offpress

Report: Microsoft To Bring Office To iPad In 2012 | TechCrunch

2011-11-29T14:35:00.000-05:00

Report: Microsoft To Bring Office To iPad In 2012 | TechCrunch

It's a little depressing, not because it's MSFT (sigh) but because it's not a full implementation of the ODF. MSFT, with help from plugin, "support" ODF--on Win. Not on OS X, let alone, right now, on iOS.

So, what does it take to get companies and developers to band together to make a minimal--yes, minimal--ODF editor for tablets? (of whatever OS, even via HTML5)? Money and the promise that what you do today will be rewarded tomorrow. (Foss, in this scheme, is an investment strategy as much as a discursive arrangement of peers.) I don't mean a big company only must be our Angel. It could be a foundation sponsored by a bevy of interested parties, only some of which are bigger than Mom and Pop. But it does need realisable interest, as the work is not really trivial--to build an editor enterprises and students and faculty, too, would like to use--and it is not likely to be completed in a weekend.

But clearly, it is a doing worth something.

InfoQ - Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

2011-11-15T16:00:00.000-05:00

InfoQ - Tracking change and innovation in the enterprise software development community

(not sure if this will come out properly)

In the last year or so there has been a veritable explosion of sites tracking what I'll call the New Technology: Web services, Clouds, mobiles, and the making of the software that they use, esp. Foss, and the distribution of these devices, esp. in the developing world.

So, as a result, there is now an overabundance of sites that, alas, pretty much recycle the same news. Sometimes there is something new, and usually that something new is boring. But not always; and more to the point, the idea is to stitch the patches of reported activity together to make patterns of meaning leading to action.

But I'm curious: what sites then do you, reader (in the singular, I suppose) read, use, follow? Or are you, like the rest of us, becoming Twitterphilies? If so, how is Twitter for most of us not unlike hearsay?

Manifesto | FSCONS

2011-10-20T15:22:00.000-04:00

Manifesto | FSCONS

I confess to being impressed by the manifesto. It's a lot, and probably more than is needed (short manifestos work better, I think), but it bears examination, as does, I am sure, the event itself.

Murder and Development – what’s the link?

2011-10-09T10:18:00.000-04:00

Murder and Development – what’s the link?

One wonders if there is also the phenomenon of underreporting.

Open Source Software Helps an Oregon Transportation Department for GIS, Website Development

2011-03-17T12:42:00.000-04:00

Open Source Software Helps an Oregon Transportation Department for GIS, Website Development

The article is worth reading, for its account of the logistics (not just logic) enabling the ultimate examination and adoption of Foss. It's more than just about using free software; that's not really the issue. The issue is adopting something that is reliable and can be contracted to be such.

Carr–Benkler wager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2011-02-09T18:13:00.000-05:00

Carr–Benkler wager - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Okay, it's 2011. Who's right?

Obviously, at least to me, it depends on the industry and field. And this means that I probably side more with Carr over Benkler, but for this reason: Circumstances (a bad economy, say) can produce the scarcity that demands monetization as valuation, meaning that people want to get paid for what they were previously doing for free, as part of the luxury of leisure afforded the middle classes in rich nations. And as more domains are perceived as fields where you can make money....

Best Alternative to PowerPoint - 2011 Nominations for Best Alternative to PowerPoint

2011-01-14T10:51:00.000-05:00

Best Alternative to PowerPoint - 2011 Nominations for Best Alternative to PowerPoint

Okay, reader, it's time to prove your existence! Vote for--shameless plug warning--OpenOffice.org Impress!

The "purchased" option, well, I leave that to you, but do note that my company's Oracle Open Office uses OpenOffice.org technology and that the recently announced Oracle Cloud Office (see http://www.silicon.com/technology/software/2011/01/14/photos-oracle-cloud-office-in-the-flesh-39746808/) works quite nicely with OOo and the ODF, of course.

Vote now!

Oh, a reason to vote: it's not that we are the best--we are--alternative (detested word!) to PowerPoint (cannot even recall the last time I used it but I'm sure my nightmares can)--but that crucial decision makers are *still* unaware of OOo, and thus of its great savings in cost, time, energy, and of its role in building truly sustainable economic systems and societies.

So, here's a goal for 2011: let's make it a point, an effort, a cause to alert our politicians, local and not, of OpenOffice.org and other free software, for the desktop, and in the cloud.

Spain grovels to penguins over 'Linux' anti-terror plot • The Register

2011-01-13T13:37:00.000-05:00

Spain grovels to penguins over 'Linux' anti-terror plot • The Register

Truth is indeed not just stranger but also funnier than fiction.

Tonight's Rachel Maddow....

2011-01-10T23:43:00.000-05:00

http://podcast.msnbc.com/audio/podcast/MSNBC-MADDOW-NETCAST-MP3.xml

I don't have a radio nor TV but I do listen to podcasts and one of my favourites--despite the often excessive noise--is Rachel Maddow's show. I like her intelligence, her keenness. (My other fave is Amy Goodman's Democracy Now!)

Tonight's show, focused on the ghastly Arizona Tucson shooting, is worth listening to, and I've appended the URL above. (One should also watch _Bowling for Columbinej_.)

Goar: Unease grows over inequality - thestar.com

2010-12-08T09:55:00.000-05:00

Goar: Unease grows over inequality - thestar.com

One of the appeals of Canada and also Australia (more there than here), lies in its seeming social levelness (not just level-headedness). But, as in Japan, and as in other places touting that post-WWII character, the truth is more complicated and less egalitarian. And in Canada, in particular, as the writings of Atwood have long pointed to (and she is not alone among Canadian authors), grotesque economic inequality is there, simply under the surface, but probably not even that.

What we see is the evolution and maturation of both new-generation old wealth and simply new wealth, born of extraordinarily pro-individualistic/business programs put into place over the last 40 years.

Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America | Art and design | The Guardian

2010-12-06T00:03:00.000-05:00

Hide/Seek: Too shocking for America | Art and design | The Guardian

Sigh. The US-ians still seem to recall the pang of Puritan birth: the Ps were as bad as or worse than Platonic Republicans and could not reconcile the proper life to art. And though they did write poetry it was in the service of religious conviction, and plain efficiency over pretty rhetoric was the point. So now, 400 years later, that which seriously questions the logic of the relation between matter and spirit, flesh and soul--the matter of a lot of Christianity--is thorned

(NB: I'm an atheist and have difficulty recalling even what Christmas is about, let alone Easter and the rest. But I did study the religious history and narrative while in grad school, and in particular, the Puritans, though I am afraid I surely missed much. My apologies therefore if I needlessly offend.)

During the days of Serrano's Piss Christ, we saw similar misguidedness. But think: the point of human matter--why, according even to the Puritans, our soul is housed in an (imperfect) body (it has desires that deviate from the will of the soul) and not, like the angels, in no body (they're all soul, no body like ours, and unpossessed of desires that deviate from their soul's)--is that it is a body, filled with body's contents, including its wastes, desires, glories. And the Christ was of a body born and in a body lived. What then, is the relation of the body to the soul, in particular, His? I find Serrano's work quite brilliant, as I do much of the other stuff in the Smithsonian, for these raise really important questions about the body itself and its place in the narrative we call modern--in particular, in the US.

