Chris Boese's Weblog

OJR's Robert Niles: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

Link: Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists.

Boy, there's some intriguing stuff packed into this short Online Journalism Review piece by Robert Niles, stuff that gets said on the way to saying something else, and those are the bits that give me pause!

They seem to have more ramifications for the world of writing and literacy than they do for the world of vocational training for journalists, although they are also in some sense tossed off, and could use more support than a hasty generalization.

So I figure, why not look in at them here? Let's look beyond the practical vo-tech employment concerns and wax a bit philosophical.

First, to Robert Niles:

Writing skill is no longer enough to sustain journalists

By Robert Niles

What's the value of journalism?

The short answer is, of course, "whatever someone will pay for it." But a more thoughtful response gets at why people are willing to exchange something of value for news information.

Economics 101 teaches that if more people want something, and the scarcer it is, the higher the price. With millions of new websites competing for people's attention, advertising rates across all media have plunged, threatening news businesses that depend upon advertising income.

[Hmmm. Tell the Econ 101 argument to poets, and they may beg to differ.

While journalists have long had to contend with the idea that their best work has the value of the Daily Fishwrap, the thing that people pile up unread, throw away daily, or use to line birdcages, poets have lived with this deep knowledge, that their very best work, their best of the best, work that strives for standing the test of time, or ephemeral, contingent, and quickly forgotten work like performance art, has an economic value of precisely ZERO, since before the time of Gutenberg. 

Jonathan Zittrain warns: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms

Link: Zittrain: Beware the Rise of Closed Platforms - GigaOM.

I love it when Jonathan Zittrain weighs in on things. Loved his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, and mostly what he says here expands on ideas in there, focused on the platform side of things, and the growing lack of "generativity" and openness in the newer platforms coming out, like the iPhone and Kindle.

So if you haven't read the book, here's some pithy bits as summarized by Liz Gannes:

Imagine, if you will, that you bought a cloud-enabled toaster. And that one day, you got a sudden in-home upgrade to three toast slots from two. Then, just as suddenly, the new feature addition was rolled back. So you were left with two slots and some smushed toast. And then your toaster decided it wanted to start serving orange juice.

You don’t truly own the toaster — rather, according to Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain, “You entered into a service relationship with a breakfast-oriented provider.” That’s the tragic and giggle-worthy analogy Zittrain uses to illustrate his worry that the cloud computing model gives too much control to platforms, which must be trusted to do good.

[...]

His audience included co-panelist Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, a company Zittrain pinpointed as being at the center of the problem.

For instance, Zittrain called Amazon’s Kindle a device with “an operating system crying to get out.” To an even greater degree than with Apple’s iPhone, programmers can’t get direct access to develop on the Kindle platform, he noted. And Amazon retreating on the Kindle’s text-to-speech feature and zapping of U.S. customers’ copies of “1984″ — despite a convincing apology by Jeff Bezos — show the company can beam itself down to make the device less useful when it chooses.

[...]

Zittrain also pointed to Amazon Mechanical Turk, where people can be put to near-automated work that makes them effectively zombies for largely non-useful purposes such as giving five-star reviews for devices they’ve never used. In this case he thinks government regulation, like the FTC’s new blogging disclosure policy, could be a good thing — at least in the sense that it pressures Amazon to police tasks on its platform.

[...]

Is Amazon trying to monopolize the empowering "citizen media" Publish-On-Demand market?

UPDATE 3/30/08: A commenter below (A.F. Stewart) has left a link for an online petition against Amazon's new policy, and I wanted to make it live and promote it also up here at the top of the post:

Buy buttons have now been disabled, (PublishAmerica and Whiskey Press) and Amazon's policy is to do it to all who don't fall into line.

Voice your protest, sign the petition.

http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/protectPOD

Thanks for the link, A.F.!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

I am republishing this courageous post from Writer's Weekly in its entirety, in order to help spread the word. That Amazon.com (normally quite supportive of key aspects of the Citizen Media Movement and its most democratizing elements) would attempt such a thing just leaves me speechless.

I hope I'm wrong, and I hope that the negative PR from such a heavy-handed move by a key gatekeeper rebounds badly and forces Amazon to allow the POD books the same rights and privileges as ANY published book with its own ISBN number.

