Chris Boese's Weblog

The passing of a giant in economics: John Kenneth Galbraith dies at 97

In a world where the widely-discredited and disproven "theories" of "supply-side economics" are being unthinkingly and unquestioningly applied (sorry Milton, but you actually need PROOF) with no attempt at accountability or to verifying the theory's precepts (are they even trying at the University of Chicago?), it is worth noting an economist whose theories seem to gain MORE credence over time.

Link: John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society - New York Times.

John Kenneth Galbraith, 97, Dies; Economist Held a Mirror to Society

By HOLCOMB B. NOBLE and DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: April 30, 2006

John Kenneth Galbraith, the iconoclastic economist, teacher and diplomat and an unapologetically liberal member of the political and academic establishment that he needled in prolific writings for more than half a century, died yesterday at a hospital in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97.

Photo by Brian Snyder/Reuters
John Kenneth Galbraith in 1998.

[...]

An imposing presence, lanky and angular at 6 feet 8 inches tall, Mr. Galbraith was consulted frequently by national leaders, and he gave advice freely, though it may have been ignored as often as it was taken. Mr. Galbraith clearly preferred taking issue with the conventional wisdom he distrusted.

He strived to change the very texture of the national conversation about power and its nature in the modern world by explaining how the planning of giant corporations superseded market mechanisms. His sweeping ideas, which might have gained even greater traction had he developed disciples willing and able to prove them with mathematical models, came to strike some as almost quaint in today's harsh, interconnected world where corporations devour one another.

[...]

At his death Mr. Galbraith was the Paul M. Warburg emeritus professor of economics at Harvard, where he had taught for most of his career. A popular lecturer, he treated economics as an aspect of society and culture rather than as an arcane discipline of numbers.

Keeping It Simple

Mr. Galbraith was admired, envied and sometimes scorned for his eloquence and wit and his ability to make complicated, dry issues understandable to any educated reader. He enjoyed his international reputation as a slayer of sacred cows and a maverick among economists whose pronouncements became known as "classic Galbraithian heresies."

But other economists, even many of his fellow liberals, did not generally share his views on production and consumption, and he was not regarded by his peers as among the top-ranked theorists and scholars. Such criticism did not sit well with Mr. Galbraith, a man no one ever called modest, and he would respond that his critics had rightly recognized that his ideas were "deeply subversive of the established orthodoxy."

[...]

Nearly 40 years after writing "The Affluent Society," Mr. Galbraith updated it in 1996 as "The Good Society." In it, he said that his earlier concerns had only worsened: that if anything, America had become even more a "democracy of the fortunate," with the poor increasingly excluded from a fair place at the table.

Mr. Galbraith gave broad thought to how America changed from a nation of small farms and workshops to one of big factories and superstores, and judgments of this legacy are as broad as his ambition. Beginning with "American Capitalism" in 1952, he laid out a detailed critique of an increasingly oligopolistic economy. Combined with works in the 1950's by writers like David Reisman, Vance Packard and William H. Whyte, the book changed people's views of the postwar world.

Mr. Galbraith argued that technology mandated long-term contracts to diminish high-stakes uncertainty. He said companies used advertising to induce consumers to buy things they had never dreamed they needed.

Other economists, like Gary S. Becker and George J. Stigler, both Nobel Prize winners, countered with proofs showing that advertising is essentially informative rather than manipulative.

[Gee, which is more counter-intuitive to you?]

Many viewed Mr. Galbraith as the leading scion of the American institutionalist school of economics, commonly associated with Thorstein Veblen and his idea of "conspicuous consumption." This school deplored the universal pretensions of economic theory, and stressed the importance of historical and social factors in shaping "economic laws."

Some, therefore, said Mr. Galbraith might best be called an "economic sociologist." This view was reinforced by Mr. Galbraith's nontechnical phrasing, called glibness by the envious and antagonistic.

[...]

Amartya Sen, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, maintains that Mr. Galbraith not only reached but also defined the summit of his field. In the 2000 commencement address at Harvard, Mr. Parker's book recounts, Mr. Sen said the influence of "The Affluent Society" was so pervasive that its many piercing insights were taken for granted.

"It's like reading 'Hamlet' and deciding it's full of quotations," he said.

[...]

[I LOVE that line! It reveals so much in very few words.]

Public Citizen: "One of the biggest con-jobs in recent history"

Are 18 of the richest families in the United States trying to create a feudal aristocracy, a private "club" that will only accept them as elite members?

I'm finding this on the Public Citizen (www.citizen.org), a public-interest watchdog organization founded by Ralph Nader. I'll dip back and forth from the press release and parts of the full report.

Link: Public Citizen | Press Room - Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy Expose Stealth Campaign of Super-Wealthy to Repeal Federal Estate Tax.