Truth Speaks--

2010-12-05T18:43:00.001-05:00

… all this comes nearly exactly 100 years since Twain's death. Twain, who denounced the Philippine War, the grotesque (and still reverberating, albeit in silent murder) Belgian colonization of the Congo, and the egregious sloth and silence of so many, too many—to find that the effort to pry open the relentlessly shutting doors to public and private sector accountability is so—once again!—reviled by the same as always….

WikiLeaks debate with Steven Aftergood - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

10 day Weather in Toronto - weather.co.uk

2010-11-30T21:45:00.000-05:00

Winter is here.... sigh. Yet, am also looking forward to it.

10 day Weather in Toronto - weather.co.uk

Copy: In praise of copying

2010-11-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, I read my friend Marcus Boon's recently issued, "In praise of copying" (Harvard, 2010). it's a fine book, though in reading it, I considered that the premise of "copy" and it's ?opposite? "originality" present their own problems, something of course Boon begins by addressing. So, rather than approaching the dyad from the christian perspective that inflects Baudrillard and so much of post-ww2 french and US discourse--a move undone by new historicist defusion of the privileged historical genesis and its consequent effectual narrative march to the radically unsettled and unsettling anecdotal start--think of this as, "History does not start here, in Hegelian times, terms, motions, but everywhere the narrative lens is applied'---Boon situates his narrative within a Buddhist frame. The tension is not then between the fake and original--that's a non-issue here--but between states of perception.

But the problem, as I see it, is not to resolve the anxiety over copying, the copy, the fake. (Are they even apposite? Isn't a fake a different thing from a copy? I do not presume that Boon equates these all, either; and copying is by no means the same as the result, the "copy", which again implies not an production process (copying), but a result independent of any process and alluding to an original. Originals are not copies. So, to return, the problem is not to resolve the anxiety, for I see that as the product of a modern kind of power that constitutes us as much as we might wish it did not and which, for that reason, adopting a buddhist "take" on the problem will not, cannot, free us, as it were, for we never were really in need of that soft of freeing to begin with.

Rather, I find more interesting--and this is my own difference here, my own intervention--the problematic of power that is implied by the logic and logistics of copying, originality, etc. It is both a micro and macro power, to be sure; it affects every measure of doing and being: that's what makes it constitutive of our modern identity. So, what I find interesting is the history of this constitutive power and the local ways it can be bounded, curtailed, if not eliminated.

To be sure, it's a foucauldian perspective, that I adopt. And one could argue that the history outlined in _Discipline and Punish_, in which the modern subject is represented as essentially coming into being as a self-regulated (disciplined) copy of an endless stream of copies and models, has done it. No doubt, but abstraction hardly gets us anywhere.

MT's autobiography

2010-10-23T19:00:00.001-04:00

Is Mark Twain's 'New' Autobiography Covered By Copyright? | Techdirt

I used to work at the Mark Twain Project and helped edit some of the letters volumes. I also read the MS comprising this newly published volume, along with a lot of other of his so-far unpublished work. The perennial question was the one posed by the title of the discussion on Techdirt, but also the larger one, "why even have an edited version of the text?"—especially as Twain's writing was uncommonly legible. One answer to the latter q. was that editorial content provided necessary context. But in effect, it situated the the text in an historical narrative that arguably, by sheer dint of plausibility, isolated it from alternatives. I don't really buy into that view, but it's a prevailing one in liberalist discourse and pedagogy: you don't fill in the details but you let the student do it.

I rather value editorial supplementation, at least as practiced by the MTP, for the scholars working there were and are first rate and their insights into the historical narratives explicating the text are invaluable and probably correct. They are also not limiting. None of their narratives, for instance, framed and bounded my own work on vagabondage in Twain, but all helped, as did the wealth of archive available.

And that raises a last point. Archive fever, a condition of finding new narratives in vast depositories, as much by serendipity as by acute insight (hey, looky here cum I wonder if this fits into....) has changed irrevocably by the perfusion of the Internet and in particular by the dumping of huge amounts of material onto it, edited or not. Automatic search engines hunting for likes irrespective of conditioning narratives further abet this process of radical fragmentation and reformation. Narratives linking events, people, causes (laugh), consequences, effects, spurious or not, are proliferating and will hugely proliferate in the years to come. And this is good. It does damage to the book, to what we privilege as the identity derived therefrom, even to a kind of oldschool copyright. But it give golden advantage to a new golem of identity scholarship. (And yes, I'm referring to Alfred Bester's wonderfully wacko last work, Golem to the 100th.)

Megi

2010-10-19T11:32:00.001-04:00

Wunder Blog : Weather Underground

Megi is or was extraordinary, and the blog is worth reading. Welcome to the new world.

Neadertals...

2010-10-19T11:25:00.001-04:00

A Setback for Neandertal Smarts? - ScienceNOW

I, along with many others, love studying Neandertals. When I was studying for my qualifying exams at Berkeley, I had the good fortune of working at the Anthropology Library, a lovely library with a lot of material on Neandertals. As I've always been interested in paleoanthropology—I almost did a degree in it—and as the interpretation of paleohistory is as much (if not profoundly) a game of logical and persuasive narrative, where the smallest detail speaks to a volume of history, decoding the Neandertal, what it was, what it is in the modern imagination, and how it was perceived as a body of people back in the Victorian Age, was overwhelming, and I succumbed. And so instead of reading the works I ought to have, I read rather lots and lots of material on Neandertals.

It's an amazing subject, and perhaps the closest we can see now for similar ethical and logical considerations comes with the appreciation of animal sentience, feeling, consciousness.

Community Actions Through the Internet

2010-10-17T00:04:00.001-04:00

Geist: Digital advocacy’s ‘weak ties’ should not be underestimated - thestar.com

This is quite interesting—both Gladwell's article (worth reading, even if you disagree) and Geist's.

live long with friends and family

2010-10-15T17:37:00.001-04:00

Vital Signs - Longer Life Expectancy Seen for Hispanics - NYTimes.com

Isolation is death.

Download this: In praise of copying, by Marcus Boon, copyrighted under Creative Commons license

2010-10-06T11:35:00.001-04:00

Harvard University Press - In Praise of Copying by Marcus Boon

2010-09-18T14:06:00.001-04:00

Open source: a savvy bet, even in tough times • The Register

Matt Asay's take on the insistent logic of Foss is worth reading. It's a nothing new—we in the field, in the industry, have heard this many times before. But it's worth going over, as the accumulation of data, arguments and narrated evidence makes the case for Foss and implicitly for open standards less and less refutable.

Still, those who refute it most effectively do not need arguments for or against to justify their actions. They need only rely on their habits. And Foss is not unique here. It's the same everywhere. When I worked at the library in UC Berkeley, as a researcher for a Mellon grant investigating slide libraries' use of the internet back in the mid-90s, the story was always the same: despite the obvious advantages, despite the absence of real anxiety relating to copyright, image fidelity, whatever, there was still resistance. That resistance took place at the last mile, when the actual implementers refused to comply not because of legal or technological reasons but because they felt it was a) too much work and b) would threaten their own jobs and livelihood, and render them irrelevant. Neo-Luddites? Perhaps: but they also had a point. And in response, we did do those things that ensured their livelihood and relevance.