Could you imagine Amazon dictating such a policy to any small university or literary press? What about selected political publishing houses devoted to giving voice to the Thomas Paines of our day?

Amazon made its name by becoming an online equivalent of our Library of Record. Google has now entered that arena, and the competition was necessary, but we can't expect the Barnes & Noble to take up that mantle, and I don't think it could; its interface is too weak and its devoted user base too also-ran. Many of the affected writers are turning to B&N as an alternative, and that could be a good move, if for nothing else, it could help B&N become a better true competitor to Amazon, but B&N has a long way to go.

Could it really be that Amazon is trying to bite the Long Tail that feeds it?

The Internet can be a truly open space only so long as our searches remain honest. Both Amazon and Google have an obligation to citizens of cyberculture not to go all border collie on us and use their power as gate-keepers at their leveraged choke-points of power as oppressive agents of social control against more democratizing forces online.

I hope to follow this issue more in the future, as I learn more about what's happening here, and Amazon's reaction to a public backlash. I should note that key groups particularly affected by this development are FANWRITERS, a massive constituency of fan fiction writers online who develop their skills and corpus of works in specific fandom communities. I have analyzed this social citizen media phenomena in my dissertation, and in the years since, have followed the careers of many successful writers who have "graduated" from fandom audiences to POD, often bringing their own quite sizable audience of fans with them. The effects of this move by Amazon below on the vast worlds of specific fandoms is just chilling.

The good news, which Amazon may not have realized, is that online fandoms are not simply intensely-focused affinity groups. As I also found in my dissertation, they are highly-organized activist organizations. While charities (on the positive side) cable television production houses and networks (on both the positive and negative side) are most often the targets of their organized activism (other sectors of politics and business should take note!), these fandom groups can easily turn on a dime and activate their bases against any target.

If Amazon should step back from this oppressive policy and I somehow miss it, please let me know, so I can also note the change here, when it happens. I have no interest in sharing this outrage in error, nor do I want to lose my faith in Amazon.

Say it ain't so! Please!

Link: Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else....

http://writersweekly.com/the_latest_from_angelahoycom/004597_03272008.html

March 27, 2008

Amazon.com Telling POD Publishers - Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else...

BREAKING DEVELOPMENT: We were notified by a PublishAmerica author that her book was available for purchase through Amazon on Tuesday but today the "buy" button for her book on Amazon is gone. We researched some other PublishAmerica books and it appears the "buy" button on Amazon has indeed been removed from the vast majority of their book pages.