April 25, 2006

Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy Expose Stealth Campaign of Super-Wealthy to Repeal Federal Estate Tax

Report Identifies 18 Families Behind Multimillion-Dollar Deceptive Lobbying Campaign

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The multimillion-dollar lobbying effort to repeal the federal estate tax has been aggressively led by 18 super-wealthy families, according to a report released today by Public Citizen and United for a Fair Economy at a press conference in Washington, D.C. The report details for the first time the vast money, influence and deceptive marketing techniques behind the rhetoric in the campaign to repeal the tax.

It reveals how 18 families worth a total of $185.5 billion have financed and coordinated a 10-year effort to repeal the estate tax, a move that would collectively net them a windfall of $71.6 billion.

The report profiles the families and their businesses, which include the families behind Wal-Mart, Gallo wine, Campbell’s soup, and Mars Inc., maker of M&Ms. Collectively, the list includes the first- and third-largest privately held companies in the United States, the richest family in Alabama and the world’s largest retailer.

These families have sought to keep their activities anonymous by using associations to represent them and by forming a massive coalition of business and trade associations dedicated to pushing for estate tax repeal. The report details the groups they have hidden behind – the trade associations they have used, the lobbyists they have hired, and the anti-estate tax political action committees, 527s and organizations to which they have donated heavily.

In a massive public relations campaign, the families have also misled the country by giving the mistaken impression that the estate tax affects most Americans. In particular, they have used small businesses and family farms as poster children for repeal, saying that the estate tax destroys both of these groups.

[...]

“This report exposes one of the biggest con jobs in recent history,” said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. “This long-running, secretive campaign funded by some of the country’s wealthiest families has relied on deception to bamboozle the public not only about who must pay the estate tax, but about how repealing it will affect the country.”

[...]

While they extol the hard work of individual farmers and small businesses, most of the 18 families have been wealthy for generations; only five still include the people who first earned the family fortune. Members of the families are far less likely than most Americans to have paid taxes on their wealth; to a large extent, that wealth lies in assets that have appreciated but, unlike paychecks, have never been taxed.

These super-rich families have spent millions in personal wealth and used their companies’ resources and lobbying power in repeated attempts to influence members of Congress to repeal the tax.

[...]

The stakes of the campaign are great, not only for the super-wealthy families, but for the public. If the families’ repeal bid succeeds, it will cost the U.S. Treasury a trillion dollars in the first decade – roughly what it would cost to provide health insurance for every uninsured person in the United States.

“The estate tax should be regarded as just paying back to the country for all the wonderful things it’s made possible for the people who have that wealth,” said Bill Gates Sr. in an audio statement played at the press conference. “I don’t think there’s any great societal goal being served by inherited wealth. And certainly there’s no sensible argument that I can think of for insisting on being able to pass the last penny of $100 million on to your three kids.”

[...]

Paul Newman, actor and founder of Newman’s Own food company, agreed in a separate statement: “For those of us lucky enough to be born in this country and to have flourished here, the estate tax is a reasonable and appropriate way to return something to the common good. I’m proud to be among those supporting preservation of this tax, which is one of the fairest taxes we have.”

OK, so I'm wanting to see some proof of these allegations, so here some from the Public Citizen report. It's 58 pages, so I'm still just skimming and cherry picking, but here's some bits that jump out at me.

First, I wanted to see the names of the 18 families profiled in the report. I also like to see all in a group the people who are so rich they think they can buy entire nations, like the air breathes differently around them or something. (I've actually been in a classroom with one person from a family on this list, and the air breathed normal just like you'd expect it to. Imagine that.)

1. Allyn-Soderberg Family (Welch Allyn Inc.)
2. Blethen Family (Seattle Times Co.)
3. Cox Family (Cox Enterprises, Inc.)
4. DeVos and Van Andel Families (Alticor/Amway)
5. Dorrance Family (Campbell Soup Company)
6. Gallo (E&J Gallo Winery)
7. Harbert Family
8. Johnson Family (BET, RLJ Development Co.)
9. Koch Family (Koch Industries).
10. Mars Family (Mars Inc.)
11. Mayer Family (Captiva Resources)
12. Nordstrom Family (Nordstrom Inc.)
13. Sobrato Family (Sobrato Development)
14. Stephens Family (Stephens Inc.)
15. Timken Family (The Timken Company)
16. Walton Family (Wal-Mart)
17. Wegman Family (Wegmans Food Markets, Inc.)

OK, so why are there only 17? I must be leaving someone out. Oh, I got it. This is from the Appendix, but in the body of the report they count DeVos and Van Andel Families as two different families, even though they're both Alticor/Amway.

Here's the report's Executive Summary. So only those of you who are executives are allowed to read it, OK? (bold emphasis mine)

Was Crete Plato's Atlantis?

I'm not saying Plato's Atlantis was THE Atlantis, because other things point to a real Atlantis, a civilization or period that precedes our known historical memory, that was wiped out with apocalypic destruction. Plato is most certainly directionally-challenged if he had been talking about Crete, tho, because it ain't WEST of the Pillars of Hercules (Straits of Gibralter).

