mechanical”) and later cable at bay to maintain a “crossword puzzle style” capture audience and maximize profits short-term, a kind of raw capitalism.

Because the development of the Internet at first accelerated slowly (the WWW wasn’t getting mentioned until 1993), companies at first thought they could control content with vertical integration, as with the early versions of AOL and Prodigy. The faulty merger of AOL and Time Warner was based on this precept, based on earlier versions of “The Cycle.” But “http” changed all that. And so did Google, which started out as essentially a “switch” that did so much by doing so little. It was the idea of “network neutrality” that made older Internet business models like AOL’s flounder.

Wu proposes an extension of “constitutionality” to the way private business works with worldwide communications. On p 304 he articulates a “Separations Principle” that would prevent any one telecommunications or media company (as defined by trading in public stock exchanges or private placements) for engaging in business in more than one “layer” of the entire system. A Comcast could not merge with an NBC Universal in such a world.

The interesting thing is that he seems to see a Separations Principle at the corporate level as essential to maintain free speech and “free entry” (which I took so much advantage of) for individuals and very small businesses, to maintain innovation. Perhaps the current controversy over the purported effect of bloggers on the newspaper industry fits into this view, as well as an interpretation of the recent "copyright trolling" by Righthaven to sue bloggers as part of the battle for "control".

There’s a lot more to this, I think, however, that he could give heed to, particularly in the area of liability, privacy, and online reputation, as in many other books I have reviewed here. There are inherent dangers when one individual has “too much broadcast reach”, that have to do with accountability in ways that are outside of bottom-line and corporate restructuring concerns. Ironically, some of the platitudes originally used to preserve centralization were based on vague notions that decentralized expression could present its own kind of public risk. History has proved that correct. Furthermore, the transformative nature of our communications culture has reached all the way into the idea of individual self-definition, as compared to being part of a group. That is, social networking (particularly Facebook) has undermines the personal anonymity that used to seem essential to freedom, even free speech. If an individual (as Mark Zuckerberg and perhaps Eric Schmidt maintain) should have only one identity, arguably one person shouldn’t be permitted to perform too many functions publicly. Maybe that’s the next battle.

Here’s Steve Paikin’s interview with Wu.

Justin Elzie: "Playing by the Rules": timely, given the (conditional) repeal of "don't ask don't tell"

2011-01-09T18:37:00.000-08:00

Author: Justin Crockett Elzie (Foreword by David Mixner)

Title: “Playing by the Rules”

Publication: Maine, Rebel Sartori Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60864-042-3. 227 Pages, paper

Also included: A Poem, “Naivety”

Let me introduce this review with an incident from my own Army Basic training in early Spring, 1968 at Fort Jackson, SC. We were on a day long march (not yet bivouac), “at ease”, when I said, “The Marines are tougher than the Army.” Yup, I just blurted it out, from “naivety”.

In fact, it’s normally up to the Marines to take territory, and for the Army to hold it. A Marine is both a sailor and a soldier, and lives in quarters normally more cramped and intimate than either more “conventional” servicemembers.

So it’s logical that the Marine Corps would provide an ultimate test of the theory that the military requires an unusual does of forced intimacy, and that rules are necessary that would not normally apply in civilian life. That came up during the recent Senate hearings over the final repeal of “don’t ask don’t tell” regarding gays in the military, where General Amos insisted that the Marines, since they always share quarters, could be severely compromised by lifting the ban.

I’m backing my way into the review, as the book indeed recreates the world of 1993, when the new and “naïve” President Bill Clinton had proposed lifting the “absolute ban” (with “asking”) that had been promulgated back in 1981, just before Ronald Reagan took office. (Randy Shilts had covered that in “Conduct Unbecoming,” with the famous “123 Word” policy. (In fact, here’s the reference from Google books, link. )

Elzie, having entered the Marine Corps in the early 1980s after dropping out of a Bible college, had outed himself in January 1993, on ABC World Evening News broadcast. So he would relive the entire debate, all the way through President Clinton’s July 19 announcement of “don’t ask don’t tell don’t pursue”. His own discharge hearings would occur in March, and then the Marine Corps would try to take away VSI/SSB (Voluntary Separation Incentive and Special Separation Benefit) retirement that he would have been eligible for. He sued, and under a judge’s order was reinstated, and serve four more years, getting outstanding performance evaluations despite the legal circumstances and the theories (from Sam Nunn and at the time Charles Moskos) that gays would disrupt the sense of “privacy” of straight soldiers, and Marines. (Sam Nunn has said, “They have no privacy”, and later, “When you disclose your status, you have described your conduct”, since Clinton had tried to make a distinction between status and conduct). Elzie would insist that it was more important for him to “make a difference” than just to collect his deserved retirement money.

Elzie describes how the “don’t pursue” idea (even espoused in June of 1993 by Barney Frank) never works. In the early days, NCIS (Naval Criminal Investigative Service) agents, who were civilians (themselves protected from anti-gay actions in civil service since 1973) staked out parking lots of gay bars near bases (particularly in North Carolina) to hunt down gays who went to bars. This was supposed to be prohibited by the 1994 administrative rules, but many commands still pursued. Elzie gives some discussion of Servicemembers Legal Defense Network (SLDN), and especially Michelle Benecke and Dixon Osburn who ran the aid group in the 1990s. I attended some of the events, included the “End the Witchhunts” dinners. Elzie would tread his double lfie carefully, avoiding such tactics as marrying a lesbian to hide. His career advanced, to his service as an Americam Embassy Guard.

Elzie also describes growing up around Cheyenne Wyoming (not too far from Matthew Shepard’s Laramie), and his dealing with his family’s religious disapproval of his emerging identity, which did not interfere with his ability to perform socially as a man. When he decided to join the military, he was wooed by a Marine Corps recruiter, probably not quite understanding what that could mean. For a while in the 1960s, it was actually possible to be drafted by the Marines.

“Gay rights” has been presented in terms of equality for the past couple of decades, and the ability to serve in the military with “reasonable” openness seemed essential to me to be a first class citizen. If you are to have fully equal rights, you must have the ability to share the risks of defending your freedom and the freedom of others in your family and community. But in earlier times, it was the right to have a private life out of the pursuit of others, that seemed to be the issue, and this could be an issue even for civilians (who, remember, could, if males, be drafted). Frank Kameny lost his government job in 1957 because of snooping, and in 1967, the horrible documentary “The Homosexuals” with Mike Wallace on CBS had described witch hunts in the State Department (in the words of a belligerent Dean Rusk, “we discharge them”) and saw gay men interviewed in shadows with voices muffled.

I am a product of those earlier times, and will ask "Why". It seems to me that people want others to do what they have to do, and that, as part of a stable and "interesting" marriage, parents expect their kids will carry the family on biologically, and provide vicarious immortality.

Are typos more common now in "published" books?

2011-01-07T20:01:00.000-08:00

Typos are certainly more common in books than they were twenty years ago. Yes, there are probably more of them in self-published and print-on-demand books (including mine), but I’ve seen some in books from major trade publishers as far back as the mid 1990s (I won’t mention names here). Copyediting used to be a labor-consuming job, but obviously in the interests of cutting costs, the menial attention to detail is down.

Here’ s a piece by Irene Watson at “Ezine” (Feb. 5, 2010) designed to help authors who outsource their editing, link here. Authors have used subsidy publishers, services from POD, and outside freelance proofreaders.

Here’s a blog entry in “Flights of Fancy” about the problem (link )

Here’s what Yahoo! says about the problem. ("What do you get for finding a typo in a published book? Nothing.")

But it’s also becoming a problem in newspapers and online news stories, as here.

Back in 1998, in a gay book club held at Barnes and Noble in downtown Minneapolis (where my first “Do Ask Do Tell” was being sold, distributed then by Bookmen) one member said something like that “errors in published books are inexcusable”. “Get real!” (I know, that’s the name of a gay movie.)

In fact, a reviewer of my book on Amazon wrote, quoting me “"Algebra invokes the manipulation of symbols as surrogates for numbers or objects. As a child, it had sounded like a great mystery, doing arithmetic or `figuring' with `letters' rather than numbers. Some people never understand the abstraction, and stay back at the grade school level where you never do your `number work' in ink."

That second sentence, taken as written, means that algebra sounded like a great mystery when it was a child. I wonder what algebra sounded like when it grew up. In the final sentence, he switches from the third to the second person midway through. And the entire book is written this way. This kind of sloppiness is natural in spoken conversation, but has no place in a published work.”

You see the error? I had used “it” as the impersonal (as “it rains”), when strictly speaking, grammatically, the pronoun would refer to “algebra”. It’s very hard for a writer to catch these errors in his own work. (It’s easier in most (less analytic) foreign languages, where endings force you to make things clearer.) I guess it is very hard in Chinese!

As for newspapers, Foster Winans, in his 1989 book “Trading Secrets” (St. Martins Press) talked about his career (cut short by his own foolish insider trading) at the Wall Street Journal, and in a chapter called “Full Boil” talks about catching grief over small factual misprints (back in the 1980s) in his “Heard on the Street” column.

WSJ reports on problems with Borders, which reflects on problems in "traditional" publishing for "traditional" authors

2011-01-03T16:38:00.000-08:00

Stories in the Wall Street Journal Monday Jan.3 indicated that Borders is having difficulty with its debt and making payments to regular publishers. Jeffrey Trachtenberg has been reporting on the problem, with the latest link (subscription required for full content) here.

Part of Borders’s problems may simply be the popularity of online purchases through Amazon, which I thought at one time had taken over hosting Borders. I no longer find my iUniverse books on Borders; they are present on Barnes and Noble (as well as Amazon).

The cash flow problems in the mainstream book industry may befuddle new authors and self-published writers, who find that the traditional world has become so uninviting, even to “midlist” authors (as so well explained in 2001 by Donald Maass in his “Writing the Breakout Novel: Inside Advice for Taking Your Fiction to the Next Level" (Writers Digest Press).