(The same could be said and was about the editors of the Mark Twain Project, where I also worked. The argument was that with the Internet, you did not need and indeed did not want editors, for Twain's writing was clear and one could append or contextualize any number of ancillary documents to explicate the material.)

Foss is good, too

2010-09-16T10:17:00.001-04:00

Accenture Newsroom: Investment in Open Source Software Set to Rise, Accenture Survey Finds

yet another.... Thanks to Marc L. for pointing me to this.

2010-09-15T11:03:00.001-04:00

Mexican War of Independence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

How many independences does Mexico have, and how many left to celebrate before it can be said to mean something? Fraught, ironic, sad.... I grew up a child in Mexico (along with also growing up in Spain, Australia, the US), and if my heart can be said to beat to any national rhythm, it's Mexican, as my taste favours comida corrida, as my memories, left alone to wander, take me down childhood paths of Mexico City. First song I sang as a child: the Mexican national anthem. Quick forgot, replaced by the Spanish (also forgot), Australian (ditto), and US (remembered, but I recall always the more pacific one, from sea to shining sea, not the bellicose).

But the point is the Mexican Independence. We were in Queretaro this, last, and prior summers, springs, falls, and also DF, Guadalajara, and we love the places, we loved the effort QRTR put into the celebration, and the city, Queretaro, really is a city unto itself in a nation that is independent.... but, like Canada, the shadow of the neighbour cast both nurtures and deprives, and where Mexico is constantly emerging, renewing itself in its emergence, for both good and ill, Canada, at least Ontario, seems perfectly happy, if occasionally disgruntled it's not happy enough, to be unemergent.

Been there.... Done that... and am sorry for it

2010-08-04T13:55:00.001-04:00

Sigh...

Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s - NYTimes.com

2010-07-15T15:02:00.000-04:00

Rules Seek to Expand Diagnosis of Alzheimer’s - NYTimes.com

I think the key point here is not that this is really a meaningful benefit to the afflicted but to the drug companies, which can ow invest hugely in plausible but probably ineffectual remedies.

Political legitimacy, crime, and the frustration of the political

2010-06-13T12:32:00.000-04:00

There is a character in Netherworld, the really rather magnificent novel, who attacks her husband for his seeming lack of political spine: unlike her, he has not fled the Bush US after 9/11 but rather has stayed a broker in NYC and has not voiced strong political concerns. She attacks him therefore for being worse than complicit: for agreeing with Bush’s politics. In fact, he doesn’t. And in fact, he really wants to establish a personal not political relation with his wife, who has effectively left him, and gained de facto possession of their child.

The point here is the wretched political agitation arising from a frustrating complex of political inability and knowledge. The supposed lesson of the 80s and 90s was that the plebeian citizen had no power in the political. In fact, the real lesson was its opposite, and we see something of this terrible power in the ludicrous Tea Party phenomenon. But we also see the slick of hugely moneyed interests spreading “Astro-turf” faking real grassroots or co-opting it.

The result is a kind of shell game of political legitimacy, in which the desire is to establish political legitimacy but where there is little certainty about its identity. I used to believe that the absence of legitimacy resulted in more crime and civil crime in particular. That’s because if no one believes that civil authority is legitimate, then the prohibitions against socially destructive acts, ranging from violations of property but also of people, become more or less disposable, and observed only if a weaponed police agent is present to enforce the law. The law itself is meaningless, in this illegitimatized context, but the long arm of the law is not. And one of the key efforts of the right wing starting from the egregious Reagan (“Government is not the solution, it’s the problem.”) to the execrable George Bush has been precisely to disvalue and render illegitimate government and the logic of government itself.

But the decline of crime puzzles my earlier view. That’s because if the right wing had succeeded in devaluing government and its logic then in my argument, there should be an increase in crime, not a decrease. The opposite has obtained. Thus, something else is probably going on. To be sure, white collar crime seems to have increased, and dramatically, and I do see that as a sign of the devaluation of governmental legitimacy. But violent crime has very much diminished, and I don’t think it’s because of better or more effective policing; the opposite is probably the case.

This suggests some more interesting factors, such as the rise and fall of lead-based gasoline. The thesis, proposed by Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, of Amherst College, was put forth back in 2007. I read it first in the NY Times but one can find it more in depth at Reyes’ papers’ homepage. The argument’s nub:

“[The] evidence suggests that, by increasing impulsivity and aggression, even moderate exposure to lead in early childhood can have substantial and persistent adverse effects on individual behavior. Moreover, such moderate exposure was the norm for residents of the United States born between the 1950s and the early 1980s.” Early lead exposure makes for violence. This violence accounts for the sustained spike in American crime (and other countries’, where lead was included in gasoline and other petroleum products). Once lead was eliminated, the exposure fell sharply and so did, decades later, crime. And the data suggest that is exactly what has happened.

Steve Jobs unveils iPhone 4 • The Register

2010-06-07T16:45:00.000-04:00

Steve Jobs unveils iPhone 4 • The Register

Whine: where's Canada and the iPhone4?

On the other hand, this (again) will save me from the impulse of madness besetting all the others so lucky (luckier than I) to be able to spend their money on it.

robin hoods

2010-05-26T18:39:00.002-04:00

What is the difference between a generous outlaw (or groups of them) who does not proclaim any political or ideological position but nevertheless cares for the community of which he is a part and an subversive political group which does more or less the same thing for its community but also claims that its actions are informed by an ideology and political agenda? I raise this point after reading a New Yorker article on the Mexican La Familia gang. It's layered by the bloody hunt for the Jamaican Christopher Coke, whose name is amazingly apropos (he makes his money on cocaine, it seems) and who generously contributes to his utterly impoverished community, Kingston. But there is no shortage of such examples, and indeed, it's characteristic of Mafia-style gangs to generously spread the ill-gotten wealth. We see it in Afghanistan, Columbia (the Medellín cartel was famously generous, and for aught I know it still is), and so on. But with rare exception, most of these outlaw groups are apolitical and are not really interested in joining the structure of official political power. And this raises a rather interesting question: How do we evaluate the political moment of these pre/post political entities?

From my perspective, it comes down to legitimacy. We evaluate modern government upon standards of legitimation independent of their specific violence and which enables others to freely view, join, quit, participate, modify. And if these sound like a version of the freedoms which Foss grants, there is no coincidence at all.