The Minoans ARE in our historical memory, but their archetype fits the Atlantis archetype, and for Plato, that would work just as surely as the Greek Artemis moon goddess archetype resembles the Roman Diana, as well as moon goddesses in other cultures, like the Sumerian Nanna. The archetype is the pattern, and humanity and memory extend to flesh out and enact the archetype, just as surely as Noah's flood came from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Link: Independent Online Edition > Science & Technology: Olive branch clue to how Minoans were wiped out.

Olive branch clue to how Minoans were wiped out

By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Published: 28 April 2006    

A single olive branch may have solved one of ancient history's most enduring mysteries: when and why did the great Minoan civilisation of the Mediterranean come to a sudden end?

The branch was buried during a cataclysmic volcanic eruption on the Aegean island of Thera - now known as Santorini - and scientists believe they can date the precise moment of the tree's death.

Knowing when the Thera eruption happened is important because the explsion was so powerful that it almost certainly caused the collapse of the Minoan civilisation, centred on the island of Crete, 60 miles away. Vulcanologists believe the explosion generated violent tsunamis that destroyed Crete's ports, threw thousands of tons of ash and pumice into the atmosphere and created a "nuclear winter" that led to successive crop failures in the region.

Scientists have detected ash from the explosion as far away as Greenland, the Black Sea and Egypt. They have also discovered signs of frost damage caused by the volcano on preserved plant material excavated in Ireland and California.

Walter Friedrich, of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, and his colleagues have analysed the olive branch's growth rings and combined the findings with radiocarbon dating to show the tree must have died between 1627BC and 1600BC.

[...]

The study, published in the journal Science, suggests Thera blew apart a century or so prior to the conventional date when the Minoan civilisation was thought to have gone into demise, based on evidence from archaeological objects. The scientists suggest it is highly unlikely the Minoans were able to survive the environmental impact of the eruption, which meant their civilisation ended 100 to 150 years earlier than thought. This would mean the Minoan civilisation was not contemporary with the New Kingdom of ancient Egypt - which began in the 16th century BC - as many archaeologists believed.

[...]

Comparing Prides and their Prejudices

So I've been on a Jane Austen film binge, and add to that another installment of the time-traveling PBS reality shows, this time "Manor House." I must be living in a time warp.

Kiera Knightly is so lovely, and I've liked her in so many films, even the fun "Bend it Like Beckham." And she was nominated for best actress for this most recent "Pride and Prejudice," but I can't help myself, there's just no comparison to the wonderful wonderful BBC "Pride and Prejudice" miniseries, even tho it does start slow. But the 2005 version just missteps too many times.

It is not Dame Judi Dench who missteps, but the costume design and writing that puts her in the Bennett household in the middle of the night.

Donald Sutherland, whom I've loved for years in just about anything, just sleepwalks here. There is no core of his character, just the classic voice reading his lines, just as he does car commercial voice-overs.

Nobody, but nobody, is Colin Firth, and I will never look at him again without seeing the definitive Darcy. That's all there is to it. Which makes his casting in Bridget Jones's Diary a stroke of brilliance (as was the casting of Hugh Grant as the scoundrel seducer. Neither of the two Mr. Wickhams seduces me as well as Hugh Grant, because he channels Miss Jane Hathaway).

I could go on, but I'd just belabor the point, when I could be watching the BBC mini-series again.

Just to register one last complaint: the buildings were too rustic, too earthy, the dances too rousing with beer stein's visible, in the 2005 version. That pig walking through packing his load just broke through the whole story and made me laugh out loud. When you're talking Jane AUSTEN, you are talking about gentle people of impeccable manners (but for the loud younger sisters and the awful mother, played so well). But see, when the background of all those drawing room manners provides the ground, then the sisters and the mother just GRATE on your nerves against that backdrop, and you cringe with Mr Darcy.

And to heap one final bit of praise on the BBC version: The father does sardonic distance remarkably well, and then humbles himself beneath it to make himself eminently like able. Firth unfolds haughty to hottie until just a look from him would melt butter, would melt many things. That awful untalented sister who dominates the piano (while it appears Lizzie both plays and sings better). The casting and writing on the BBC version is spot on and nuanced, and yet it is hard not to be upstaged by such stunning sets and scenic views, not the least of which is Firth swimming, or wet and dripping, depending on what you prefer. Mr. Collins is played to cloying perfection as the obsequious parson cousin-come-courting. He's like something straight out of Chaucer, crossed with Malvolio in Twelfth Night.

Maybe I'm odd, but as sweet as the oldest sister Jane is, Lizzie is far prettier, despite the family's deference to fair Jane. Maybe I just have a thing for darker and feisty or haughty.