Textbook errors create a stir in Virginia schools; even academic publishing has problems in quality in this cost-cutting age

2010-12-30T07:27:00.000-08:00

For all the discussion of “amateur” vs. “professional” authoring and publishing, it seems that the flap over errors in social studies textbooks from Five Ponds Press (link), including “Our Virginia: Past and Present” (Joy Masoff) and “Our America” have really created a stir. The publisher even mentions helping students with their SOL’s (Standards of Learning tests) in promoting the lower-priced texts. The Washington Post has a story on Dec. 30 by Kevin Sieff. Errors included stating that the US entered World War I in 1916 (it was 1917). Another was that the Confederacy comprised 12 states (it was 11). And there was a controversial error involving the participation of blacks fighting for the South.

An interesting sidelight seems to be that the authors did a lot of their research for the texts on the Internet. “I read it on the Internet so it must be right.”

Of course, I remember my own factual gaffe on the back cover of the first edition of my first “Do Ask Do Tell” book in 1997 on the "age" of the Bill of Rights (I don’t know how it got past me), but corrected it in the 2000 print-on-demand from iUniverse. But no one caught it until 1998, when someone in Minnesota noticed it proofreading my second booklet. (It’s a good idea when writing history not to say how “old” some document is, because the book itself will age anyway.)

There was some controversy back in the 1950s, because social studies in Arlington was always “Virginia and U.S. History” and “Virginia and U.S. Government”. And we always had a lot of collateral reading besides history and literature anthology texts. I don’t even remember what the anthologies were (in college, we had Crane Brinton’s “A History of Civilziation” and “British Poetry and Prose”). We had a lot of collateral reading: “Silas Marner” in 10th Grade English, John Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” in 11th Grade History, and “Huckleberry Finn” in college freshman English. It seemed (when I was a sub) that everyone read Goldman's “Lord of the Flies” (a kind of “Lost”) in 9th Grade English and had to take pop reading quizzes on it. Another external assignment was an abbreviated version of Elie Weisel’s “Night” – there’s eve a Spark multiple choice quiz here. And these assignments produced some vocabulary words (like “lorry”).

Update: January 9, 2011

Andy Rooney, on CBS 60 Minutes, talked about the textbook fiasco tonight, and Robert McCartney wrote a column for the Metro Section of the Sunday Washington Post, "Va. schools should insist on refund for textbooks". No way to turn these into "teachable moments."

Smithsonian's "Mysteries of the Universe" takes up the coronal mass ejection issue

2010-12-25T20:55:00.000-08:00

The Smithsonian has a Collector’s Edition for Winter 2011 of “Mysteries of the Universe” (104 pages) about many topics.

But the most important piece, by Robert Irion on p 70, “Staring at the Sun”, echoes the warnings that a large coronal mass ejection from the Sun could wreak havoc. Like the book by Lawrence Joseph reviewed Nov. 9 here, it discusses the 1859, 1921 and 1989 CME’s, and warns about our growing dependence on electronics. It says that the effect of an 1859-style event might be reduced by precautionary voltage reductions by power companies and by various measures to redact satellites, but the damage could be over a trillion dollars and be long lasting. Also, it notes that the 1859 event occurred after a period of little sunspot activity, and notes that sunspot activity dropped almost to zero in 2008 and 2009. But rather than 2012, it seems to think the greatest risk occurs in 2013 and 2014.

There are articles about all kinds of things, like the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, which does not have a quasar, but which will develop one in some billions of years when the Andromeda Galaxy approaches.

It talks about the Solar System, but does not have pictures of Europa and Titan, a disappointment.

It also has an article (“Ready for Contact”) by Sarah Zielinski about the search for extraterrestrials, and notes that a laser reply would be a sign of intelligence. It is guarded as to how arriving extraterrestrials would treat us, but probably not as badly as in the film “Skyline” (or “V” or “The Event”).

If you believe in the idea that family gives future beyond the self, you have to realize that some day Man will have to find a new home, a new solar system, maybe a new galaxy or new universe to live in. Ever wonder “what makes me who I am?” Why am I experiencing myself in 2010; why wasn’t I born in earlier times in more “primitive” conditions with more collective values? It seems that “consciousness” or “soul” is an entity like matter and energy, and that consciousness can transcend the universe’s speed limit and jump universes. It would make sense to transmit a person’s soul through a wormhole and reassemble it in another universe from the information transmitted, much like a download from the Internet, even like Facebook.

The link for the “Magazine” is here. It can be found in many supermarkets and retail outlets.

George W. Bush and "Decision Points": Finding faith was like diving into the pool

2010-12-22T05:52:00.000-08:00

Author: George W. Bush

Title: "Decision Points"

Publication: New York: 2010, Crown Publishers; ISBN 978-0-307-88522-7, 497 pages, hardcover, two sets of illustrations

The former president presents his experience, from young adulthood through the controversial presidency, as the unfolding of life’s challenges to an “ordinary person”.

True, he says early that if he had not made the decision to stop drinking, he could not have faced any other of his monumental problems during his presidency. He also describes the experience of going to a Christian church but not quite believing because he saw himself as a “logical person.” The “born again” experience was a kind of letting go, of diving into the deep end of the pool with dependents needing to be kept afloat.

I do recall his promotion of "faith based" initiatives early in 2001, and his interesting comment during an early speech at Ohio State, "a person without responsibility for others is truly alone". I believe he made a similar comment toward the end of his Inauguration Day speech in 2001, a Saturday where I went snow tubing south of Minneapolis after hearing the speech. Later he would suggest that more people take interesting in "mentoring a child", and I don't know whether meant to include those who do not have their own children.

I do recall his announcing his stem cell decision, on "conventional right to life" grounds, in August 2001, about a month before 9/11, when I was "home" myself for a visit.

He is very firm in his conviction that he didn’t really “know” much more than the rest of us, despite the elaborate infrastructure for his daily presidential briefings, which go on the road with a president. Having lived in Dallas in the 1980s, I can say it would be nice to have a ranch and a fully equipped and stable personal office in the Texas Hill Country.

His account of how he came to understand the nature of the 9/11 attacks as they unfolded takes a little over a page. He first thought that a small plane had flown into the WTC, and then that a pilot had a heart attack. He experienced disbelief, until a point of recognition, as Andrew Card whispered to him in that elementary school gathering. The "Day of Fire" shocked him and indeed presented an existential threat to our way of life, not necessarily clearer to him because of intelligence, which was often murky. He mentions the New Line film "13 Days" about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. I recall that there was a small "existential" problem about Taiwan in April 2001, however.

On Iraq, he also says he really believed that Saddam had WMD’s, and makes plenty of arguments that even without them Saddam Hussein needed to be removed, given his behavior and the likelihood that he could shield terrorists.

On Hurricane Katrina, he describes some amazement as he flew over the flooded city.

He also experienced the Election Night in 2000 as an ordinary guy, amazed for a while that the media had fumbled the information about Florida. As a factual matter, it simply is unclear whether Gore would have won had the Supreme Court allowed the recount.

He is self-critical on taking up privatizing Social Security, when he says he should have turned more attention to immigration.

One of his most interesting suggestions is that redistricting should be done by a non-partisan committee.

He does not mention gay rights anywhere but he does mention oppression of homosexuals in radical Islam.

He provides a brief an non-apologetic version of the Plame affair ("Fair Game")

I take it that "W." enjoys daily life in Dallas, Texas. I did.

Crown Books provides the following YouTube video:

Pope Benedict XVI gives book-length interview in "Light of the World"

2010-12-14T19:43:00.000-08:00

Authors: Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger) , Peter Seewald and George Weigel (Foreword)

Title: "Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times"

Subtitle: "A Conversation with Peter Seewald"

Publication: San Francisco, Ignatius, 2010. ISBN 978-1-58617-606-8; hardcover, 219 pages (Foreword and Preface, 20 roman pages), Three Parts, 18 chapters, with Appendix; each chapter has the form of a sequence of comments or questions (“is that a question?”), each followed by the Pope’s reply; hence the publisher calls this a “book length interview” with the Pope.

There seem to be three major points in the Pope’s thinking, as to what the teachings of the Church comprise:

First, God has a plan for us, to develop into a civilization that has a future, where we have much input but where He has a final say, and it is arrogant to say that we can challenge his Plan with intellect and reason alone to define “good” in our terms. (That’s a paradox as the Pope must use considerable abstract intellect to compose his answers.) Indeed, we are imperfect by definition and need salvation by Grace.

Second, God provides many instrumentalities for us to develop and gives us Free Will. He does not stop us from making choices that vary from his Plan, because if he did His Plan could not be carried out at all; His Plan requires us to have freedom. But some personal choices are intrinsically wrong or at least contrary to His intentions for us.

Third, because human beings are imperfect, they face challenges or “miseries” which demonstrate need for God. The “miseries” are individualized and different for various individuals and may seem to contradict political ideas of equality.

Before going into the “specifics” of Vatican prescriptions in morality (which are controversial), I’d like to run through a few original scenarios.

One: Back in First Grade, the teacher let us choose between white and chocolate milk for morning snack. But she warned us that chocolate was the wrong choice because it could make us sick. The boy who sat in front of me, Mike, chose chocolate. I said “you may get sick” and he said, “I don’t care.” He never got sick. Was his choice wrong? What was the point of the teacher giving us a choice if one option was always wrong?

Two: Physicists say that a universe could exist without the “weak force” and a weakless universe could have stars and planets supporting intelligent life. But a weakless universe doesn’t have elements heavier than iron. That means no radioactive elements, and no nuclear weapons. It means no heavy metal poisoning. But probably such a universe would have much less variety and “opportunity” than ours.

Third: In a typical information technology shop, ordinary programmers might not be given regular authority to update production files. This protects the integrity of production systems, but can make getting work done and fixing production problems more difficult. Should programmers be “bonded” and have more “freedom” to do their jobs more efficiently?

You can see where I could be heading: the questions about gay people. The Pope insists that God insists that God’s intrinsic purpose for sexuality is procreation and providing humanity a future, and also he hints that marital sexuality socializes people into meeting the needs of others rather than just following their own “rational” purposes, which for some people can seem quite tempting and rewarding. Hence the famous Vatican doubletalk on homosexuality – and contraception. The book does pay brief attention to his widely announced admission that condoms may be acceptable to prevent STD’s.