Cyclists Find New Way to Use Old Doping Tool - NYTimes.com

2010-05-25T18:29:00.000-04:00

Cyclists Find New Way to Use Old Doping Tool - NYTimes.com

I used to be an amateur bike racer (road) in the Bay Area and have long disputed the anxiety surrounding the moral hazard of doping, though not the physical. I'd be more supportive of efforts to control doping if it were focused on the physical harm incurred. But so many seem convinced that sports offers a new Eden of the body and soul tainted thus by the self-interest of the athlete. And that's nonsense, as the history of modern athletics (or even ancient) more than amply demonstrates. Image is not reality.

listening

2010-05-24T18:00:00.001-04:00

What do you listen to when you work? If anything? For me, it depends so much on what I’m doing. If I must think step by syllogistic step I cannot listen to anything outside my thoughts. But if I am reading a text whose argument is easily apprehensible or that I think is, and this includes the daily news, the regular articles, the quotidian grounding that Thoreau hated (and rightly) so much, then I can easily listen to news programs, in English or French, the latter in some ways being better, as the language can quickly become part of the humdrum sounds and never intrude.

But sometimes music is required for some thought, for thinking things through in language that must be clear. In that case, I find myself reverting, again, and again to the simplicity of piano, violin or cello Bach or Mozart; Brahms is too complex, demands too much attention, and the more complex pieces, concerti, for instance, are almost impossible to reduce to background.

Over the weekend, we went to hear Perlman at the TSO. Our seats were one row removed from the stage and not 2 metres from him; my wife could hear him breathe. The first chord of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 (Oundjian conducting and wearing a really silly shirt), were transformative. How to put it? I closed my eyes not simply to hear better--that had no appreciable effect--but to eliminate, to invert the logistic of foreground/background, so that there was only the presence of the violin. I don’t see images when thus focused; I quite lose myself: there is only the pure, perfect sound, its excitement, its presence. I thought, at some point: Is his personality inflecting the music, ought I to see his expression, does it affect my interpretation? All of which are an of course, but also an irrelevance. The immediate presence of the music occluded all other points.

children

2010-05-24T17:58:00.000-04:00

I’ll never have children, and that’s a good thing, I have no doubt. I cannot imagine speaking child-talk to a child, cannot envision a mentality that is not impatient to be adult and that does not already conceive of itself as adult. But I can observe. I guess I’m deeply offended by the Western modality of child-rearing. It is based on giving unlimited and unstinting attention to the child, the way you would to a spoiled puppy. The effects on the puppy are clear: it grows spoiled, it grows infinitely demanding, it grows into a major pain. And this is neither desirable nor particularly useful behaviour for a dog, let alone for human. But for children, here in the West, it is seen as precisely that: normal and desirable. It is seen, or at least it must be, for so many parents seem to want this, that young children are demanding of attention, self-seeking and selfish, and placated only by treats.

But go elsewhere, to traditional environments, where families are extended, where villages raise the child, where he and she has companions and multiple parents. You seldom see there bad, spoiled behaviour, you seldom will see crying, whining, demanding annoyances. You will likely see well-behaved and polite children who make happy and nondestructive sounds. And when you do see spoiled behaviour, it’s likely due to nuclear parents raising their children amid violence and ill-temper as they themselves accommodate to Western modalities of familial atomization.

Mind, this is not an attack on small children or a commentary on the families possessed of small children that seemingly surround us here in Toronto and which interrupt the simplest thoughts. It is rather an observation: That I consider now, as I always have, that the Western child is spoiled and that the parents’ institutional insistence on producing a child with demands that must be satisfied is wrong.

Quebec Family Dies as Home Disappears Into Crater - NYTimes.com

2010-05-22T23:55:00.000-04:00

Quebec Family Dies as Home Disappears Into Crater - NYTimes.com

Quite bizarre; and the thing is, I've known many Quebecois from this area and never heard a word of this before. I presume the inland sea referenced is the emptied Lake Agassiz.... whose repeated emptying probably brought on the Younger Dryas stadial 13K BCE, and the last, 8.4K BCE quite plausibly the persistent advent of middle-eastern farming technology, and a lot more, like a wealth of myth. And now this: sudden sinking into infernal holes of poor Quebecois.

Down The Memory Hole - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

2010-05-22T15:47:00.000-04:00

Down The Memory Hole - Paul Krugman Blog - NYTimes.com

Who doesn't read Krugman now? But this column is particularly to the point, as it highlights the counterfactual, counter-historical claims made by libertarians and the unthinking. I encounter this mindset all the time in Foss, where advocates elide the unpleasant facts of government support (via education, say, to start with) and more or less blindly trumpet a radical free market notion of free and open source software collaboration. Think again.

This Amazing Video Is Why TV Is Bigger Than The Internet

2010-05-21T11:38:00.000-04:00

This Amazing Video Is Why TV Is Bigger Than The Internet

I have to agree. And reiterate my oft-repeated point, that the early Web (if not Internet, which includes other dislocated communication and informatic services) and its continuing consumer aspect, as found in, say, early iThings and among a lot of extant browsers, is just TV manqué, merged with rather inefficient magazines, all larded by the quite a lot more useful slide functionality that makes it much easier to flick through pics fast.

And it's all the more reason why I embrace the development of a more sophisticated production Web, which has been called Web 2.0 (sigh....) but which really comes down to an evolution from consumption to production, without losing the consumption element.

Wikipedia, porn, and the FBI: how sexual images are handled

2010-05-19T10:05:00.000-04:00

Wikipedia, porn, and the FBI: how sexual images are handled

The problem of standards, of radical democracy, and of benevolent dictatorship. In the absence of clearly stipulated rules that one may agree or disagree with, there is custom or dictatorship: tacit, implicit authority or explicit, enforced authority.

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

2010-05-17T11:00:00.003-04:00

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

Posted using ShareThis

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

2010-05-17T11:00:00.001-04:00

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

Posted using ShareThis

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

2010-05-17T10:59:00.001-04:00

Challenge Raised To Constitutionality Of Brazilian Pipeline Patents

Posted using ShareThis

MOVE 25 years later | Philadelphia Inquirer

2010-05-14T11:10:00.000-04:00

MOVE 25 years later | Philadelphia Inquirer

It was actually 13 May. I remember this quite clearly and was outraged then, as now, that the city government could actually drop a bomb on a house--a row house, in a crowded city: Philadelphia. But this was during the Reagan Regime, which not only effectively legitimized cowboy disregard for the rule of law in the popular consciousness (I noted this when Eddie Murphy's *Beverly Hills Cop* series came out: crime is insoluble as long as cops follow laws; and is the egregious if rollicking series *24* that different?), but also put such a disregard into effect, most famously in the Iran-Contra Affair, which illegally funded the US's war against the Nicaragua Contras.

(The consequences of this, and the related Salvadorean Civil War, which killed, according to Wikipedia, 75,000, are still being felt and in some cases have magnified. I am thinking of the development of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, formed in Los Angeles by displaced Salvadoreans, evidently initially as a defensive tactic. Again, for an impartial account, I point to Wikipedia's entry. On a side note, I'd be interested in researching the broader issue: the effects in the 20th century of local wars like this on the displacement of populations and the establishment of more or less permanent subversive classes. It's one thing to refer to Kleist or Deleuze and Guattari, but quite another to look at, say, Sudan, Senegal, Ugunda, Rwanda, Angola .... and so many other places where local war, whether proxy or not, has forced the creation of by and large destructive blocs. And I guess one can further point to Afghanistan, as a brilliant case in point.)