So, to cap off my bender (I'm rewatching the BBC version again right now, cleansing my palette of all but Keira Knightly from the newer, younger, older setting, and more compressed version), I've got Bridget Jones I coming up again in my Netflix queue, not to mention Bride and Prejudice, and... what else? Flavor it up with some Emma Thompson in Sense and Sensibility? I think so... I'm a little afraid to go back and pick up the Maureen O'Hara Pride and Prejudice.

And Manor House! I have to get Manor House and start from the beginning. I have no clue why I'm on this kick, when I could be reading... oh, Middlemarch?

I just love fiesty women!

I wish I could see this exhibit. I'm already a Ben Franklin nutjob, and now I'm going crazy trying to read everything I can find on Ekaterina Dashkova. Luckily, there are links to the online exhibit on this site below.

I so envy the folks in Philadelphia who get to see this.

Link: Museum of the American Philosophical Society in Philosophical Hall.

The Princess and the Patriot

Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin and the Age of Enlightenment

Through Sunday, December 31
Museum of the American Philosophical Society

They seemed to have nothing in common. She was the Russian princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova, a noblewoman and friend of Empress Catherine the Great. He was the American printer, scientist, patriot and statesman Benjamin Franklin. When they met in Paris in 1781, it was a meeting of two of the most fascinating minds of the Age of Enlightenment.                     

In The Princess and the Patriot: Ekaterina Dashkova, Benjamin Franklin, and the Age of Enlightenment, a 2006 exhibition at the Museum of the American Philosophical Society in Philosophical Hall, visitors will be introduced to these two fascinating personalities.

Although Franklin is the more familiar of the two, both left indelible marks on their native lands. Franklin invited Dashkova to become the first woman member of the American Philosophical Society. As its director, Dashkova made Franklin the first American member of the Imperial Academy of Sciences and Arts in St. Petersburg. They both exemplified the ideals of the Enlightenment that flourished in Europe and America and still shape our world today.

Portraits, memoirs, letters, maps, court attire, jewelry and other decorative arts—many items never seen before in this country—will be on view. They will document the extraordinary lives of America’s favorite founding father and the outrageous Russian princess who spoke five languages, helped overthrow a czar and directed the most prestigious scientific organization in her country.

The Princess & the Patriot is part of the Benjamin Franklin   Tercentenary, an international celebration of the 300th anniversary of Franklin’s birth.

An interesting observation by a now-ex-blogger

This one quotation from Sarah's article just jumped out at me.

Link: Why I shut down my blog. By Sarah Hepola.

One morning last month, I woke early, finished a book I'd been reading, and shut down my blog. I had kept the blog for nearly five years, using it as a repository for personal anecdotes, travelogues, and the occasional flight of fiction—all of which I hoped, eventually, might lead to a novel. And then, somewhere between the bedsheets and 6 a.m., I realized something: Blogging wasn't helping me write; it was keeping me from it.

[...]

[What she writes here below... I remember feeling EXACTLY this when forced to crank crap forgettable articles for newspapers, either the stress from constantly meeting new people and feeling shy while at the same time having to commodify them, or the personal humilation at knowing I was just dumping my interview stories into a rote formula. That was in the 1980s, though, so I went into an MFA program in creative writing instead, to learn to write for myself and my own standards again. And now, many many years later, blogs have taken me past the creativity-cramping I used to feel after some of my poems got published in good literary magazines, the fear of writing a poem that was pure crap. Blogs are works in progress, and publications. They're a dessert topping AND a floor wax. Can't beat that.]

Just prior to that, I'd been writing for an alt-weekly in Austin, Texas. What began as a great job had curdled into an anxiety nightmare. I would burn to write a certain profile and then, deadline looming, I would stare at the computer as another beautiful Saturday ticked away. I can remember crossing the street one night and thinking, absently, "If I got run over by a car, I wouldn't have to finish that story!" Don't get me wrong—I didn't want to die. I just wanted a really long extension. Thus my decision to leave the job. Thus my journey to the southern hemisphere. Thus the blog that I started, thinking no one would read it and secretly hoping they would. The blog was the perfect bluff for a self-conscious writer like me who yearned for the spotlight and then squinted in its glare. [...]

Eventually, I began enjoying my writing again. I stopped worrying about deadlines, audience, editors, letters to the editor, all the stuff that had smothered me before. I was writing so fast that I didn't have time to double-think my sentence structure or my opinions. What came out was sloppier but also funnier and more honest. I started getting e-mails from people I'd never met, and they were actually encouraging.

[...]

OK, now here's the bit that's my favorite quotation. Maybe I'll put this line up in the banner rotation on my blog. If it isn't too long.

At times, I started to feel that jokes and scenarios and turns of phrase were my capital, and that my capital was limited, and each blog entry was scattering more of it to the wind, pissing away precious dollars and cents in the form of punch lines I could never use again, not without feeling like a hack. You know: "How sad. She stole that line from her own blog."

[...]