The Pope admits he is not sure whether homosexual orientation could be immutable or would develop in the environment. If it is immutable, he might have a problem, because God seems to have created something that is beyond behavioral choice that contradicts his plan. The Pope really doesn’t answer this. Maybe he’s wrong and God intended that some people explore psychological polarity for its own sake, without the need to procreate. But with the “environmental” hypothesis, the Pope may make more “sense”. Sometimes people (especially men) don’t “compete well” according to gender norms; and this is the “misery” that they must deal with to understand they need God. If they were encouraged to express “upward affiliation” openly, we might arrive at a society where people show much less empathy within the family and which people in general have much less “investment” in their biological future. It’s a scary style of thinking, isn’t it.

I understand his reasoning from an abstract perch. But when you say some lifestyles are more in line with God's (or society's) purpose than others, you invite expropriation (and the talk about compassion for "people" as opposed to their indivualities -- whether "chosen" or "miseries" -- sounds like a contradction). And some people feel that, to lead their own lives dedicated to marriage and family, they need to see everyone else have to do the same so that their world has "meaning."

The Pope does rationalize the celibate priesthood. He writes “Homosexuality is incompatible with the priestly vocation” (in analogy to the Pentagon’s 1981 statement “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service”). He takes head on the idea that celibacy could become a “pretext for bringing people into the priesthood who don’t want to get married anyway.” He also writes that homosexual orientation “estranges them from the proper sense of paternity”, as if to highlight that generativity is an intrinsic moral responsibility for everyone. It wouldn’t be hard to connect the Pope’s thinking with right wing arguments about “demographic winter”.

The Pope does discuss the abuse scandal in terms of going back to standards of right and wrong, and in other parts of the book he gets into some things that are generally esoteric, such as Fatima’s appearances (Portugal) and the healings at Lourdes (France) (I visited both in May 2001).

Seewald sometimes begs the questions, summarizing moral arguments on his own, particularly toward the end, where he suggests that a media-saturated and “me first” world takes people away from the social cohesion (and Godly devotion) that a society needs for sustainability.

Ignatius provides this YouTube trailer:

Time's picture book on Benjamin Franklin

2010-12-06T17:35:00.000-08:00

In my junior year in high school (they say it’s the hardest year), I remember having to read and compare two biographies for English. One of these was “The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin” (now available from Dover paperbacks),with its Moral Perfection Project of the Thirteen Virtues. I thought the family had a copy, but I don’t see it, so maybe I did borrow it from that old Clarendon library. The other biography was that of Edgar Allen Poe, and I even recall giving an oral book report on that, vividly, some public speaking experience setting up my 1998 talk on my own book, maybe.

Time Magazine offers (in supermarkets and pharmacies, mainly) a spiffy illustrated paperback “Benjamin Franklin: An Illustrated History of His Life and Times” (128 pages), by Richard Lacayo.

The book makes Franklin, our greatest non-president among the Founding Fathers, into a kind of heterosexual Leonardo Da Vinci or polymath. As a teen he might have come across as someone who would get onto “It’s Academic” or “Jeopardy” today. He was also given to philosophical ruminations (as a friend in the 1970s said, “verbosity promulgates egregious epigrammitization”). At 19, he wrote “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain” and tried to argue that evil does not exist. Later, he tried to destroy all copies of this foolishness, but here it is (link http://www.questia.com/read/77355496 ). Most of us know of “Poor Richard’s” pamphlets. Like #3, “Journey of My Voyage”, all rather self-centered, comprises lots of short passages rather like blog entries. Franklin’s activity in the printing business probably got him as close to global self-distribution, in comparison to what happens with today’s Internet, as anyone achieved. He also helped other pamphleteers, including Thomas Paine.

But perhaps it took his sort of Ayn-Rand-hero personality to enable everything he did, including is inventions (such as his armonica (p 54) where wine glasses produced musical tones, and for which Mozart and Beethoven wrote music (no polytonality yet, please).

His sense of family values was interesting, as he entered into a rare common law marriage with a woman whose first husband had deserted her, and as he had his first son by another woman.

Franklin’s contribution as a political founding father are in every history text, of course. He was early to oppose slavery, and the different schemes for representation in the House and Senate were largely his. Yet it’s his contribution as a literary content originator and distributor, relative to the capabilities of his day, which he increased, that seems like his most remarkable achievement. Intellectually and as a business person, he compares to the Internet entrepreneurs of our era.

The book sells for about $10 and the illustrations practically make it into a filmstrip (like what we used to have in grade school, in the 50s of course).

Franklin was also an avid chess player, but the rules may not have been quite the same as today, and published opening theory in those days was very limited.

Beal and Strauss: "Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online"

2010-11-23T08:55:00.000-08:00

Authors: Andy Beal, Dr. Judy Strauss, with Foreword by Robert Scoble

Title: “Radically Transparent: Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online”

Publication: 2008, Wiley, ISBN 978-0-470-19082-1, 378 pages, paper, indexed, 3 parts, 15 chapters.

The authors define the term “radically transparent” on p xxiv of the Introduction, to mean “being open and honest online, admitting mistakes, engaging stakeholders in discussions about you and your brands, and even revealing your internal processes.”

Now, wait a minute: my first pause. “Online reputation” (as characterized by companies like Michael Fertik's Reputation Defender) has become a “personal property” or attribute, an element of our lives that has developed quietly and insidiously over the past decade or so (actually, even longer). [Note well: the word "Reputations" in the book substitle is plural!] But the focus of this book is the presumed situation that “you” already have your career and professional goals defined, and that you are interfacing with the public through your job, using and managing your company’s or organization’s resources, representing their best interests before your own. Indeed, even a dozen or so years ago every major company (almost) had a public website that it put effort into (my employer, ING/ReliaStar had “I Hate Financial Planning”), but it tended to be done “at work”: “those were the days my friend” (“I thought they would never end”) of Web 1.0, before “Blogumentary” (a documentary film), and social networking sites, when Mark Zuckerberg was still in prep school. There was a presume separation, for most people (particularly in information technology, where I worked as an “individual contributor”) between “work” and “private life”. In the early days of the Web, people “sort of” understood that what you wrote online was yours, not your boss’s (until Heather Armstrong came along – we all know what it means to get dooced now).

But think of the “job” of an insurance agent, or a trial lawyer, or a surgeon, or any professional who interfaces with the public to get and serve consumers, in some relationship with larger companies. Now (especially since about 2005 or so as social media became important), he needs to deal with the idea that consumers will find him online, and grade him on the web, too. Yup, it’s an asymmetric world: in some cases, what one blogger writes about you (or your company, as the authors show with Dell) can seriously disrupt your business. (Some physicians, at least, have been making patients sign "gag order" contracts that they will not complain online; the asymmetry, some professionals say, of unsupervised complaint sights can destroy their practices or businesses. But you don't have to be a surgeon for others to talk about you online!)

So, I guess, my “second pause”. Generally, most professionals are in some particular “place” in their career situation, and now the practical reality is that they have to use the online world to support their business reputation, not to express their own personal views or engage debate, as I did (and I’ll get to that). So going online and networking is indeed a practical necessity, a skill everyone must master. As individuals, we all need to develop our own “brands” online, for ourselves as well as our employers.

On p 58, the authors have a gray-font “FAQ’s about online reputation management for individuals”. They tend to downplay the serious risks of litigation (for libel, copyright infringement, etc) and of being fired for personal online behavior (although later the authors mention the doocing problem again, particularly the young woman who lost a teaching career over a “drunken pirate” Facebook picture). The authors also present writing and media savvy as something that used not to be expected of many professionals in the workplace the way it is now, and they’re right (oops, not “write”) about this!

My circumstance, to be honest (as I reach my “third pause”) is the inverse of what the authors describe. I got onto the web early (around 1996, as Hometown AOL was coming into being), first with desktop publishing (and book self-publishing) out of a desire to project my own voice on a particular issue, gays in the military (and “don’t ask don’t tell” – which certainly, by the way, presents issues for “online reputation” for servicemembers). The issue, in an existential manner, became the focus of all kind of other issues that revolved around it, just outside an event horizon, which I in turn took up, “connecting the dots”. So I developed a quick way to present the news, with a bit of a “Chicken Little” flavor, a sense of warning of so many other things that can go wrong, and an idea that so many perils can be prevented. I was very much against the “herd mentality” (not “nerd herd” of Chuck!) that seems to drive people like lemmings into catastrophe (like the mortgage meltdown). That worked wonderfully in the early days of Web 1.0, but after 9/11 things seemed to change. Once social networking sites became a staple of life, it seemed as though online behavior could become a demonstration of “fitting in” and taking on “social responsibility” (particularly readiness for family responsibility) as compared to my original paradigm of becoming an individual voice of libertarian-oriented constructive criticism of everything going on.

One of my motives was not to depend on the collective voice of “organizations” whose positions, sometimes based on a faulty sense of victimization, might eventually reinforce a sense of shame. Nevertheless, someone who expresses his own political opinions visibly online could run into issues in the workplace if he has direct reports or makes underwriting decisions about others, a problem I have already covered on my blogs. Taking on such responsibilities in the workplace could mean removing a lot of personal materials, but once they’re out in cyberspace, digital copies exist forever, part of what we have come to see as the “online reputation” problem. On the other hand, as the authors point out, most people approach the Internet with specific career-related goals already laid out for them to be supported. So someone in my position is left with the “inverse” problem of making my online innovation into a viable news or media business, perhaps with film. From a legal perspective, when dealing with the “implicit content” problem (and fending off charges of gratuitous “recreational outrage” in some “conflict of interest” problems), one might need a viable business plan to maintain one’s legacy place online.

One of the caveats that come with social networking (especially as Mark Zuckerberg says he envisions it as he grows Facebook) is that in a moral sense, a person has only one "identity", one "soul". So we come back to a more personal meaning for "radical transparency": personal life and professional life merge into one mass. It's a new world of "do ask, do tell".