PublishAmerica issued a press release today that states, "PublishAmerica will not comply with Amazon's ultimatum, and will not allow that company to dictate who will print PublishAmerica's books, and at what conditions."

~~~~~

Some Print on Demand (POD) publishers are privately screaming "Monopoly!" while others are seething with rage over startling phone conversations they're having with Amazon/BookSurge representatives. Why isn't anybody talking about it openly? Because they're afraid - very, very afraid.

Amazon.com purchased BookSurge, a small POD publisher/printer back in 2005. Amazon also lists and sells titles for the largest POD printer, Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram (the large book distributor). According to their website, Lightning Source serves more than 4,300 publisher clients and has more than 400,000 titles in their system.

You'd think Amazon's purchase of BookSurge might have made things a bit uncomfortable between the two companies. However, they continued to work together, getting books on demand to Amazon.com's loyal customers. Things appeared to be cruising along just fine, but perhaps not anymore.

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off."

The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon's Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted "free shipping" that Amazon offers.

Don't believe it? I didn't believe it either. I am Angela Hoy, the co-owner of POD services company BookLocker.com and publisher of WritersWeekly.com. I am well-known in the industry for my activism performed through WritersWeekly Whispers and Warnings. Over the years, we have helped writers recover tens of thousands of dollars in fees from deadbeat editors and publishers, helped them negotiate better contract terms, assisted writers in obtaining payment after their copyrights have been violated, and even assisted police in collecting evidence to prosecute criminals who have preyed on writers. I am also the author of 11 non-fiction books.

Still doubting the reports could really be true, I emailed an Amazon/BookSurge representative who's been trying to get us to talk to him by phone. John Clifford of Amazon/BookSurge called me at 12:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 2008.

My first comment was to tell him we heard a rumor that POD publishers who didn't use BookSurge would have the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages turned off.

He said, "What? Who told you that? That's not true!"

I told him I'd heard some rumors from the "POD underground."

He said he'd previously tried to talk to my husband, Richard Hoy, the President and CEO of BookLocker. I explained that we had a very bad experience with BookSurge in the past and that he was, naturally, hesitant to do business with them again. (Google the words BookSurge complaint without any quotes to see other customers' comments about them as well.)

He claimed the people who worked for BookSurge back then are probably all gone (but that didn't explain the more recent complaints). He made his sales pitch, talking about percentages and such, and said many POD publishers are resisting their attempts to convert to BookSurge. Mr. Clifford also said BookSurge's aim was to help Amazon customers get their books faster.

What he didn't say was that Lightning Source not only packages books for Amazon customers in boxes that feature an Amazon.com return address label, but also drop-ships those orders directly to Amazon customers at Amazon's request. Hmm...

He stated several times that books not converted to BookSurge's system would be "taken down." Since that wasn't exactly what we'd heard, I asked about books that perhaps weren't selling well, that aren't good candidates for converting to BookSurge (books that would remain for sale through Lightning Source, but would never be converted to BookSurge due to the time/expense involved).

Contrary to what he stated at the very beginning of our conversation, Mr. Clifford finally admitted that books not converted to BookSurge would have the "buy" button turned off on Amazon.com, just as we'd heard from several other POD publishers who had similar conversations with Amazon/BookSurge representatives.

Mr. Clifford said authors of those books could participate in the Amazon.com Advantage Program, meaning they would have to pay Amazon $29.95 per year PLUS 55% of the list price of their book, as well as buy and then send those books to Amazon directly for them to warehouse and ship to customers.

I explained to him that we had more than 1500 books in print and that it would take quite awhile to convert all of those over to BookSurge's system. He said as long as the relationship was "moving forward" that the "buy" button would remain active on our authors' books that had not yet been switched.

Another comment Mr. Clifford made was that their eventual desire is to have no books from other POD publishers available on Amazon.com.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?!

I have to wonder if Jeff Bezos is even aware of what is going on within his organization. Here is Amazon's Vision Statement, taken directly from their website:

"Our vision is to be earth's most customer centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online."

What it doesn't say is, "Our customers can buy any print on demand book they might want online...as long as we also get paid to print it."

Nobody likes being backed into a corner, and saying "do this or else" naturally breeds angry rejection and hostility. If we did agree to sign the contract, pulling and transferring files to Amazon/Booksurge would take an enormous amount of time and money. From the POD publishers we've talked to, and from our own experience at BookLocker, we could all be looking at a dire and immediate threat of revenue cuts if we refuse to sign the Amazon/BookSurge contract. Most importantly, there could be an outcry from and potential financial hardship on the authors, who are completely innocent in all of this.