[Isn't that cool? And it's just SO true. I've also felt that way about some rants I've written to a listserv I manage. I never know what's going to bite me in  the butt, or when the stars will line up and the universe or the tenth muse is going to speak through me, so stuff comes out that wouldn't otherwise. I have to appreciate that. But if that's the ONLY place where the universe is channeled through my writing, then I'm pissing away my best ideas too.

It did help a lot when I was writing my dissertation, to be active in private listserv discussions in the Xenaverse, the fandom community I was studying. Invaluable, actually, and I owe those people so much for being a sounding board, and for arguing with me when I got it wrong. Sometimes, now, when I read my dissertation, I wonder who wrote it, because I do feel that the tenth muse, or at least Xena and Gabrielle, were using me for a channel. Doesn't feel like I wrote it at all, and on really good days, I swear the dissertation wrote itself. I don't know too many harried and harassed grad students who can say that about the process, but it was one of the best times of my life.

There's one more bit that the writer has here that I thought was a particularly pithy observation:]

I suspect I'll come back to blogging eventually. It will be something I quit on occasion, like whiskey and melted cheese, when the negative effects outweigh the benefits. Practically every blogger I know has taken their site down at some point—for personal reasons, for business reasons, for boredom reasons. It's no different from the way we have to turn off our cell phones or stop checking e-mail so that we can actually focus on something. As much as I loved writing online, it's a relief writing offline: taking time to let a story unspool, to massage a sentence over an afternoon's walk, to stew for days—weeks, even—on a plot line. What a modern luxury. Now, if I could just turn off the TV, I think I could finally get started.

I've been there and done that, and yes, it most certainly did feel very good. I really started blogging in earnest with Radio Userland in early 2002, and the blog I was posting to at that time (nameless here forevermore) rose up respectably in the blogosphere, and in the mostly tech-blog atmosphere of that time, got linked to by the A-listers of the day, which satisfied me but wasn't the be-all and end-all of my existence, having gone through that previous newspaper experience that drove me into the Arkansas MFA program. Regardless of who linked to me, I was really still writing for myself.

So by early 2003, and for certain by the start of the Iraq War, I was immersed in war coverage at work, putting in a lot of overtime, worrying about some war-bloggers in Iraq who are my friends, and I just needed some time off. I went inward, started learning the I Ching, and filled four handwritten journals in six months. Felt real good. And then I started blogging again. That felt good too. It's called "being your own boss."

Ajax sounds interesting: Asynchronous JavaScript + XML

Color me intrigued! adaptive path spells it out in a way I'm beginning to understand. So far I'm up on the XHTML and CSS, and Javascript, of course. But Document Object Model and XSLT are still pretty much Greek to me. Guess I'll have to study up some.

Link: adaptive path| ajax: a new approach to web applications.

Ajax: A New Approach to Web Applications

by Jesse James Garrett  

February 18, 2005

If anything about current interaction design can be called “glamorous,” it’s creating Web applications. After all, when was the last time you heard someone rave about the interaction design of a product that wasn’t on the Web? (Okay, besides the iPod.) All the cool, innovative new projects are online.

Despite this, Web interaction designers can’t help but feel a little envious of our colleagues who create desktop software. Desktop applications have a richness and responsiveness that has seemed out of reach on the Web. The same simplicity that enabled the Web’s rapid proliferation also creates a gap between the experiences we can provide and the experiences users can get from a desktop application.

[...]

Google Suggest and Google Maps are two examples of a new approach to web applications that we at Adaptive Path have been calling Ajax. The name is shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript + XML, and it represents a fundamental shift in what’s possible on the Web.

Defining Ajax

Ajax isn’t a technology. It’s really several technologies, each flourishing in its own right, coming together in powerful new ways. Ajax incorporates:

• standards-based presentation using XHTML and CSS;
• dynamic display and interaction using the Document Object Model;
• data interchange and manipulation using XML and XSLT;
• asynchronous data retrieval using XMLHttpRequest;
• and JavaScript binding everything together.

The classic web application model works like this: Most user actions in the interface trigger an HTTP request back to a web server. The server does some processing — retrieving data, crunching numbers, talking to various legacy systems — and then returns an HTML page to the client. It’s a model adapted from the Web’s original use as a hypertext medium, but as fans of The Elements of User Experience know, what makes the Web good for hypertext doesn’t necessarily make it good for software applications.

[Note to self, get that book. I'm leery of anything that distances the Web from its hypertext roots, however, esp if it comes from an application-driven code bias. That might be a backlash or reversion back to that "olde time religion"]

This approach makes a lot of technical sense, but it doesn’t make for a great user experience. While the server is doing its thing, what’s the user doing? That’s right, waiting. And at every step in a task, the user waits some more.

Obviously, if we were designing the Web from scratch for applications, we wouldn’t make users wait around. Once an interface is loaded, why should the user interaction come to a halt every time the application needs something from the server? In fact, why should the user see the application go to the server at all?