The authors give “how to” and handbook advice on all kinds of Internet-use matter, such as email. The suggest that people not use aol, msn, or hotmail accounts for business email or job searches, as, according to them, these domains suggest amateurism and spam; I’ve had AOL since 1994 and not run into that attitude at all. (For some reason, Verizon email addresses sound better for reputation.)

The authors do discuss blogging, and the various tones of writing that are appropriate in blogs as compared to formal white papers and (particularly academic) books.

See also, trademark blog (Nov 18), “BillBoushka” blog (Nov. 19), IT blog (Nov. 19 and 22).

(Note: I bought the paperback; the image shown is for a slightly different version; Check Amazon for all versions).

Amazon pulls "objectionable" Kindle book; a slippery slope?

2010-11-11T06:27:00.000-08:00

Should Amazon have “given in” to public “recreational outrage” over a Kindle Book title by Phillip Greaves II, which had been self-published in late October, 2010? Fox News has a story on the disabling here. Apparently in two weeks the e-book had risen to sales rank 65 among Kindle books.

The “book” (rather more like a leaflet) dealt with disturbing subject matter, to say the least, and had a title that most would find offensive (so I won’t reproduce the title here, for practical reasons). Quotes from the book show some egregious and obvious spelling errors.

As of Thursday morning (Nov. 11), pricing information on the e-book was not available, and the individual URL for the book does not come up. However late Wednesday night I saw several angry comments threatening to boycott Amazon, and one of the comments said that other comments had been removed. (It's not absolutely clear if Amazon or Greaves did the removal.)

Greaves has other entries on Amazon that continue to work.

Although the book had been available for almost two weeks, outrage erupted late Wednesday when Anderson Cooper covered the issue on his AC360 program (in his “keeping them honest” ® series). Dr, Phil appeared, and then Jeffrey Toobin, legal advisor, indicated that the book probably would not be found obscene or in violation of child pornography statutes because it contained only text and no images. (That is not necessarily the case overseas, even in Canada.)

Fox notes that Amazon has been criticized before, and once removed a violent video game, but also allowed another book about underage interest to stay despite threats of suits from a conservative group.

Amazon reportedly said “Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable. Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

But critics noted that Amazon was inconsistent because it does not sell (visual) pornography.

Toobin described Amazon’s issues as purely business ones, not legal.

Anderson Cooper’s 360 blog entry is here (updated). The entry even reports an urban legend that the book is an FBI sting (like a former Dateline series!)

The incident could make “public outrage” a more sensitive issue for Amazon (and BN) since some people are offended by a number of topics (such as abortion). It could cause them to become more wary of accepting self-published books.

I have reviewed one or two books that I think could have inspired boycotts. I have one such review Jan. 21, 2009, and I hid the objectionable nature of the book title with a blog posting title (“Women and children first”) that expressed the “spirit” of the title in a less “offensive” way.

Back in 2005, a couple staff members at a Fairfax County high school where I substitute taught were “very offended” by the presence of a screenplay on my own website about a similar subject matter after I mentioned (to one teaching intern) the fact that I had a website in response to a newspaper story regarding the First Amendment. The incident is covered on the “BillBoushka” blog July 27, 2007.

There have been a few cases of litigation and prosecution around websites with intention similar to Greaves’s book.

AOL has a detailed story about the incident here.

NBC affiliate 9News in Denver has this story about the Pueblo author (including a brief interview with the author, as well as with lawyers and prosecutors):

My own concern: rule of the mob, and possibility we could sink back to "Fahrenheit 451" or book burnings. You don't have to buy the book. Amazon's Discussion Page about the book is still available here, and many of the comments look pretty responsible and balanced.

It sounds appropriate to say that the company won't sell knowingly anything that gives instructions on illegal conduct, and that logic would apply, for example, for weapons making. But in the past it could have applied to all gay conduct, even with adults. Most of us don't know exactly what the ebook says, but there's a good chance that, despite Greaves's assertions, a lot of it would be illegal in most or all states (let alone harmful).

I remember the controversy over "Hit Man", from Paladin Press ("Rex Feral"), resulting in a lawsuit. It's still n Amazon, and very expensive.

Update: Dec. 21

NBC and Kerry Sanders on the Today show report that the Polk County FL sheriff set up a "sting" to buy the book through the mail and then sent sherrif's deputies to Colorado to arrest Greaves on obscenity charges. The sheriff used the word "manifesto" in discussing the case in this video. It sounds like it will be hard to get past the First Amendment in court. I thought one had to use US Marshalls for such an arrest, but apparently not.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Lawrence E. Joseph: "Apocalypse 2012": Beaucoup "coronal mass ejections" from the Sun coming?

2010-11-09T12:21:00.000-08:00

Author: Lawrence E. Joseph

Title: "Aftermath: A Guide for Preparing for and Surviving Apocalypse 2012"

Publication: Broadway Books, 2010, ISBN 978-0-76793078-9, 272 pages, hardcover; 4 sections, 11 Chapters, Introduction and Epilogue

Let me start with a personal anecdote. Back in October 1962, I was a patient in a psychiatric ward at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. (Readers of my blogs and books know the background.) I was the only person who left the “campus” to go to college, at George Washington University, at night. So I heard JFK’s speech about the Cuban Missile Crisis while having supper in the Student Union. I was the only “patient” who knew what was going on. I don’t think that much of the staff paid attention. Now, I had been bullied as a kid, but I’m afraid that I turned the tables a bit in the “group therapy” and “unit government” sessions. I would say that a post-catastrophe world would have no use or tolerance for non-adapted (maybe even “parasitic”) people like “us”, who had failed to perform certain social duties imposed from without for the good of everyone besides our own selves. I’ve always felt this way about survivalism; I have become dependent on a stable, technological world where I, as an individual person, have considerable reach regardless of ability to function in a conventional social hierarchy. Take that away, and you have a world with no place for me. The author, toward the end, even admits that while living in LA (Beverly Hills) he may not be able to fully live up to his own moral precepts. I’ll come back to this, but now for the book.

The author (who in 2007 wrote “Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End”) presents his material in quixotic fashion. In fact, only the last Section deals with how to survive; the rest of the book makes his choppy case. His presentation is punctuated by sidebars on gray pages where he sketches some fictitious, movie-like scenarios. Nevertheless, his thesis and many of his points are interesting, even compelling. He does provide his own take on the Mayan Dec 21, 2012 date early, and it is more wrinkled than you expect.

By now, the word has gotten around. NASA (and the National Academy of Sciences) put out a report in early 2009 to the effect that the Earth might experience unusually strong “coronal mass ejections” from the Sun at the height of the sunspot cycle in 2012. Joseph makes the case that the outbreak could be somewhat prolonged, for some number of months toward the end of the year; and one or more of them really might hit the Earth in orbit. He paints a scenario of many large power blackouts taking weeks or months to repair, possibly throwing the US back into the early 19th Century.

There is some history here. There was a sequence of huge CME’s in 1859, and another in 1921; a “smaller” one in 1989 knocked out Quebec for a few days. He also shows that a grid based on alternating current (which he says developed in the US partly after blizzards and storms showed that DC networks were too vulnerable because of the need for more generators and wires) is more at risk to CME damage than a DC one (as in Europe). He shows that it is easier to “harden” satellites than transformers on the ground, and easier to protect satellite telephone networks than conventional cell networks. He also argues that terrorists or anarchists could try to take advantage of natural catastrophes. Ironically, he gives no discussion to the threat of a terrorist EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse) blast from a small nuclear weapon (at high altitude) or even from certain microwave jamming weapons widely used by the military in deployed areas (like Iraq) but not normally in civilian possession. Ironically, Popular Science had discussed such possibilities in September 2001, just before 9/11.

He properly argues that the world (especially the US) is much more vulnerable to prolonged disruption today than it was in 1859 or 1921, and hints that the smart grid (monitored by the Internet), as proposed by Friedman and probably the Gore-Clinton-Obama crowd, could make it even more vulnerable. That point is debatable, however. If every home (or at least neighborhood) could generate its own wind and solar power and even maintain (and perhaps harden with Faraday-like protections) its own Internet connections, the country might be much more secure because of decentralization.

He also provides some nuance to the debate on climate change (such as explanations of ice ages and discussion of ocean currents and the risks of methane hydrates).

What’s more interesting is his venturing into spiritualism and social psychology toward the end of the book. He talks about his travels to Siberia and meeting shamans, who he says teach us the value of ancestors and of connection to lineage.

His discussion of who would survive a global cataclysm or “The Purification” and how is quite sobering. Basically, it seems, his prescription is that if you want to live, well, you have to really want to live and function as a very social creature. Street smarts count a lot more than book smarts (which amount to zero or worse) – although he notes, that at least in the case of Lebanon, individually-based arts made a rebirth in a very stripped down world. Using the specific example of the novel and film “Sophie’s Choice”, Joseph talks about the need for one to find a “protector”, almost in the sense that the Mafia or a street gang would use the term. As I’ve noted, a world like that has no use for me. Yet a soul of conscious-unit seems as much an element of the universe as anything, and perhaps cannot be destroyed. Perhaps the soul is the tunnel or wormhole between universes, and one day physics (and thermodynamics) will prove that. So someone who was “spoiled” by civilization and leaves with bad karma will awaken in poverty on another planet around another star in another universe. He’ll have to learn to connect.

Adam Hamilton: "Enough": Christians, stewardship, and financial planning

2010-11-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

Author: Adam Hamilton

Title: "Enough: Discovering Joy Through Simplicity and Generosity"

Publication: Nashville, Abingdon Press, 2010; 110 pages, paper. ISBN 978-1-426-70233-4

The Trinity Presbyterian Church in Arlington has been selling this little book for a stewardship class, and in the fall most congregations hear a lot about stewardship. That’s been especially true since the financial collapse of 2008.

It’s not hard to imagine the arguments against consumerism and materialism. The author goes into a few of the “seven deadly sins”. And there’s no question that the Financial Crisis was fueled in some part by the gullibility of many consumers, who, following a herd mentality, were duped by unregulated banks into believing they could get a lot of house for nothing.