GNU Project launches accessibility initiative [LWN.net]

2010-05-12T15:06:00.000-04:00

GNU Project launches accessibility initiative [LWN.net]

Quite cool. In a telephone call last year (or this?) I mentioned to Peter Brown of FSF (executive dir.) the work being done with the OpenDocument Format, FluidProject, and others on accessibility, and my strong desire that the Foss community, writ large, could (and should) participate in creating sustainable inclusive design software. My notion is that freedom (as both the positive and negative quality) exists when all can access, use, and enjoy the practical and legally enabled qualities of software. Software should thus be designed with the inclusion of all in mind. (I conducted a class on this subject at University of Toronto not too long ago.)

The FSF & OpenOffice.org Extensions

2010-05-09T13:47:00.000-04:00

No doubt many following the living history of free and open source software have already come across the Free Software Foundation's bulletin (communiqué?) on OpenOffice.org's Extensions Repository and what they mean to do about it. I've appended the link to it below, along with the response from the OOo Community Council, of which I am a part (and the Chair). My colleague in the CC, Charles-H. Schulz, of Ars Aperta, issued the response on behalf of us all in the CC and on behalf of the OpenOffice.org Community.

I've long been an advocate and promoter of extensions for OOo. The monolithic code demands them. And I've also long believed that free or non-free as a choice unjustly simplifies--to the point of absurdity--immensely complex positions regarding modes of production and consumption. I suppose I favor nudging the user or consumer, not enforcing a position and expect that the producer (who might be also the user) will respect the choices made in the market. I don't naively believe that what the market says is always right; hardly. But then, not all markets are the same.

FSF launches free software extension listing for OpenOffice.org — Free Software Foundation

OpenOffice.org Community Council Position on Extensions

Fukuyama's review of Young on Nietzsche

2010-05-08T13:44:00.003-04:00

I have seldom found Fukuyama persuasive, but was intrigued enough by the juxtaposition to bother scanning his short review of the new philosophical biography of Nietzsche by Julian Young. The part that struck me and that resounded both as a quasi-libertarian position and also one that really has little to do with the matter of Nietzsche, despite Fukuyama's assertion:

"But understanding Nietzsche’s project as a cultural rather than a political one should not blind us to its terrible implications. For while one might be able to create a small-scale community based on common and voluntary commitment to art, as Wagner sought to do in Bayreuth, scaling up such a project to society as a whole, with all its de facto diversity, would require dictatorial political power. The mystical origins of Nietzsche’s Dionysian community are an open invitation to the unleashing of irrational passion that is perfectly happy to squander the life of any individual standing in its way. Ayatollah Khamenei is indeed a much better model of Nietzsche’s future leader than the power less Dalai Lama."

.... which utterly misses the point of the contradictory braids of fin-de-siècle liberalism (or any period's) and the pragmatics of a libertarian community.

For the full review, see: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html?hpw

News: International OpenOffice market shares - Portal - Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de

2010-03-23T07:56:00.000-04:00

Ah, I realize that my February post on these data lacked the HTML code.... so here is the link again demonstrating OOo's and more generally the technology's use.

News: International OpenOffice market shares - Portal - Tutorials, Tipps und Tricks für Webmaster auf Webmasterpro.de

Secrecy Around Trade Agreement Causes Stir : NPR

2010-03-17T21:42:00.000-04:00

An interesting NPR article on ACTA.

Secrecy Around Trade Agreement Causes Stir : NPR

Intellectual Property Watch � Blog Archive � AIDS Patients Protest EU-India Trade Agreement

2010-03-13T13:15:00.000-05:00

The logic of intellectual property--who owns it, keeps it, safeguards it, distributes it, and why and how--applies as much to medicines as to software and other intangibles. In the case of medicines, what's at stake is pretty clear: lives. If the drug is too costly or otherwise unobtainable, the user might very likely die, or suffer rather horribly, as patented medicines aimed for niche markets (even if they number in the tens of millions) can be priced arbitrarily high. (Think of it as ransom: only the rich can afford their lives.)

The consequences of such encumbered software are less visible. But lives, too, can be at stake, as software *enables* the flow of ideas and the making of things. Good software that does what the user wants is essentially invisible: the user's desires are achieved and she doesn't worry about the means or the medium. She simply does it. But if the software is poorly designed, buggy, or equally, enormously expensive, it adds to the cost of doing things and introduces obstacles to their doing. In fact, those doings, however meritorious and necessary, may simply not be done.

Open source is by no means a panacea. It is a strategy for making and distributing things, and it is purposefully unscripted when it comes to precise methodology. That's the nature of pragmatism. It's an option that could answer the exigencies of efficiency and cost. Applying the logic of openness to other fields, such as open access and open IP for the production of such things as the medicines, and not only that, seems at this point, compelling.

Intellectual Property Watch � Blog Archive � AIDS Patients Protest EU-India Trade Agreement

OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change | ITworld

2010-03-13T11:15:00.000-05:00

I was delighted to read of Simon's election to the Board of the OSI, and can think of no better person for it. Congratulations, Simon! I, like many, do look forward to seeing OSI become more relevant. We need a standard by which claims of openness are measured and deemed true or false. We need sanity in the licenses. We need policies that address the world's turn to Foss and open standards. Simon has been working in all these fields.

OSI Board Addition May Bring Needed Change | ITworld

The Hindu : Business / Economy : Think local, go ‘open’

2010-03-13T11:12:00.000-05:00

I used to work with Gopi, who's featured here, and I've also helped produce a lot of the language I read here. And so it's doubly nice to see the attention given to open source and open standards here in The Hindu, which is a quite important paper in India. But I've also seen similar attention evanesce. The difficulty is not in getting attention but in keeping it. And most important in engaging the attention of the politicians who make the crucial decisions.

Foss, open standards are in the end political issues, as they now demand *how* to spend your (taxpayer's) money. Your money can be spent on proprietary work made by companies which depend on the luck of the market. Or it could be spent on work that does not impose what is effectively a user tax and which is more removed from the uncertain roll of the market's dice.

The Hindu : Business / Economy : Think local, go ‘open’

This winter was the driest on record - thestar.com

2010-03-11T16:39:00.000-05:00

Global climate change, aka Global Warming, at home.

This winter was the driest on record - thestar.com

An Individual’s Agenda � What I Couldn't Say…

2010-03-10T09:46:00.000-05:00

Worth reading, this and the subsequent blog on patents and IP.

An Individual’s Agenda � What I Couldn't Say…

Paths of and to Openness

2010-03-09T20:00:00.002-05:00

I was talking with an analyst/consultant based in the Middle East about the state of OpenOffice.org in the region. He wanted to know the usual.... and the usual is that which is really hard to supply. Users are under no obligation to tell us of what they are doing, and this is also true of those providing support and services, such as ArabDev, which is based in Egypt. Developer communities, however, do let us in on their work, and outside of individuals working on localization, I don't think there are any developer groups or companies in the region. I wish there were. But it takes a lot of time and money to do core work on OOo. Which is all the more reason to do extensions.