[If codeheads were designing the Web from scratch for applications, they'd probably institute central control, disable aspects of distributed systems, and make it look more like... a mainframe. Aren't we all glad TPTB didn't see things that way? Central control and efficiency are nice things to tout, but they disconnect a system from the greater empowerment that the distributed model gives.]

How Ajax is Different

An Ajax application eliminates the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction on the Web by introducing an intermediary — an Ajax engine — between the user and the server. It seems like adding a layer to the application would make it less responsive, but the opposite is true.

[...]

Who’s Using Ajax

Google is making a huge investment in developing the Ajax approach. All of the major products Google has introduced over the last year — Orkut, Gmail, the latest beta version of Google Groups, Google Suggest, and Google Maps — are Ajax applications. (For more on the technical nuts and bolts of these Ajax implementations, check out these excellent analyses of Gmail, Google Suggest, and Google Maps.) Others are following suit: many of the features that people love in Flickr depend on Ajax, and Amazon’s A9.com search engine applies similar techniques.

These projects demonstrate that Ajax is not only technically sound, but also practical for real-world applications. This isn’t another technology that only works in a laboratory. And Ajax applications can be any size, from the very simple, single-function Google Suggest to the very complex and sophisticated Google Maps.

[...]

Jesse James Garrett is the Director of User Experience Strategy and a founder of Adaptive Path. He is the author of the widely-referenced book The Elements of User Experience.

Note: I'm DEFINITELY buying the book. Just finished looking inside it at Amazon, and I really like its approach.

Who are the tougher journalists? The professional press or bloggers?

My friend at the Kansas University put me on to these two stories. Very intriguing! I'm liking the analysis of the San Francisco Chronicle piece, although wouldn't it be cool if it were a formal rhetorical analysis examining these very questions? Any grad students out there looking for seminar paper ideas? Anyone, anyone, Bueller...?

Link: The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog: Is It Too Late for the Fourth Estate?.

Link: San Francisco Chronicle: New media are the message / 'Journalism by other means' makes its mark.

This first Chronicle below is the Chronicle of Higher Ed.'s Wired Campus Blog.

April 12, 2006

Is It Too Late for the Fourth Estate?

With the merging and closing of newspapers and the emphasis on advertising and marketing, some journalism schools must be looking for a reason to exist. Perhaps it’s time to focus on small-scale, Internet journalism -- journalism for the masses. Dan Gillmor, founder of the Center for Citizen Media (affiliated with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University), posits that online citizen journalism is not ruining the Fourth Estate but adding to it and improving it.

According to an article in a Vermont alternative newsweekly, Gillmor says that tomorrow’s news machine “will be more of a conversation, or a seminar” and that “the lines will blur between producers and consumers.” Given that, some might think that j-schools should take a more active role in educating the general public, not just current and future reporters, about how journalism works.

To add to this whole discussion, the San Francisco Chronicle recently assessed the role that amateur online journalists have had in scrutinizing the Iraq War, the Bush White House, and the Congress. The article suggests that bloggers have been tougher and more perceptive on the issues than professional journalists have. Because of the financial pressures on newspapers and the poor reputation that journalists have among some Americans, it would seem that journalism in general is in trouble. Or maybe blogs like this one represent the future of news?

See what I mean? Wouldn't there be a value to being able to SAY definitively that bloggers have been tougher than professional journalists, OR that professional journalists have been tougher than bloggers?

Rhetorical analysis would be a good tool to evaluate communicative artifacts from a well-selected representative pool of dual coverage. You'd need to operationalize your research question a bit more, but the real key, I think, is making sure that bloggers' journalistic rhetoric is examined in terms of its larger, dialogic ecosystem, rather than as isolated communication acts outside of the larger field of the ongoing conversation. As Gillmor says, "news should be a conversation." Blogs most certainly are.

Another challenge for the kind of research I'm proposing would be to find a dialogic frame for looking at conventional journalism across its larger field of ongoing conversation. I'm in the middle of reading Pierre Bourdieu's short lecture "On Television" right now, and it's interesting to see his attempt to do just that.

So often I hear or feel the frustration of professional journalists who can only throw marshmallows at larger issues that beg for more definitive answers than the admirable but limited effort to skim out an answer with tools of journalism research, as in the San Francisco Chronicle article below. While it's stimulating, it doesn't MAKE KNOWLEDGE or ADD TO THE GREATER POOL OF KNOWLEDGE IN THE WORLD.

Most journalists I've met (who've never been to grad school, and even some who have) don't know that one need not be a specialist or a wonky pointy-headed professor to appropriate and USE professional tools of knowledge-making, such as rhetorical analysis, to arrive at real answers to questions, instead of just gathering a collection of quotes and talking heads to impotently spout off about a larger question.

Journalists defeat themselves before they've started by only allowing themselves to be a shallow channel for thin pronouncements made by other people. And they really only do this on certain topics that pertain to social issues. Most professional journalistic endeavors will have people who use professional tools to analyze an annual report or balance sheet of a company, people with math analysis skills, for instance, or skills for sophisticated database massage. Why shouldn't rhetorical analysis of texts be another skill journalists (or bloggers) can use to hold sources more accountable for their communicative actions on bigger questions about things that really matter?