In BookLocker's opinion, and the opinion of all the fellow Lightning Source customers we talked to, the Amazon/BookSurge proposal does not appear attractive at all (yes, we obtained the contract and the file submission specifications). Amazon/BookSurge would make money two ways on Amazon.com sales - first the fee for printing the books, and then 48% of the list price of each sale through Amazon.com. Lightning Source allows its customers to set their own discount rate for Amazon and other retail sales, and does not force POD publishers or authors to pay "48%."

Furthermore, it could take the larger POD publishers months to submit their book files to Amazon/BookSurge, at a considerable cost and number of man-hours. This makes the deal even less attractive. Finally, while the initial list of books submitted by POD publishers could be submitted to Amazon/BookSurge for free, the contract states future books would cost $50 each to process. The cost for individual authors to publish through BookSurge is considerably more, with an average publishing package cost of more than $1,000.

Since Amazon/BookSurge does not offer Ingram distribution (Ingram distribution is considered imperative in the industry for bookstore sales), any company that accepts the Amazon/BookSurge deal, who desires to keep offering Ingram distribution, may need to maintain two copies of the book files. Since the Amazon/BookSurge current specs don't match the Lightning Source specs, future book files, both interior and cover, may need to be formatted separately. So, they would have to pay double the setup fees and might have to do double the formatting work as well...or pay designers to do double the formatting work.

Likewise, self-published authors who believe they must have Ingram Distribution AND an active "buy" button on Amazon to be successful may need to pay double the setup fees (to a POD publisher AND Amazon/BookSurge), and also may need to create two separate sets of formatted files.

In the event where two versions of a book might be available, Mr. Clifford said the Amazon/BookSurge version of the POD book would trump (override) the version offered by Lightning Source on Amazon.com.

AMAZON WAS BUILT BY BOOKS....That Were Written By AUTHORS

When authors get wind of this, we believe they are going to be livid. Authors are also readers. They love books. We suspect they buy from Amazon in droves. I, myself, have been an Amazon junkie for years, not only heavily promoting Amazon.com in my non-fiction books for writers and on our very popular website, WritersWeekly.com, but also listing my own books for sale there, ordering other authors' books, DVDs and numerous other products as well. I pulled up our Amazon customer account and looked at our receipts. We've spent $1508.81 at Amazon.com in the past six months. Multiply that by the number of authors this will affect...authors who, like me, have a multitude of websites to choose from when doing their shopping online.

In addition, authors participate in the Amazon experience, via blogs on the website, by posting reviews about other books, and more, activities that help to continually make Amazon bigger and better. Authors are a loyal bunch! For years, they've been faithfully sending their readers to Amazon.com, again and again, even when they earned lower royalties for doing so.

It's not inconceivable to think that this group, if shoved against a wall like this, won't simply pledge their allegiance elsewhere. Let's face it, BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping on orders of $25 or more, too. Authors can change the links to their book pages on their websites, in their ezines and press releases, and even in their email signatures to their book's page at BarnesandNoble.com. Authors can spend their own money elsewhere as well (as I plan to do). I imagine BarnesandNoble.com will be very happy to process the extra book sales that could result from all of this.

Amazon.com might also upset countless companies that have Amazon Affiliate bookstores on their websites (many authors have these, too!). If Amazon/BookSurge were to follow through with turning off the "buy" buttons for thousands of POD titles, customers following those links from other websites could be confused and annoyed. After clicking on a link, they would find no easy way to purchase the book directly from Amazon, and no way to obtain free shipping on that book, even if they're willing to buy more products to meet the $25 free shipping threshold. One would think Amazon must know the free shipping strategy works to upsell customers on additional products. That's why they offer it. Without it, these customers could have no incentive to buy more products because the product they surfed in to buy does not qualify.

One has to wonder if traditional publishers will be next? Will Amazon eventually require all books sold through Amazon.com to be printed by BookSurge?

Let's all hope and pray this situation is one huge, misguided idea from some mid-level management person and not corporate policy being dictated from the office of Jeff Bezos.

What can you do? Let Amazon know what you think about this "offer" by Amazon/BookSurge.

The names of their Officers and Directors are here: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-govManage

Amazon's Investor Relations Team email address appears near the bottom of this page: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?c=97664&p=irol-faq

Their address is:

Amazon.com, Inc.
P.O. Box 81226
Seattle, WA 98108-1226

Next, tell your author friends, your book buyers, your website visitors, your ezine subscribers and everyone else about this situation. Amazon.com was built on books. Books are written by authors. Unfortunately, it appears authors may ultimately be the innocent pawns in this power struggle.