But this book doesn’t repeat Suze Orman’s lessons on financial discipline (valuable as they are). It is also prescriptive against careless consumption even by those not in particular financial trouble or debt (either credit cards or mortgage).

It maintains that a financial plan starts with a tithe first. I once (in the 1980s) heard Rev. Don Eastman at the old MCC Dallas (before the Cathedral of Hope) answer a question about before or after –tax tithe: “Do you want a before tax or after tax blessing?”

But consumerism is a relative thing. For some people, consumption of media or technology related items or even entertainment gets turned in to income (think about people who write Facebook applications and make a good living at it, or think about professional musicians). Many such individuals have to deal with the whole issue of gadgetry vs. family time, too.

Picture: From Jon Stewart's Rally:

Favre and Stanford: "The Cure for the Chronic Life": Is it "purpose-driven"?

2010-10-28T08:57:00.000-07:00

Authors: Deanna Favre and Shane Stanford, foreword by Max Lucado

Title: "The Cure for the Chronic Life: Overcoming the Hopelessness that Holds You Back"

Publication: Nashville: Abingdon Press, hardcover, 204 pages. (The dust jacket has a rear view of a very fit looking youth jumping into (baptismal) water, curious indeed. ) ISBN 978-1-4267-1001-8

First, a note about the authors: Deanne Favre is wife of Minnesota Vikings quarterback Brett Favre and breast cancer survivor; Shane Stanford is pastor of Gulf Breezes United Methodist Church in Pensacola, FL, and himself has lived years as HIV-positive having been infected by a blood transfusion related to hemophilia.

A few personal anecdotes come to mind to tie into this book. In my own coming of age period, I knew a contemporary, already in a second marriage to a wife who had been married to a pro football player. In 1971 or so, that had seemed like a distant connection to celebrity (no so any more). Much more to the point, I recall an incident in 2004, shortly after I had start substitute teaching. I had taken an assignment in a special education setting without understanding what it meant or the situations that it could set up. The classes, though nominally high school, were for profoundly disabled teens. Then I was moved to another class, that was going on a “field trip”. The unremarkable male teacher, himself in gym clothes, asked me if he could count on me for help in the locker room and then to man the deep end of the swimming pool. Well, I never had learned to swim very well (now we hear that African Americans {I am not} are not learning this skill at all). Furthermore at the time, I was a 61 year old male who would have felt humiliated to be seen by any student in swimming trunks. Now, on p 131, Deanna talks about “what would cause people to hide themselves from others.” Funny, because in 2004 I perceived this as infringement on my right to consent.

I can spin other tales of both wonder and misunderstanding. In 1979, I was on a gay camping trip in the prairies of West Texas with MCC Dallas and we were going to have a midnight service. There was some intrigue about a booklet I wanted to deliver to a particular friend. At midnight we are ought in front of a pyre when this other member puts his arm around me and speaks about me as if I were partially disabled, even retarded. I was certainly misunderstood. Then a violent thunderstorm came up immediately and drove us back to the bunk houses before he could finish his “prayer”. Later the same person would invite me to brunch at a controversial Dallas restaurant at the time, the Lucas B&B, and want to talk to me about God. Then, a few weeks later, in August, on a Sunday night, someone who had been paralyzed for ten years really would get up and walk for the first time while my “other” friend sang “He’s Alive” with his guitar.

I go back into my long-term memory bank for a third anecdote. When I was a patient at NIH in 1962 (I explain all this in my first book and on the “BillBoushka” blog posting Nov. 28, 2006), I did befriend a couple of the more “intact” male patients, but there were a particular female patient who would wake up in the middle of the night screaming about why we “can’t love everybody.”

What I’m getting at here is something about “autonomy.” Some of us are indeed “different” and can accomplish unique things if left to our own devices and we follow through and work hard. Yet we find that others press us to conform , to join in the group, and support the causes defined by others.

I have to say that a lot of evangelical thinking, even from relatively liberal pastors and denominations, supports this “joining in” mentality.

On p 10, Shane mentions Pastor Rick Warren (at Obama’s inauguration) and his concept of “The Purpose-Driven Life” (a best selling 2002 book (from Zondervan), but takes it further; it is not (just) a common or shared social purpose (as in the idea of the “Natural Family” from Carlson and Mero) but a purpose given by God himself.

In the last pages, the book, speaking of “selfless views of life, God, and God’s people” says (p 185), “The chronic life seems to make it all about us.” He gives an example of a young woman who is not a bad person but who “is constantly focuses on her own needs.”

The book gives a 40-day recipe for curing the “Chronic Life”, which seems to center more around compulsiveness in managing relationships than anything else (as the authors describe it). He starts out by categorizing the Seven Worries of Living in Christ – as if anxiety itself were the grand pathology of (psychologically feminine) self-indulgence. The grand acronym is the “CURE”, with the four temperaments: “Compassion, Understanding, Response, Encouragement”. (Yup, kids, be able to name these on a test.) Each day there is a four-step process: “Discover, Deepen, Deploy, Discern.”

His concept of “Understanding” is interesting (and reminds me of Dan Fry’s group in Arizona in the 1970s). He says that teaching is not about imparting knowledge (the way college professors handle it when they lecture), but about personally engaging students in the process of learning. I’m reminded here of the “knowledge of good and evil” problem.

Shane does give a good account of the HIV panic of the 1980s, which extended to all those infected, not just to MSM’s.

At a certain level, the books seems like a call to introverts for social conformity. I can say from my own live that my desire to “leverage” by differences were motivated in large part by the humiliation of competitive battles centered around the expectations of gender-related social conformity. (The “competition” aspect of this presents a certain paradox.) No doubt, others can raise existential questions if I try to stand out without responding to “real needs” of others for me to join in with them. But, sometimes, to accomplish anything, you just have to be left alone.

Bob Woodward: "Obama's Wars" (review)

2010-10-10T10:22:00.000-07:00

Author: Bob Woodward

Title: "Obama’s Wars"

Publication: New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010; hardcover, 439 pages, indexed, 33 unnamed chapters

I was in the Army myself, stationed at Fort Eustis, VA during the 1968 election, and in 1969 when Nixon took office from LBJ. In fact, I was in “special training” in Basic when LBJ made his famous March 31 speech that he would not run or accept, and heard the speech on a radio in the barracks tent. My Army experience took a turn for the better almost immediately.

But we all know that Johnson’s war became Nixon’s war, even though most soldiers expected that personally they had a better chance of surviving exposure to Vietnam if Nixon won. Nixon did get us out (and would end the draft), but not soon enough for many people, and it was Nixon who would take such offence at some of the dissent from the privileged.

I remember another personal circumstance, in December 1990, when on an “Adventuring hike”, when there was a discussion of the Persian Gulf situation among some gay men on a West Virginia retreat, over a great dinner, and some of them (that is, us, including me) were so hawkish. We could already imagine that the Persian Gulf situation could naturally lead to openly challenging the ban on gays in the military.

Remember how William Westmorland kept demanding more troops during Johnson’s war, and how long they stayed under Nixon? That was scary when we had a draft.

Today, Obama has indeed rightfully shifted the focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, but in many ways the liberal Democrat sounds as determined to see “War on Terror” through as was Bush, even if his intellectual focus is much more abstract. That’s true even though there was a much ballyhooed schism between a hawkish side (Gates, a Republican whom Obama kept as Secretary of Defense to keep continuity, and Hillary Clinton, probably a little more “conservative” than Obama) and Joe Biden. Obama took a middle road, but his commitment of large amounts of troops continues, even as there is now a definitely announced end. On p 309-310 Woodward outlines Biden’s approach. On pp 395-390, Woodward reproduces Obama’s final orders.

Much has been made in the media of Woodward’s conversations with the president about our nations’ ability to withstand terrorist attacks. We’re stronger, he says. But the government did a paper war game that assumed that Indianapolis was struck by a suitcase nuke. The exercise assumed a second nuke existed and maybe more. Woodward feels that the exercise just scratched the surface as to what would happen, and Obama talks as if that could be a game changer. Again, for me, this strikes a personal coincidence; I spent a summer in Indianapolis in 1970 on my first career job with RCA.

Woodward gives some discussion of the incidents on Christmas Day and then May 1, and discusses the Tehrik-al-Taliban (TTP).

The Washington Post has a YouTube video from Bob Woodward on tips for investigative journalism.

Some have criticized Woodward for disclosing "so much"in the book (given the WikiLeaks scandal and the questions being asked about the right to publish "leaked" information), but here the president and vice-president can lawfully release anything they want (discussion on CNN, Spitzer's program, Dec. 23).

Hawking: "The Grand Design": Nature allows us to get something for nothing (maybe); why am I "me"?

2010-09-19T19:53:00.000-07:00

Authors: Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

Title: "The Grand Design"

Publication: New York, Bantam, 2010, ISBN 978-0-553-830537-6, 198 pages, hardcover

Hawking has attracted attention lately with his theories about extraterrestrials, and this book gives his view of cosmology and theology in terms of unified theories of physics.

Essentially, quantum mechanics, combined with gravity as an essential force, according to what we call M-theory, that posts ten dimensions and time, characterize “Nature”. It becomes possible and inevitable for countably infinite universes to appear spontaneously out of nothing. There doesn’t have to be a specific plan from God other than total logical consistency.

In some of them, ours, the other forces (electromagnetic, strong, and weak) and various physical constants are arranged in such a way that the resulting universe becomes non-homogeneous or lumpy, and eventually stars and planets form, and sometimes even life. Toward the end of the book, Hawking explains British mathematician John Conway’s “Game of Life”, in which x-dimensional dominoes set up self-replicating structures that sometimes die out, and sometimes are “reborn”, in theory generating so much complexity that eventually biology develops.

I’m left to wonder then, what makes my train of experience attached to “me”? Why now? Why am I 67 and not 26 (Zuckerberg’s age), or why wasn’t I born at the time of Christ? I think it has to do with “karma”, and that karma is part of Nature. The recent film “Inception” probably demonstrates it.