You KNOW the PR industry has people who are able to do very sophisticated textual analysis as a way to gauge the success and effectiveness of their message campaigns. They don't publish their findings, but they most definitely have them in internal documents. Why should the PR industry be more sophisticated at analysis than the journalists they're trying to manipulate?

Anyway, let's take a look at what the SF Chronicle reporter "suggests," but is unable to make a definitive analysis or argument about.

Link: San Francisco Chronicle: New media are the message / 'Journalism by other means' makes its mark.

New media are the message
'Journalism by other means' makes its mark

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, April 9, 2006

The invasion of Iraq and the three years of war that followed it seem unlikely to go down in history as a proud era for American journalism.

Critics on the political left and right, journalism professors and even many reporters agree that the media  --  print and electronic alike  --  failed to provide accurate, unbiased or complete coverage of the past three years and particularly the run-up to the war.

But while critics often blame that failure on factors unique to the Iraq war or the Bush White House, some experts say journalism's current crisis has less to do with the conduct of the Iraq war and more to do with its timing  --  smack in the middle of the biggest technological revolution journalism has seen in years, "probably not since Gutenberg," in the words of Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley. 

That revolution  --  combining expectations from the journalistic quake that was Watergate, the corporate merging and downsizing of media and, most importantly, the new technologies of the Internet  --  has placed journalism at the precipice of a paradigm shift. Covering the Iraq war, and the public response to that coverage, may just push it over the edge. 

"I think the business of journalism is in a very desperate strait right now," said Thomas Kunkel, dean of the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland. "And that might be the best thing for it."

Some of the most common complaints about the way the American press covered the war come from the political left. Anti-war activists have accused journalists of failing to look skeptically at White House claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, claims that did not prove to be true.

[...]

"The press treated the war at the beginning the way the press treated other wars at the beginning, and that was: There's nothing to discuss. We're off to war," said Theodore Glasser, of Stanford University's Graduate School of Journalism. 

"There was no debate among Democrats and Republicans (about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq), therefore there was no debate in the press. The press has always had a hard time covering debate outside the mainstream."

[...]

"This administration really has been better at keeping people on the reservation generally ... but they've all tried," he said. Nevertheless, the most recent report on the State of the News Media by the Project for Excellence in Journalism found that most people see the press as slanted and more concerned with the bottom line than informing the public. The same survey found that a majority of national reporters feel that the press is too easy on the White House and that journalism is being hurt by bottom-line pressures.

[...]

"To some degree, journalists are berating themselves for not living up to their own mythology ... (But) it's not as if the good old days were always there and we've suddenly lost them."

But there is one area of change in the past few years on which almost all experts, critics and academics agree: the rise of what Lichter called "journalism by other means." 

The Internet has given readers unprecedented access to overseas newspapers, original transcripts of White House briefings, videos of executions posted by the insurgents who committed the deeds, and blogs written by American soldiers, amateur journalists, armchair critics, Iraqi citizens and the next-door neighbor.

Even  Rendall and Aronoff agreed that blogs have offered a new outlet for people disaffected with mainstream news coverage of Iraq and other issues, a defection to which mainstream news media has yet to fully adapt.

The technology behind "journalism by other means" was developing before the war and could have arrived without the invasion of Iraq, as would the economic pressures on mainstream news prompted in part by that new technology.

[...]

"What the war has done is hurled kerosene onto the fire. It provided the passion, and when people are passionate about things, they get active about things."

So instead of creating a ripple of letters to the editor, canceled subscriptions and advertiser boycotts, those unhappy with the mainstream media were able to create vocal displeasure through their own media  --  media that grew larger each day, feeding on itself and on traditional media for content.

[...]

Soon, the blogs demonstrated an ability to make, or remake, news overlooked or handled differently by the mainstream, from analyzing a Wall Street Journal reporter's downbeat letter home from Baghdad to sharing a list of accomplishments purportedly made by the U.S. military since the end of major combat, and from the questionable Bush National Guard memos to Trent Lott's poorly received birthday comments.The result: lots of energetic criticism of the mainstream media, and the budding of a new alternative media, arriving just when traditional media is under enormous financial pressures from corporate mergers and downsizing.

"The media is financially off balance, and then you bombard it with all these political assaults from right and left, and you have an absolutely critical societal function that has no terra firma under it," Schell said. "That's not good for a society that depends on its public to be well-informed." [emphasis mine]

But others see the gloves-off treatment as healthy. 

"The democratization of journalism has really been a phenomenal thing to watch," Maryland professor Kunkel said. "The journalism industry might actually resort to doing better journalism as a way out. If that's what it took to get them to do the right thing, God bless them."