~~~~~

[...]

Angela Hoy is the publisher of WritersWeekly.com, which offers free job listings and paying markets for freelance writers every Wednesday. Subscribe at WritersWeekly.com. She is also the publisher at BookLocker, which offers full-service, affordable print on demand publishing and free ebook publishing.

~~PERSONAL POSTSCRIPT TO AUTHORS FROM ANGELA~~

There is no reason to panic. We are not aware of any cases yet where the "buy" button has been removed. It is possible, after recognizing everyone's concerns, that Amazon might change its mind.

If they do turn off the "buy" buttons, though, not having an active "buy" button on Amazon.com is not the end of the world.

After selling books for eight years, it has been our experience that "chance purchases" of self-published books on Amazon.com are not the norm. Authors slap books up on Amazon.com all the time, don't market them, and sell zero copies. For most self-published authors, sales are almost always author-driven, meaning the bookstore link you use in your marketing efforts is what's driving your sales, not just simply having your book listed on Amazon.com.

We know from experience that the customer is going to buy your book from where you tell them to buy your book. If you want your customers to qualify for free shipping, you can send them to BarnesandNoble.com, and tell them their order might qualify for free shipping (many people don't know BarnesandNoble.com offers free shipping!).

J.K. Rowling oversteps copyright... because fans are easier to pick on than academics?

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine

The unique ways lawyers and authors try to stretch and distort copyright laws are reaching new levels of absurdity.

At first, I thought the article below was going to go toward a new argument about derivative fiction authorship (a case I believe can and should be made, but a more difficult argument than the point I want to make here).

Then, I realized that Rowling was actually suing what is essentially a critical VOCABULARY guide to Rowling's works.

What? What sort of absurd assumptions sit behind this suit? That the Encylopedia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary should have obtain copyright permission for every entry they include for a term or an entry that has a clear author with copyright?

It gets even sillier. It appears to me (check out the article below and see for yourself) that Rowling and her lawyers are going after FANS of her works largely because they are a less empowered group, rather than target FAR BIGGER offenders of the type of behavior the lawsuit seeks to punish.

What offenders am I referring to? Why, tenured academics in the humanities, of course! There is not an academic in the humanities in the U.S. who has not received tenure specifically for writing about and critically analyzing (and professionally profiting from) someone else's copyrighted work!

If what these fans are doing is a copyright violation, then nearly every scholarly book in the humanities, perhaps every college student's research paper which cites as sources CREATIVE AND COPYRIGHTED WORKS is, by virtue of the reasoning in this lawsuit, is ILLEGAL.

What a bizarro world this is.

Link: J.K. Rowling should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon. - By Tim Wu - Slate Magazine.

J.K. Rowling's Dark Mark

Why she should lose her copyright lawsuit against the Harry Potter Lexicon.

By Tim Wu

 Posted Thursday, Jan. 10, 2008, at 7:59 AM ET

As I wrote in October, over the last few years, the relationship between fan-written Web sites and the copyright owners of the content they draw on, if legally murky, has at least been peaceful. Once it dawned on media companies that fan sites are the kind of marketing that they usually pay hard cash for, they generally left the fans alone. But things turned sour in the fall, when the Harry Potter Lexicon Web site announced plans to publish a book version of its fan-written guide to the Potter world. Author J.K. Rowling and publisher Warner Brothers have sued the Lexicon for copyright infringement, exposing the big unanswered question: Are fan guides actually illegal?

[...]

At issue are the giant fan-written guides like the H.P. Lexicon or the Lostpedia (for the show Lost) that try to collect all known information on topics like Harry's pet owl or the Dharma Initiative. Rowling takes the position that she, as the original author, has the right to block the publication of any such guide. In her words: "However much an individual claims to love somebody else's work, it does not become theirs to sell."

But Rowling is overstepping her bounds. She has confused the adaptations of a work, which she does own, with discussion of her work, which she doesn't. Rowling owns both the original works themselves and any effort to adapt her book or characters to other media—films, computer games, and so on. Textually, the law gives her sway over any form in which her work may be "recast, transformed, or adapted." But she does not own discussion of her work—book reviews, literary criticism, or the fan guides that she's suing. The law has never allowed authors to exercise that much control over public discussion of their creations.

Unlike a Potter film or computer game, the authors of the Lexicon encyclopedia are not simply moving Potter to another medium. Their purpose, rather, is providing a reference guide with description and discussion, rather like a very long and detailed book review. Such guides have been around forever—centuries if you count the Bible, and more recently for complex works like the writings of Jorge Borges or The Lord of the Rings. As long as a guide does not copy the original work verbatim, it falls outside the category of "adaptation." And that's why it is largely unnecessary to discuss the more complex copyright doctrine of "fair use." Rowling's rights over the guide don't exist to begin with, so we don't need to go there.

[...]