In talking to the analyst, it occurred to me that a really rather cool study would be to chart the how (and to a degree why) public and private enterprises adopt and migrate to applications such as OpenOffice.org. The narratives to such a migration are many, and for public narratives, as well as for a lot private ones, we know that they want to save money and gain flexibility: Why spend a lot of money on something that limits your ability to engage in the future? Okay, but *how* did the decision makers (if any) come to this understanding in the first place? That is the interesting question.

I guess I've known answers: that one path is to work from the ground up. This is a classic Linux/Foss narrative: that we persuade the actual user geeks who actually work with and are informed of the software gamut, and these then persuade their managers, unto the CXO who decides. We know this path and help those in the narrative of persuasion by supplying facts, arguments, presence.

The other path that I pursue is the opposite: the top down approach, where I seek to persuade the most powerful person of the virtues of OOo. He or she can be the CXO or even above. What counts is selling the executive on the things that appeal most, such as saving money, flexibility (no vendor lock-in) or whatever, while at the same time, underscoring that a migration to open source (or its proprietary versions) is not likely to erode his or job, but rather grant more power and security, as the executive is no longer dependent upon any single vendor. This method works fairly well in a lot of regions where the top echelon is regarded most highly and the bottom not at all.

But there are other paths, and it is never obvious which, exactly, is the right one to follow. Each region, each cultural pocket determines its own path. What I do in Canada, where I have been trying to get the country, as well as the provinces, to adopt OOo, will differ dramatically from what I do in India, say, or in the China or elsewhere. Power may be the same but its narratives always differ.

encyclopedism

2007-08-21T22:13:00.000-04:00

Accounts of the encyclopedic novel are unconvincing. So here's a possibility:

the encyclopedic novel as epiphenomenon of the colonialist project, informed by is aesthetic and by the logic of identification, territory and acquisition: knowledge not for its own sake but for is territory.

In Good Faith? About SIL International

2007-07-02T23:34:00.000-04:00

[This is a work in progress.... and as it evolves, so too does SIL: it increasingly distances itself from its roots and mission.]

I like being straightforward about what OpenOffice.org is. I consider this level of honesty a civic and civil necessity, especially when one is dealing with something as apparently novel as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), which has for about a decade mystified business with its raison d'être, its funding, and its general operation. So I try to be as clear as possible about us. I can't speak, of course, for the motivations of those who contribute to the project, only refer to what we have all agreed is the project's mission.

OpenOffice.org is proud to be an inclusive open-source project and direct in its efforts to work with all to give to everyone who has access to a computer free and useful tools for producing content of all sorts. We are bridging the digital and developmental gap, and we are not doing so with neoliberal tactics or rhetoric. Our goal is informatic autonomy for all. The community making up OOo is like many other: those engaged in it are surely part of others; it's nonexclusive. I am for instance a member of various academic organizations (the Modern Language Association, the American Studies Association, Narrative), an associate of the Free Software Foundation, a member of OASIS, and probably a member of some other organizations I can't offhand recall. Until recently I was also employed by CollabNet, and will soon be working for Sun, and I endeavour to clarify to all when I am wearing my employer's hat and when my OpenOffice.org, when, that is, I am representing OOo and when my employer. (None of what I write here represents CollabNet or Sun or OpenOffice.org: it represents my own views.) And I am sure that most involved in OpenOffice.org do exactly the same. We are all concerned about the good faith of our representations.

How is affiliation--personal, professional--related to OOo's consideration of contributions? It isn't. This where the democratic character of FOSS comes in, and also where it is meritocratic. OpenOffice.org welcomes all contributions, though of course not all are accepted. We base our acceptance on the merits of the contribution, not on the contributor, and our processes are transparent; if they are not, let us know and we can improve things so that they are. We do ask that for contributions of code the copyright holder sign a joint copyright assignment form, the JCA, which jointly assigns copyright to Sun, which owns copyright over OpenOffice.org, and to the original copyright holder. For non-code, we ask that the copyright holder use our Public Document License, which allows for subsequent free collaboration. The actual provenance of the material, and why it was created, is not terribly interesting, unless of course the presumed copyright holder has misrepresented her relation to the work and does not in fact legally hold copyright over it and is thus not legally entitled to change its license or assign it to any one. How the subsequent product (the community-enhanced code) will be used and by whom is another story altogether, and one that we can't really control, beyond the issue of license and the protections imposed by our trademark. But for what it is worth, the OOo project will, for one, use the code in accordance with its mission. How others outside that domain use it is less clear, and there are many who are now distributing more-or-less strong flavours of OOo.

Put another way, someone can contribute to OOo in order to further the product for her own selfish interests. All will naturally benefit from her meritorious contributions, as is the nature of FOSS, but her own contributions will be more particularly motivated. They may be good motives or they may not be, at least by my standards. But if she follows the protocols and is honest about the intellectual property contributed, her actual motivation will be of no concern. What counts is the contribution, not the contributor. Of course, one way the contributor can matter relates to how seriously she takes the project: we prefer sustained contributions, not one-offs, though we are always eager to consider all contributions; as well, we are generally willing to help a willing programmer or other sort of contributor develop her skills. This is in one of the ways we are a community: we care about the communal process.

That community, I've written often enough, is a participatory community, one made up of peers engaged in producing something in common, engaging in limited public sphere to do so. It's not, or not necessarily, a community of friends or a community that would exist without its own public identity that transcends individual particularity. We can come from other companies, and have a wide range of beliefs, political philosophies and cultural backgrounds, but our work on OpenOffice.org brings us together under the banner of a shared goal. Outside of OpenOffice.org, we may have nothing in common, not even be friends, though I have formed friendships through OpenOffice.org, and I'm sure others have, too.

One of my primary goals as the Community Manager is to enlarge the scope of the global OOo community. To this end, I go to a lot of conferences, present on OpenOffice.org, ODF and FOSS, meet many interesting people, and try to excite them into contributing to OpenOffice.org and other FOSS projects on a sustained basis. I can't assume that everyone is always representing herself in good faith, but equally I cannot really care, as what they do outside the boundaries of the public community is pretty much their own business. (If I do care, I care privately, as a private person.) What counts is the contribution itself, not the contributor. And if the contributor counts, as a member of the OOo community, she counts in a limited way, the boundaries being shadowed by her participation in the project and the implicit social contract she has formed with the community. If inside OOo everything is visible and transparent, outside, there is a kind of blindness.

There are interesting complications to this logic of social blindness. Critics of social contract theory (liberalism: the political theory that society is predicated on an individual's "right" to engage in contract), as it is applied generally to society writ large, point out that we are never such abstracted agents as liberal contract theory would imagine, and that various classes of people are always encumbered by more or less visible commitments and their obligations. I tend to think this is an obvious but no less important point. Rich people have more freedom than poor, and poverty and wealth can be conditioned by a host of qualities, such as skin colour, gender, age, etc. (An excellent and polemical analysis of the problem of evaluating social power is Walter Benn Michaels' The trouble with diversity.) But the social contract that a Debian developer engages in differs from that which supposedly constitutes the larger society in which she lives. It's a self-consciously designated utopia, a perfected space, though in practice, the typical FOSS community is just like any other human zoo and a space of politics and fun. Still, FOSS strives for utopic social contract where what counts is what you do in the project not what you do outside of it.