I think that with our motives and thoughts (our “existential integrity” when we have it), we create “trends” (maybe “gliders”) that play out in such a way as to motivate others. Dreams may be part of this. Suppose you have a dream of an intimate encounter with someone you are attracted to. You don’t know how you got there (Inception), but it seems real when you “experience” it. After waking, you believe you have been with the person (a “brain belief”). It may wear off. I wonder if the other person knows. I think sometimes he or she does. I think that ultimately telepathy will turn out to become as controversial as information sharing on social media, even though the birth of Facebook seems like a process of “Nature” to me. But in this example, the intimate encounter probably occurs in a different universe, with access through worm holes – no, through the other 7 unused “dimensions”. The nice thing is that usually there are no consequences in this universe for the encounter. (You get to “undoredo” the time arrow, something not normally permitted within a particular universe.)

I say usually, but it’s possible sometimes there are consequences, particularly with a REM-sleep dream. You might not wake up. Your heart could go into fibrillation, you could flatline, and you might perceive yourself as staying in that alternate (just different) universe forever. (You might stay in a specific situation forever, which could be painful or pleasurable; call it the "Bugcrush Effect".) We call it “afterlife.” You might not like what you find. You could be alone forever, or you could be in a situation where you don’t like your emotional reputation with the other beings who know you. Or maybe it does work out, and you get some bearings, and you stay.

Some other sources write that universes compatible with life could exist without the weak force (we call them “weakless”) with life around smaller stars. There would be no elements heavier than iron, so no nuclear weapons.

The book is printed with thick high quality paper and has many colorful illustrations (like a school text book) that would lend themselves to animation videos.

John Grisham talks about how he became a novelist

2010-09-08T09:57:00.000-07:00

I posted a story about John Grisham’s novels back in April 2009, but I thought I would mention his op-ed September 5 in the New York Times “Boxers, Briefs and Books”, about how he went from manual labor to becoming a lawyer to writing novels. He did not start out by wanting to become a writer, but became one anyway. He says that this is the most difficult job her ever had, and worth it. He’s also coming out with a collection “Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Acclaimed Authors and the Day Jobs They Quit”. The link for the op-ed is here.

Chandler Burr: "You or Somebody Like You" (novel, review)

2010-09-01T19:21:00.000-07:00

Author: Chandler Burr

Title: “You or Someone Like You”

Publication: 2009, Ecco (Harper), ISBN 978-0-06-171565-5, 319 pages, including source notes and acknowledgements, fiction. (Amazon says that the book became available in paperback in June 2010.)

Chandler Burr may be best known for his 1996 book “A Separate Creation”, from Hyperion, building upon a 1993 Atlantic piece “Homosexuality and Biology.” He has described himself in the past as an assimilationist, a moderate “conservative” to not quite libertarian, somewhere in line with Andrew Sullivan or perhaps Bruce Bawer (“While Europe Slept”) in outlook.

His novel strikes me as a meditation. He says he is examining the question as to whether one can be both a progressive humanist and faithful to an established religion (here, Judaism, but the problems are the same with almost any faith). And he clearly thinks the answer is no, as if it were a scientific conclusion, perhaps disappointing, as if to tell us we will never, in our own bodies, travel faster than the speed of light.

The title of the book hints at an essential, or fundamental problem of moral physics: tribalism. That is, when the individual accepts the goals of the group (the “natural family” or tribe or faith-based community) as his own, he gains some security, and some protection for the most vulnerable of selves within the group, at the terrible cost of being able to accept full accountability for one’s own track record and station. Christians will say that’s why we need Salvation by Grace (or existential forgiveness). Jews will saw we need purity, atonement and redemption, and Muslims will say we need absolute loyalty to the Creator. But ultimately there is loss of loyalty to self (or at least a protracted shame and guilt); and sometimes that is fatal. One can cease to be a person.

There’s something else important about identity tied to organized religion: sometimes, group identity, that of a “chosen people” (demanding competitive procreation) sounds downright arrogant.

The presentation of the story seems unusual, if explainable. It is told in first-person by Anne, from Britain, married to Howard Rosenbaum, raised as an Orthodox Jew and now a Hollywood executive. They have a smart 17-year old son, Sam, who is exploring the dualities – religious and sexual – in his own identity. (If all parents had a “Sam” as the oldest son, they should count themselves as lucky; yet Sam will provide an existential challenge to their marriage, just as I did [as an only gay son] to my own parents’.) The narration moves between past and present tense (ironically using present tense for back-stories). Burr does not use Chapter numbers (I think he should have), instead just breaks the 300-pages into small sections, some as short as a paragraph, with many literary quotations (almost as if writing a take-home literature exam in grad school).

A director guides Anne into forming a book club, although “no one reads in Hollywood.” Pretty soon various treatments and screenplay scripts are circulating (in one spot the novel has to emulate the screenplay format like FinalDraft to show a portion of script), some of which seem to be period pieces circumscribed by the consciousness of their characters. Here, I’ll quote Burr on p 299

“Literature shocks not because what it shows us is inherently surprising. It does the exact opposite. It is shocking because it breaks down what we would be and shows us what we know we are.”

The characters encounter most of the Tinseltown players: Miramax, Spyglass, Paramount. (I didn’t see The Weinstein Company.) Various specific people get mentioned (David Geffen). You get a feel for how the movie system (which is somewhat balkanized off of the old studio system, with indie-focused companies like Summit and LionsGate gaining more influence).

I do have a treatment of sorts for how my own “Do Ask Do Tell” ought to be made (I haven’t put it online), and this book has me wondering how it would fare in all the perambulations of submissions. No, the book wasn’t run through an exclusive book club first (and by the way, book clubs should not be social clubs – see the “BillBoushka” blog (Aug. 26, 2010). Yet the concept is open, following an argument hierarchically, and telling a story, rather an “inception”, non-sequentially. There is, however, a beginning, middle and end. That’s mandatory. (I just have to have Meryl Streep as the high school principal, and Leonardo Di Caprio as the Dean of Men.)

I would presume that Burr expects this book to capture the attention of the indie film market – the real Landmark or “AMC Independent” fare, because it is about some of the values of that world. (I don’t see it on imbd “yet”/) Somehow the IFC Independent Film Channel three-note plucked music jingle runs through my mind. Then one has to imagine who the director is, and who is in the cast. I wonder if an actor just fresh from playing Mark Zuckerberg would fit as Sam. Time will tell. I don’t think the novel mentioned the industry’s “third party rule” (that’s how reviewers get scripts to read, always from agents), to preclude copyright and script clearance problems – a rule that breaks down in the age of Facebook and blogs (just as “don’t ask don’t tell” does).

Burr's website for the book is here.

Barnes & Noble may sell itself; a testimonial to the fact that even the chain book stores face challenges; any effect online?

2010-08-04T10:59:00.000-07:00

Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest bookstore chain, is considering selling itself, possibly to Leonard Riggio, which might take the company private. The story broke Tuesday on the New York Times blog here and continued Wednesday August 3 with a “Business Day” story by Julie Bosman (linked above).

The deal marks the latest chapter in the difficulties faced by traditional bricks-and-mortar print media, like newspapers. Independent book stores have trouble competing with chains (the gay “Lambda Rising” closed at the end of 2009), and the chains have trouble competing with Wal-Mart at Costco’ but most of all, they have trouble competing with their own on-line sales websites as well as Amazon. BN.com is also a major bookselling website (as is Booksamillion and Powells).

It’s not clear if an acquisition would have any affect on the web business, affiliated with iUniverse, a cooperative and self-publishing “print on demand” book publisher. But most “print on demand” books are sold online rather than in stores, and the POL business model has been integrating itself with the eBook business lately.

Amazon had recently announced that it’s eBook (and Kindle) sales were outperforming regular books.

There is also evidence that people – especially young people – are simply reading less. Sad!

Barnes & Noble stores try to increase business with discount membership “green cards”.

Cahn and Carbone: "Red Families v. Blue Families"

2010-08-02T17:19:00.000-07:00

Authors: Naomi Cahn, June Carbone

Title: “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture”

Publication: 2010, Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-537217-5; 288 pages, indexed, endnotes; hardcover; Introduction and Conclusion; Three Parts with twelve Chapters.

Recently, on July 28, on my “BillBoushka” blog, I mentioned a Washington Times op-ed on this recent book, which really does get at what a lot of the culture wars of marriage is all about it. Indeed, the authors have an interesting treatise, but what’s missing is the effect of that English language conjunction “If”. Somehow the book title reminds me of the “three colors” films of Krzysztof Kieslowski (Red, White, Blue).

The authors describe two paradigms for family life and map them to various regions of the country in terms of political and particularly partisan effect. But it’s “what they mean” is what really matters, not so much the political and even legal landscape.

The “Red state” family is based on older ideas founded in religion and tradition, so it seems. In the red state model, people marry younger and have more children, and sit in church a lot having their souls saved, but they tend to sin more, not able to live up to their religious teachings, resulting in shotgun weddings and more divorces.

The “Blue state” model emphasizes personal choice and responsibility (which sounds strangely libertarian, not leftist), developing income earning skills and personal identity (regardless of gender) before marriage, and better preparation for having children, who may be born later but who can be better provided for. “Blue” marriages tend to be more stable and be less likely to end in divorce because the partners are better prepared. The “blue” model emphasizes public tolerance and public diversity but a private sense of personal responsibility. “Blue” homes tend to be higher income.

As a practical matter, teenagers raised in stable two-parent families with some practice of religious faith tend to do well in school and later life, whether the political and religious beliefs of the parents are socially liberal and tolerant or more conservative. But it’s important to look at where the “blue” and “red” models lead and what’s behind them.

The “Blue” model is based on “rationalism” and individualism. Some social critics maintain that such a model leads to an unsustainable, “atomized” society where individuals pursue their own visions into discordance, and where less competitive individuals are left to drop on the floor. One could compare the "Blue" model to "unbundling" in pricing a contract: the individual picks the pieces of emotional and family life he wants as long as he or she can take personal responsibility for it.