Yup, just bless 'em. Bloggers are out there appropriating tools that are just lying around because journalists won't pick them up, tools of analysis and criticism, of making arguments, debating, evaluating the comparative strengths of various arguments, their persuasive value, and making truths, making new knowledge through dialogue and consensus, as well as dissent and dialectics.

I could take it a step further and berate academics who want to claim these tools as their exclusive domain, speaking in closed groups only to other members of strictly defined disciplines.

Once upon a time there was such a thing as a "public intellectual," but with the great gaping hole in the public commons left by the disengagement of academic intellectuals, the hall monitors of public discourse became the journalists, by default. And they, in the name of populism and accessibility, refuse to use the tools at their disposal, and instead dumb down the public discourse to an intellectually silly relativism where all viewpoints are treated interchangeably as are the talking heads that spout them, to be plugged into a simplistic formula where each issue has two sides and only two, summarized into a thin gruel with no intellectual engagement at all.

Thank goodness bloggers found a way to rush into that airless vacuum left by the abdication of the commons by intellectuals and critical thinkers, and the journalists who fill their thin gruel with factory-farmed high-fructose corn syrup at the behest of "wag the dog" market-driven mass media corporations.

One thing still gives me nightmares (esp. as I contemplate the net effect of the so-called "alt paper," the Phoenix "New Times," buying the iconic and iconoclastic "Village Voice"):

If blogging and the citizen journalism movement hadn't suddenly appeared at this moment in history, would anybody have thought to invent it? Or would we have just chugged along, obese on our overly-sweetened thin gruel and none the wiser to what we were lacking in the empty calories?

Jim Kunstler on the dark side of "growth"

Happened on this site by accident, but liked what I saw. I have to say, I LIKE blogs that give me some substance from the author, something good to chew on.

Blogs that never talk themselves, and instead contantly point me to other places, sometimes they feel like you're sitting in a movie theater, and there's this preview on, tease tease tease, but it just never ends, and you never get to the movie.

Jim Kunstler likes to talk and has something to say, as do the commenters on his blog. Neato. He also makes me very happy that I've never had a mortgage and hope to never have one.

Link: Clusterfuck Nation by Jim Kunstler : Growth.

Growth

April 3, 2006
Americans ought to regard the word "growth" with trepidation. When invoked by presidents and economists, it is meant to imply ideas like "more" or "better." It's a habit of thinking left over from the exuberant phase of the industrial age, when there was always more of everything to get.  Nowadays, though, as we enter terminal years of cheap energy, the word "growth" invokes a new set ideas.

   For instance, "impossible." With the price of oil edging toward $70-a-barrel now, and likely to flirt with $100 by the end of the year, the effect will be higher costs for virtually all products and services, and tremendous stress on every socioeconomic organism from the family to government at all levels to the Ford Motor Car Corporation. The only "growth" we might expect under these conditions is the growth in our exertions to stay where we are, and the truth is that many of the weak will simply fall behind.

[...]

For those of us positioned against the suburban juggernaut, "growth" invokes the destruction of more landscape, the conversion of pastures and croplands into McHousing subdivisions, with a long menu of additional liabilities -- not least being the huge investment in a living arrangement with no future. One would think the "homebuilders" could see this coming -- with oil edging toward $70 -- but the truth is that their companies are programmed for only one kind of behavior -- to keep building 3000 square foot McHouses 27 miles outside Dallas, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Denver, et cetera. Since they won't change the programming, then they will continue their destructive behavior until circumstances make it impossible for them to continue -- when the housing bubble blows up in their faces -- and then the companies will just die.

[...]

  There are many ways of viewing this "growth" predicament, and some strategies we can turn to in the face of it. An obvious one is to change our behavior, to stop acting as though our destructive, terminal, and futile activities were beneficial or indispensable . For instance, we could yield to the reality that the age of mass motoring will have to end. Instead of desperately seeking "alternative fuels" to run our 100 million cars, we could make an effort to restore our railroads. Instead of a million McHousing starts out in the meadows and cornfields, we could repair our existing towns and cities. There is no reason why they cannot be rewarding, beautiful places. There may well be greater benefit in walking more and driving less. The well-off Americans who have visited Europe over the past several decades invariably notice this. Anyway, we are going to need every meadow, cornfield, and pasture that we have, because as cheap energy wanes, we are going to be desperate to grow enough food to feed ourselves -- another reason to be wary of alt.fuel fantasies based on growing crops dedicated to gasoline substitutes.

    One esteemed (and extremely shy) reader refers to the process of moving from a high entropy society to a sustainable one as "autonomic devolution."
 
   "Positive feedback driven social systems breed self-amplifying trends which ultimately self-destabilize," he writes. "Autonomic devolution societies consist of localized islands of self-sufficiency."

[...]

Autonomic devolution. That's something to think about. It was living in Missoula that got me thinking about it, and the local food movement in that area, with the claim that the region could be self-sustaining if cut off from outside sources.