But of course FOSS goes beyond that. Richard Stallman preaches freedom not juts in coding but in daily politics, and rails against any suppression of liberal freedom. I and others also critique companies that use free software but do not contribute back to the community and are thus not "good FOSS citizens." The utopia of freedom whose kernel is FOSS, has no boundaries. But no one is wholly within it.

A short while ago, I wrote about meeting two people from SIL International at the Libre Graphics meeting in Montreal last May, where I presented on the ODF. They demonstrated the font work they've done and emphasized their commitment to FOSS and interest in OOo. I praised their fonts and open-source efforts and urged them to contribute to OpenOffice.org. They represented themselves to me as being simply concerned with improving free fonts. Open source fonts are quite important, and not having good, open-source and standardized fonts that accommodate a range of complex writing schemes has held back a fair amount of FOSS efforts. So I was enthusiastic about SIL's work.

It turns out that SIL is in fact an evangelical organization and its interest in fonts and translation derives from and is motivated by its proselytizing desire. Translating the Bible to this or that recherche language--and they are very active in codifying autochthonous languages--is a means the missionaries chose (and it's an effective one) earlier this century to spread the word. FWIW, Wikipedia has an entry on SIL, describing it right off as, "a worldwide non-profit evangelical Christian organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document lesser-known languages in order to expand linguistic knowledge, promote literacy and aid minority language development." The entry is labelled as needing to be checked for impartiality, but one can easily confirm the claims.

SIL does not actually hide its identity and in its About page is direct in stating that it is a "faith-based organization" whose staff share a

Christian commitment to service, academic excellence, and professional engagement through literacy, linguistics, translation, and other academic disciplines. SIL makes its services available to all without regard to religious belief, political ideology, gender, race, or ethnic background.

A "Christian commitment"? What a vague modifier! And what work, exactly is it doing? But moving beyond that, the page seems dedicated to underscoring SIL's commitment to an impartial public sphere and to rescuing languages at risk. The affiliation with Wycliffe is buried, and the bloody and politically deplorable history of the group is unstated, though the Wikipedia article cites some good sources, which I recommend. Reading them, one can quickly understand why SIL people don't trumpet their past or, for that matter, the motivations for their interest in ethnolinguistics.

None of that comes across; rather, SIL appears to be as disinterested as academia. But where academics are motivated institutionally if not always historically by disinterested goals, SIL seems motivated by something else, presumably their "Christian commitment." An academic ethnolinguist doing field research might only want to document the language to prove a point, or simply to document it; an SIL agent (and she may be a trained linguist, too), will seemingly want to document the language in order to create a Bible that can be used to convert and establish their religion, all under the pretence of impartial linguistics.

I'm not blind to the tainted history of ethnography (a now-evidnetly discredited for being racist discipline) or of anthropology itself. (See in particular, .....; see also geertz). Nor am I ignoring the fact that the very act of documentation and all it entails is hardly innocent. It affects, perhaps irreversibly, the cultural environment. But there is a huge difference between conducting research that for all its unintended effects is nevertheless dedicated to maintaining the liberal freedom of its cultural interlocutors to one that is using the guise of that claim to freedom to try for the opposite. The academic is (supposedly) uninterested in changing the beliefs of her interlocutors; the SIL agent is.

But it's not obvious at all, and they make no effort to reveal their agenda to people like me or even casual visitors of its website. For instance, its "About" page mentions, at the very bottom, its affiliation with Wycliffe Bible Translators: "Resources for SIL’s work are provided primarily by affiliated organizations in various parts of the world. Major contributors include affiliated member organizations of Wycliffe International, which have a goal of promoting the translation of Christian Scriptures into the world’s languages where appropriate." Wycliffe is a little bit more upfront about what it does (translation) but not about why. For that, one must read into the unfortunate history of Wycliffe and SIL (t

Why is this an issue, if SIL does good fonts or if they contribute to ethnolinguistics? Who cares if they are funded by an organization which has historically kept itself close to bloody dictatorships

But SIL It doesn't trumpet the news, and it takes pains to make it appear as if the work it is doing is disinterested; indeed, it states that it does not care about religion or other characteristics. But if you work with them, even in a more or less indirect way, one can infer, you are in effect supporting a historically far-right wing Protestant evangelical effort. It's as if some reprehensible political or ideological organization were doing work one approved of but whose goals one disapproved of. Would I react the same, say, if it were a Nazi organization? No doubt.

Yet let's unpack this issue. How problematical is it to work with this organization or any other organization one disapproves of? After all, but for their statement about their evangelicalism, they seem just like any secular NGO. Perhaps my problem with SIL is personal, and I should state here that I am an atheist, but I don't think the issue is personal, and characterizing it as such would be but a version of an ad homiinem attack. I don't, for instance, discount the scientific work done by, say, Jesuits simply because they are also priests and thus ipso facto religious, or begin to imagine that Francis Collins' work is any less brilliant or tainted for him being a Christian. That would be idiotic.

Rather, or most directly, my problem with SIL concerns SIL's duplicity in representing its agenda, at least with regard to its academic and open-source efforts. More generally, it has to do with the clouding of intentions. The result is an uncertanty then of what is being validated by one's engagement with SIL, by SIL itself, and that by validating one thing, I and the project may be validating an organization whose primary work has less to do with coding languages or making fonts than with making more of their sort of Christians. In concrete terms, by helping the development and distribution of the fonts I am helping SIL's work; by building on their linguistic work (compiling dictionaries, grammar rules, etc.), I am furthering their Bible efforts. Agreement with their work is not the issue. It's engaging in the relationship in good faith.

I have no doubt that many among the SIL are passionate about their linguistic and font work, and see their religion as validating what they do, and vice versa. I can sympathize with this belief. I too believe that what I do with OpenOffice.org and FOSS is morally and politically good (I also believe it so for my own academic work) even though I also know it is merely a production and distribution strategy and really only as good as its practitioners make it and that it in itself is like any other dance minus the dancer, an abstraction without effect. But I nevertheless believe what I do because I see its effects (greater access to the tools of informatics for more people) and like them. My basic political rationale is democratic and liberal, and I am philosophically opposed to strategies of power and to a politics that institutionalizes inequality.

But let's say that SIL had announced themselves for what they are and what they are about: That their work on behalf of FOSS and with linguists, was for the purpose of producing the kind of Christians they want. FOSS and all the etnolinguistic work they do was of secondary importance; a mere vehicle for the real brand of politically valenced soteriological work at hand.

Would I have reacted differently? Yes: I, in my OpenOffice.org capacity, would probably have appreciated the work they do for FOSS and OpenOffice.org independent of ulterior motives. As I mentioned, the fonts are good and will make a positive difference to FOSS if the licenses are in order. I would not be, however, enthusiastic about their evangelical work, as I think that by framing the linguistic work in evangelical terms inevitably brings into the picture interested political and moral considerations that do damage to the essentially disinterested work linguists and academics in general supposedly do. Yes, I am cognizant of the fact that no such work is ever truly disinterested and that even the act of recording and coding deploys a system of disciplinary power that both Foucault and Bourdieu and many others have written on. But that doesn't legitimate the interested fracture of the very fragile public sphere being developed in the regions where SIL most travels.