The “Red” model is based on tradition, religion, and the deep belief that marriage, when connected to sex and procreation, is transformative, in such a way that people share the deepest parts of their lives but can take care of one another in a sustainable but decentralized (eg, with the state) fashion. That may explain the affinity of the “Red” model with the Republican party. To some extent, the “Red” model expects people to become “irrational” when dealing with their own best interests in the area of family and sex, and yield to authority, faith and tradition. The "Red" view sees marriage, sex, procreation, and the caretaking of family as a totally bundled experinece, essential to civilization and practically mandatory for anyone who enters the world on his or her own. The “Red” model can become corrupted at the top, since it still depends on a social organization that needs to be led; the Blue model can become undermined by lack of shared commitment and unfairness at the personal level.

The “Red” model comports with the “Natural Family” as described by Allan Carlson and Paul Mero (review Sept. 18, 2009 here), and in theory it sounds compatible with social and environmental sustainability. But the “Red” model is challenged by economic realities, abetted by the industrial and then information technology revolutions, making society less dependent on male labor or even “protective instinct” (e.g. “The Blind Side”), and requiring better preparation of both men and women for adult life and raising children (leading to a “deep purple” like “The Color Purple”).

The authors discuss the various legal issues that come up in conjunction with culture wars. Fertilization technology (and surrogate parenthood) is opposed by some (as the Vatican) on moral grounds, but could help “blue” parents have more children (including same sex couples); economic changes regarding work and family balance could help “red” families have their children earlier in life and still support them. But along the way, the “blue v red” battle has grown with the legal landscape concerning contraception (including the “morning after” and “Plan B” controversies), abortion (which is becoming more tangential now), and most of all, gay marriage and acceptance of gay sexuality at all (the authors discuss Lawrence v. Texas in 2003 in some detail).

But the biggest problem, it seems to me, is not just the culture of marriage and parenthood for people who want it, but the fact that it is imposed on people who don’t want it, including many gays and lesbians. The authors (having a subchapter called "Respecting Autonomy", which is discussed from the viewpoint of the powers of the state [Lawrence], which of course depends on the values of people) say that there is a balance between promoting personal autonomy and pro-family public policy; on p 165 they write “we are optimistic about the prospects for generational change and therefore see the issue as one of allowing space for the reconciliation of the critical demand and equal respect for gays and lesbians with understandings about the nature of human family creation” and then make an odd comment about persecution of people for the sins of their parents (or ancestors). Remember, “Reconciliation” is one of gay novelist Clive Barker’s favorite concepts.

I’ve always thought that the moral mantra of “no sex until marriage” (or experience of sexuality outside of marriage) is an indirect (Vatican-driven) way guarantee that everyone has a real stake in procreation and in intergenerational responsibility – in a world where technological advance offers special opportunities to those who would stand alone. There is no question that the “childless” are sometimes conscripted to serve the interests of those who do have children (as with Elinor Burkett’s “The Baby Boon” book (2000), reviewed here March 28, 2006). But this could be seen as another paradigm for moral fairness among individuals, as opposed to whole groups of people. It’s easier to sidestep the question (especially with gay issues) by regarding people as born intrinsically different, but the way the burdens of a community get shared raises profound ethical questions that earlier generations understood better than we do now. We’re really seeing this big time now with the explosion in demand for eldercare, which will draw in people who never made (or “chose”) commitments before; but single people have often had to raise siblings or their relatives’ children (a theme known in Hollywood [“Raising Helen”] but not discussed by politicians). The “compulsory” aspect of marriage and parenting (and the "family slave" situation on the other end) needs to enter the debate. In the end, freedom wins, but it can get hard for many people to see.

Interview with authors by TYTInterviews and the Huffington Post on YouTube:

Truman Capote's famous book "in Cold Blood" is subject of a trial in CT

2010-07-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

The books chosen from a prison library are now being considered as evidence in at least one trial, that of Steven J. Hayes for a home invasion and triple murder in 2007 on Chesire, Connecticut.

The defense attorneys have objected to this as leading, but prosecutors think there is similarity between this case and the events of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” (Signet, 1965). The book depicts the attack on a Holcomb, Kansas family, the Cutters, by two drifters in a robbery gone bad. There was a black and white film from Columbia in 1968 from Richard Brooks, which I saw my first weekend on pass in downtown Columbia, SC near Fort Jackson. Two more recent films about the author of the book are “Capote” (Sony) and “Infamous” (WB).

William Glaberson has the New York Times story on July 21, 2010, here.

There was a “novel” by Meyer Levin, originally published in 1956, republished for collectors by Carroll and Graf in 1996, named “Compulsion”, loosely based on the 1920’s Leopold-Loeb case, but the book was sometimes viewed as a fictional precursor to the real life events that led to Capote’s book. I read the Levin book while in the Army. Leopold also became the subject of theplay "Never the Sinner" by John Logan.

Amazon says Kindle and e-book sales exceed conventional book sales

2010-07-20T07:12:00.000-07:00

Bloomberg Business Week reports that Amazon now says it now sells more electronic books, for Kindle, than conventional printed books. The trend toward e-books seems to be returning: it was touted in the late 1990s (one of the COPA plaintiffs had an e-book innovation called SoftLock), dropped off, and seems to have returned.

The iPad certainly can also generate interest in eBooks, yet it’s hard to imagine that the appeal of a printed book, something you can take anywhere and out to the beach or on camping trips without worry about power, damage or Internet connections, would dwindle in comparison.

Kindle sales soared when Amazon cut its price.

Print-on-demand, popular with self-publishers, has not necessarily increased conventional printed book sales that much.

The BW story is here.

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Kirkpatrick: "The Facebook Effect"

2010-07-06T16:38:00.000-07:00

Author: David Kirkpatrick

Title: "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that Is Connecting the World"

Publication: New York, Simon & Schuster, 2010. ISBN 978-1-4391-0211-4, 372 pages, hardcover, Prologue and 17 chapters.

I start this review with repeating an (apparently unrelated) old chestnut from my own political activity: “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service.” To which history answers, “Facebook is incompatible with ‘don’t ask don’t tell’”. Military members do have Facebook pages, and some have outed themselves without consequences. But, innovated largely by a young man whose “personal” life appears to be heterosexual, Facebook may have done more to destroy the DADT policy than any politician, any judge or any advocacy organization (even SLDN). (Oh, well, there’s straight San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsome’s support of gay marriage, too.)

Of course, what I’m hitting on goes back to the evolution of the Web, as “average people” starting using in the mid 1990s, before the first dot-com boom and bust, long before social media became fully established, when the Web was more like a self-publication platform (and e-commerce store). Anyone could make himself a celebrity with almost no capital, with the help of search engines, if he or she had something important to say.

With Facebook, as with other social networking sites, there has developed a fundamental dichotomy: is it about meeting and interacting with people, or is it about self-publication? Indeed, the book, as have others, traces the origins of “TheFaceBook” at Harvard, with the idea of facilitating connections with people whom you have a real chance of hooking up with. In time, however, it would go global. It had to, to make money, even as it was popular on campuses as a virtual “speed dating” prompt. It would become an incredibly effective tool for keeping up with people over long times and vast physical distances. As a mathematician puts things, it would create a new measure space for social interaction. It would provide an alternate universe with (as Clive Barker would call it) “Reconciliation”.

But as the Prologue of this book starts us with, Facebook has also provided a facile means of political protest, often in the Third World, overwhelming totalitarian attempts to put people down. Indeed, some governments like Pakistan have tried to disable it.

I take this back to the mid 1990s when I pondered and then wrote my self-published book on issues that concentrically surround the dilemmas posed by the “gays in the military” issue, as these issues related to my own past history. I followed up with a web presence, provocative enough to get involved with the litigation over COPA, and, particularly during my time in Minneapolis from 1997-2003, became a minor celebrity. Self-publication definitely did create desirable social contacts.

But in time an ethical question evolved, something I have called “The Privilege of Being Listened To” on my main “BillBoushka” blog. Should one definitely enter the world of social and family responsibility before being heard from? I had grown up in a culture that had good reasons to believe in that idea as a moral precept. This could have legal consequences. Web content could be seen as gratuitous, making the publisher morally and maybe legally responsible for putting others at risk if he did not have a clear motive from his self-broadcast other than to provoke others. In the COPA trial, this got called the “implicit content” problem. It then becomes possible to say that people in some workplace or familial situations don’t have the right to broadcast themselves under the Web’s “free entry” model at all.

But social media flip this content-driven question upside down, by starting with the precept that people should have an efficient medium (and topology) to initiate and maintain social contacts. Someday this could have a profound test in constitutional law. And Facebook, by growing from the bottom up from a social, almost dating service to a platform that can support self-publication, illustrates the dilemma perfectly.

That brings one to consider the role of its founder Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is a creation of “Our Kids”, but in fact it evolved from much more specific social applications envisioned by a number of people, including the Winkelvoss twins and Aaron Greenspan. Accounts of the history of this phenomenal site present Mark Zuckerberg as a kind of “chickenman” – I mean that in the sense of Army barracks jokes at Ft. Eustis around 1969 (even the Colonel watched the Saturday morning cartoons on the character), about “me”-- as an abstract person, “he’s everywhere”, omniscient, ready to drill through all the mannerisms of the world to some kernel of absolute truth and force everyone to see it. Kirkpatrick reports a lot of interviews with Mark, and describes him as somewhat absorbed in his own thoughts, ready to look right through someone until he hears something he connects with. In fact, he tends to behave that way even on the late 2007 CBS 60 Minutes (“toddler CEO”) interview I reported on in my “BillBoushka” blog on Dec. 6, 2009 (the “Is that a question?” moment in the video). Perhaps there was a body image issue at one time; Kirkpatrick, on p 20, describes him as “an intense introvert with curly brown hair whose fresh freckled face made him look closer to fifteen than the nineteen he was.” As the book progresses, it becomes apparent that his thought processes are a lot like mine (although I’m not sure I get his moral dilemma that leaves him in tears in the Accel offer situation). If I could have entered a time machine and become his age and become a student in Kirkland House, I probably would have related well to him and become involved in the project.

The book does not spend a lot of space on the legal controversies over the ownership of Facebook. I do know that ownership of software copyright can be a difficult subject, and a particular incident at NBC where I worked in a mainframe environment back in 1977 comes to mind. While companies guard their code and design even for inhouse applications, in fact programmers take what they learn and write similar code in other companies. The issue may be more testy with object oriented programming than older procedural programming. But to a reasonable person, Facebook sounds like it is quite different from the earlier services Mark had worked on, sometimes without pay. That's one thing about Internet innovation: underlying paradigms of consumer use keep shifting.

There’s another thing about the OOP: when teenagers (or preteens) learn it, they can get very fluent at it, which explains in part the ability of kids to make the intellectual connections it takes to come up with a Napster or a Facebook. It’s much harder for older people, trained in other thought patterns, to make the switch, just as it is harder to learn foreign languages at later ages. In the book, Kirkpatrick documents Facebook’s rather brazen preference for youth.

Zuckerberg’s “ideology” seemed to develop over time, inductively. It seems to me he would have become aware of Dean Elena Kagan’s opposition to the military gay ban while at Harvard in 2003, it must have occurred to him in time that his innovation was the antithesis of a social “don’t ask don’t tell” mentality in society that had tempered older generations and led to the current policy for gays in the military. Facebook insists that a person has only one “identity”, and denies the value of anonymity. Whether that “identity” should always be searchable for “everyone” is a major piece of the privacy debate.) Zuckerberg’s idea of radical social networking denies the idea that work identity and personal identity can any longer be kept apart (so much for “don’t ask don’t tell” indeed).

Mark's evolution of thought shows in the gradual evolution of Facebook from a campus-specific service to a facility for almost everyone. There was a period in late 2005 where high schools could become separate "facebooks". It was about the same time that the controversy over the public implications of my own website erupted when I was substitute teaching. In retrospect, I wonder if the schools were concerned about the sudden effect of social media on the security of their environment and then connected the dots incorrectly.

Along with “radical social networking” (and probably “radical self-publication” as in my own 1997-or-so “innovation”), comes all the new problems of online reputation (enough to inspire Michael Fertik and others to start companies defending online reputations). Kirkpatrick documents numerous cases of lost jobs and broken relationships because of unexpected anomalies that can occur with Facebook use (including the entire photo tagging facility). But many of these had started happening before with convention Internet blogging and forum posting (again, my “BillBoushka” blog July 27, 2007 documents my own mishap with this). But Kirkpatrick’s chapter on Privacy is a valuable addition to the literature on the problem by other authors like law professor Daniel Solove. Facebook is becoming particularly a trove for divorce lawyers.

The other “ideological innovation” is Zuckerberg’s particular idea of a “gift economy” although it’s rather like the thinking of Bill Gates. Sometimes “pay it forward” really does make economic sense. Since the company is privately held (so far), with Zuckerberg having a lot of control, it has been able to approach monetization (such as advertising based on the visitor's profile and subsequent cross-sharing) based on philosophical ideas as well as short-tern results. That in turn would raise interesting legal questions were it a publicly traded company and does raise questions with investors.

Here is a YouTube interview with author David Kirkpatrick from Thomas Crampton. Note that he says that Facebook doesn't see itself as a website, but as a paradigm for the structure of the Internet. It is almost like a "government." We might use a Facebook ID as a social security number some day.

A novelist must ponder his "point of view": no one really is an "omniscient observer" in "real life"

2010-07-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

It’s a little presumptuous (though not delinquent) to talk about one’s own writing on a books blog, although I see that I did this on June 5, where I used Amazon’s widget for my own book. And I outlined some plans for my novel on Dec 24, 2009 on my “BillBoushka” blog.

I’ve prepared an outline for the novel (tentatively called “Brothers” although I’m thinking more about “The Brothers’ Triangles” now), and shortened it from 140000 words to about 90000, I think.

One idea that I come back to is character perspective. Most of the time, novelists jump in on the first page, when “it started”, with inconspicuous events that are about to blow up. I know that there are writing coaches who preach the beginning-middle-end paradigm and say you need a crisis on page 1 to keep the reader engaged (remember how the movie “Vertigo” begins, and then where it goes). But typically, you have an “omniscient author” introducing his characters, who seem to be rediscovering themselves as much as they discover each other.

The first person view is more like real life. How often in my own life have I emulated someone, and imagined what discovering the person’s life would be like, and dreaded the possible perils that could come along the way. (This all came to a head with a particular matter in New York in 1978, but that’s for another post some day.) But a first-person viewpoint can be limited by its own logic (as taught in English classes); one viewer doesn’t really experience enough. A bigger problem comes if the first person narrator does not come across as a role model or inspire sympathy. The writing can become perfunctory and self-indulgent (feminine!)

So established novelists often tend to put vulnerable but likeable protagonists on stage and let them discover themselves – or rediscover themselves, more likely, the former selves that they have forgotten – by new, previously unthinkable, challenges.

So it is with my character Randy, the 30-something CIA agent who bluffs his students (but not his administration) and even his own wife and kids (aka “natural family”) to some extent as a good history teacher. (Yup, he makes his exams all essay.) He left the Army and did the same kind of work as a civilian, running around the world and checking for nuclear waste disposal. In the first chapter of the novel, where he has made a personal “pilgrimage” to the Auschwitz site by himself, and meets (and scopes) the mystery” college student Sal, whom he sees as a kind of paragon or “super ocelot” who won’t even develop the clay feet he is just starting to notice hanging from his own body. He is past summer. But, as novelist Clive Barker once pointed out, there is usually a third person, and usually one person at a time on stage. That may be the “life court reporter” and now super-blogger Bill (me), another aging ex-FBI agent Ali, whose physician ex-wife has discovered evidence of a previous unthinkable pandemic developing. Or it could be his own gifted middle school son, or the basketball-star-sized Matt, who see,s to have fallen to Earth. Randy realizes he looks forward to the “end of days” and a new kind of life, if only he can finish a rite out passage that he had missed out on in college and the Army.

Stephen King talks on ABC’s “The View” in November 2009 about keeping track of over 100 characters in “Under the Dome”. Remember, according to Barker, only three can interact at a time.

I'll have a new "real review" here soon, and I promise a humdinger. Happy Fourth!

Picture: Barker's "Second Dominion" ("Imajica") teaching from Pluthero Quexos in action.

Nicholas Carr: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains" -- it's not all bad!

2010-06-14T19:17:00.000-07:00

Author: Nicholas Carr

Title: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains"

Publication: 2010, W.W. Norton, ISBN 978-0-393-07222-8, 276 pages, 10 Chapters, Prologue, Epilogue, hardcover

The title of the book suggests a certain negativity, that the easy “fix” of constant information from the Web is making us narcissistic, unable to maintain emotional connections to others, and unable even to concentrate enough to win a five-hour chess game, no less read a Tolstoy (or Ayn Rand) novel. (On the cover, the first part of the title is written last: interesting!)

But in fact, as he shows in the later chapters, the non-linear approach to gather information does make us more flexible and smarter in some ways, able to connect new memories to old ones, “connect the dots”, see around corners. We become different, more independent in some ways, and more connected in others. Just look at the debates over how Facebook works and its effect on “privacy.”

The author traces the history of communication and writing back to ancient times, when tablets and paper were expensive. In time, the relationship between writer and reader became a matter of controversy: after all, the writer reaches people he does not know or become committed to in anyway (so does the painter or music composer), and that possibility has been understood since Da Vinci’s time.

New technologies would change the “balance of power” in communication: newspapers today seem to be hurting because of the Web, but journalism itself must change, as it becomes more of a citizenry pursuit. In earlier times, the phonograph record was a thought a threat to the book, but it wasn’t. Maybe the web is not either, as books (on iPads), and even movies and DVD’s incorporate social networking.

He traces how web publishers have experimented with the format of web pages, originally making them like book chapters (as I did when I put “Do Ask Do Tell” on the web in 1998), before breaking them up into sellable morsels.

He talks about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s memory experiments in the woods (enough for a n 11th grade English essay), and then bridges to a discussion of the hippocampus and how it integrates our short term and long term memories. It may be that our understanding of how the information flow with the Web affects our brain may help us deal with memory loss and Alzheimer’s in the future.

ABC GMA followup on multi-tasking and our brains, June 30, 2010

Another Washington DC independent book store for sale; a new business model for bookstores?

2010-06-10T11:54:00.000-07:00

Today the Metro section of the Washington Post reported (Thursday June 10) that the Politics and Prose independent bookstore (link here ) in northwest Washington DC is looking for a buyer, as Barbara and Carla want to retire. The story is by Michael S. Rosenwald with link here. The Post headline claims (online) “a bookstore’s legacy is up for grabs”. But the book's website says that right now everything is "business as usual."

I’ve been to booksigning parties there (not mine). At the end of 2009, Lambda Rising (Washington DC’s gay and lesbian bookstore) closed, probably because it was difficult to compete with the large chains, all of which have LGBT sections (Barnes and Noble in Minneapolis carried my first printing of “Do Ask Do Tell” for most of 1998 and 1999), and particularly with online retail sites like Amazon, less so with ebooks. However the article proposes a new business model, whereby print-on-demand computers (whether Mac, Unix or Windows is unclear) manufacture books right on site (often by independent or self-published authors), somewhat in the way that larger CVS stores make photo CD’s and sometimes DVD’s on site.

Should "self-published" authors pay for book reviews?

2010-06-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

Should self-published or print-on-demand authors accept offers to pay for book reviews?
A recent opinion from December 15, 2009 by Stacey J. Miller on the Book Promotion Blog says no (link here). It gives away “amateurism” and money could be spent on more above-board book promotion tours and campaigns. Unsolicited reviews (if favorable) obviously can help a book promotion campaign.

Back in 2001, Wired ran an article “Pay to Publish, Pay for Review” about the concept, link here.
The article discussed “ForeWord Reviews” (“Good books independently published”) on which authors could pay for reviews but would not have to disclose that they had purchased the reviews, but the site would (the site today is here. )

Of course, in academia, there is a sense of “payment” (through university tuitions) for peer review of theses and dissertations that get published and often add a lot of value to the latest material on a challenging subject (Ph.D.’s are supposed to require originality of concept in some way).

See also "BillBoushka" blog Aug. 22, 2011 for related story.