In fact, independent of my approval of their work for FOSS and linguistics, I'm downright opposed to SIL's agenda, as I do see it as shaking the necessary trust in a disinterested and in-common public sphere that allows all participants to engage in and circulate discourses without the concern that what they say and how they say it is not already in the service of an entity they may--but not necessarily--agree with. The public sphere may be a fiction but it is a necessary fiction, irreducible to any religious or governmental or commercial or ideological agenda, and we maintain it precisely in order to support the world we live in.

I want to emphasize that the world I would like to live in is not homogeneous in its beliefs. I am not insisting or suggesting everyone believe as I do and not believe in any religion at all, though I confess to thinking that would hardly be worse than the current headlong plunge into religion and it probably would be better. That's why I like believing what I believe--that and the fact that I really cannot even imagine believing otherwise. (I'd have to suspend a lot of disbelief.) Rather, I would urge a greater transparency of motive and funding, so that those who work with others for disinterested and civic reasons (or reasons that can be mapped to such) do not find themselves unintentionally supporting reprehensible political agendas or belief structures they do not agree with. (Supporting OOo is a neutral objective: it is a group project utterly irreducible to any politics or beliefs, let alone mine.) In areas where funding is tight, that kind of problem is not unusual, I'd imagine, and I'd guess that religious groups like SIL threaten the very existence of the kind of field linguistics in which they play such a large role, just because their role is so large and just because it depends finally on ulterior not disinterested motivations. SIL may also be affecting the open-source font work which is so needed. Nothing is ever free of political (or even, in capitalism, financial interest), and FOSS can obviously be put in the service of any agenda. But it's a practice, a tool, a mode of power, and as such, cannot be simply contained.

Of course, there are many instances in daily life where we "support" organizations, often religious, without really thinking through what our support means. For example, if I give money to Salvation Army or my discarded furniture, I am casually supporting the religious efforts of the Army. If I buy something at a church sidewalk sale: the same thing. I am implicitly supporting a religious agenda as much as the individuals who materially benefit, and these include myself, if my gifts are deemed tax deductible. How is this different then from the case of SIL international? The difference lies in the knowledge I have going into the exchange. I *know* what the Salvation Army is about and though I receive zero little pleasure from donating to it because it's religious, and in fact wish there were more secular options available, still I recognize the good it does and the necessary altruism that its supporters daily demonstrate; the church here provides a function and fulfils a need that other institutions have not. But this is not entirely the case with SIL International. They have mystified their agenda and obscured their purpose. With the Salvation Army, t I know what I am doing. With SIL, do people know? They should.

Reliving the Nixon Years

2007-01-06T11:26:00.000-05:00

I have to confess that in a purely abstract way it’s kind of exciting to be reliving the Nixon years. Oh, to be sure, I was too young the first time around to properly appreciate them, so the notion of “reliving” is not quite accurate. But it’s close enough, and the sense is helped all the more by the exhaustive correlations provided by the newsmedia, between Iraq and Vietnam and between Bush’s imperial presidency (or his pretensions to it) and Nixon’s.

But in another way, it’s such a depressing correspondence. The consequences of Nixon’s misrule were also hardly enjoyable: a wrecked economy, a destroyed belief in government as a public thing, or res publica. I can only guess that Bush’s effects will actually be worse. The scary thing is that it is not as if Bush et al. were ignorant of the tired history they are foisting upon us. On the contrary: they want to rewrite that history, only this time come up right. So, this time, the cycle is not farcical--it’s anything but--its rather kind of tragic.

(One plus: this time around, the descent is being not only televised but reported and blogged; never before have we had the opportunity to be such witnesses to such a catastrophe and never before have so many been able to see clearly what is occurring. Organizations and outlets like Think Progress, which is sustained by the Center American Progress Action Fund, merit more than our kudos.)

The 2006 MLA Conference

2007-01-02T10:53:00.000-05:00

Christmas time is MLA time, and it has been for me since the mid-90s. For those innocent of what it all means, the MLA stands for the Modern Language Association, the international association of teachers and scholars of literature and criticism, and it holds its annual meeting and job fair from 27-30 December. The New York Times routinely reports on the event and equally routinely pokes fun at the panels and sessions. To those outside of the profession, the titles of the talks do indeed sound silly, as if the cloistered denizens of the ivory tower were trying desperately to claim that what they do and say and think is actually, truly, deeply, important.

It actually is. English professors, after all, are the whipping posts of conservatives and anti-inltellectuals of all stripes. They are accused of fomenting revolution, depravity, and everything else that is remotely un-American, like French-inspired criticism. In fact, the vast majority of professorts wish desperately to sell out and land a job that provides them with the security to pursue the most recondite studies or teach and teach and teach the willing and unwilling undergraduates who have been mostly obligated to take the lone English or composition course. These professors, in short, are hardly revolutionaries. They get paid little, they work long, and they are yearly confronted with the possibility that a grad student or contract lecturer might one day take their job from them. Incrasingly, universtities are moving to hiring lecturers and others who have no chance of tenure and who can do much the same work as the tenure track professor, viz, teach unwilling undergraduates how to write a paper.

The MLA on the one hand promises an antidote to this condition, as it supposedly (ideally?) provides a unique forum for enterprising ideas. Where else can you gather such an audience? Where else will your paper be so public? Well, the truth is that there are now many such forums. Furthermore, the august aspirations of the MLA have lately had trouble getting off the earth. Seldom are new ideas presented at the conference, though that does still happen. More often, the ideas presented are a little tepid. Frankly the point of the conference is much less an intellectual forum than a job fair, and it's been that way for at least a decade

As a job fair, the MLA is probably truly unique. The job fair aspect dominates everything about the event. Several thousand job seekers ranging from ABDs to associate professors come to the conference for interviews--and then there are those interviewing them. Without exaggeration, I'd guess that the majority of attendees are there for a job. The talk in the hotel bar is about jobs. The networking is about jobs. The people in suits seen walking briskly or sitting dazed are not there to give incisive papers or show off the results of their research, they are there for desperate interviews. Their hope is to land a job (often any job) not change the way people read this or that cultural text. (I can't blame them. In fact, if I were to turn things differently I'd join their ranks, something I think about it every year.) The sad fact is that for now, there is really no other mechanism for finding academic jobs in the US. (Other countries may use the MLA, which is supposedly international, but often do not; they use their own mechanisms.)

But what would the MLA be like without the job fair? There are some models: the ALA conference, regional MLAs, the Narrative conference, INCS, and so on. These events tend to be focused and interesting. Stress is lower--one's life is not on the line--but the papers are often enough more exciting, as people will use these forums for the presentation of their research. But I don't think that the MLA can get back to this state, at least not until he job situation is ameliorated, and that is not going to happen any time soon.

Instead, I'll probably continue to attend the conference, presenting papers, meeting friends, perhaps more. And my Christmas to new year's period will likely continue to be bracketed and infinitely altered by the event.