Bizarrely, Rowling says that the fan guide would prevent her from writing her own guide to the Potter world. "I cannot," she said in a statement "approve of 'companion books' or 'encyclopedias' that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book. ..." To begin with, Rowling sounds entirely too much like a Death Eater in this quote. More generally, two products in the same market isn't called pre-emption—the word is competition. Why not let consumers decide which guide they like better? Rowling might object that the fan's guide will be strewn with errors or poorly written; but it is hardly the job of copyright to protect us from bad execution. And the fan's guide might actually be better, or at least different.

There are more ethereal reasons that Rowling ought not win. For reasons anthropologists will someday understand, volunteer encyclopedias have become the place to find what passes for our collective wisdom. Wikipedia is the clearest example: It may be wrong sometimes, but it is nonetheless a statement as to what we know. To her credit, Rowling accepts this and tolerates the online version of the H.P. Lexicon. But a general rule of the kind she is asking for isn't so generous: It would, by necessity, give copyright owners power over the content of Wikipedia and other online encyclopedias that discuss their works. Not the end of the world, but certainly a subtle form of thought control.

In the end, this dispute is about the current meaning of authorship. Rowling is the initial author and deserves the bulk of the credit, respect, and financial reward. But she has all of that. What she wants is a level of control over the Potter world that just isn't healthy. The authors of fan guides, like house elves, rarely get famous or rich. They deserve legal credit for their modest contributions, not the Wizengamot.

What bothers me above is that the author, Tim Wu, while making good points, is perhaps missing the most important point.

Wu is drawing some kind of unconscious distinction between critical study through works of of analysis and cataloging and documenting done by SANCTIONED and IMPORTANT author-types (a self-appointed class, as declared by the various academic credentialing or the established publishing industry) and ordinary people, hereto referred to by the diminutive label "fans."

He never mentions this distinction in the article, but he also never reaches or sees past it. What is the difference between a fan seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of Rowling's work and a tenured professor seeking to write the "definitive" piece of encyclopedic analysis and cataloging of, say, Emily Dickinson's work?

And no, the fact that Emily Dickinson is dead, or supposedly "canonized" by some massive sanction system called a "literary industry" doesn't count. Current postmodern scholars have easily collapsed distinctions between so-called "high" and "low" cultural products, distinctions that were only ever really enforced by repetition.

Further, before the advent of Modernism and New Criticism in literature, the PRIMARY "product" of literary scholars was a form of criticism known as "traditional-biographical."

That means if you wanted to be a literary scholar back in that time, you had two routes to follow:

1. catalog and link the author's works against a careful biographical analysis of events or aspects of the author's life, OR

2. catalog and carefully establish the exact chronology and literary development of various textual versions of the author's works, those first drafts that establish dates, the variorum editions that attempt to argue that Emily Dickinson used male and female pronouns interchangably in her love poems, or that Shakespeare wrote Twelfth Night BEFORE Hamlet.

Oh yeah, and along the way, they'd argue over and create lexicons for specialized terms and metaphors, which, for authors such as Jonathan Swift or Lewis Carroll, mean unusual and otherworldly terms and situations, and the potential political points that were made through allegory.

Granted, literary criticism has evolved considerably since then, to the point of subjecting live and dead authors to psychological high colonics in order to analyze the symbolic systems that go along with the works (ala' Freud or Jung). Or they take apart the imperialist or foundationalist cultural assumptions an author makes (like Tim Wu above), or even just to do a micro-minutia focus on a single literary work alone, as if it doesn't even have an author, or better yet, treat it as if the work itself doesn't exist and only the reader does!

All of which FANS of ANY work can engage in and profit from just as viably as tenured academics, because the Commons is free for anyone to engage in independent and unaffiliated research, even ordinary fans, even (gasp) ordinary journalists, even ANYONE who gets up in the morning and puts her underwear on one leg at a time.

Imagine that. Shhhh. Don't tell J.K. Rowling's ambitious lawyers. Think of the field day they could have, if they were turned loose in academia.

We now interrupt this blog for a bit of 1855 Leaves of Grass

Link: Leaves of Grass (1855).

Have you reckoned a thousand acres much? Have you reckoned the earth much? 
Have you practiced so long to learn to read? 
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? 

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems, 
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun . . . . there are millions of suns left, 
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand . . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . . nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, 
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.   

I have heard what the talkers were talking . . . . the talk of the beginning and the end, 
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.   

There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now; 
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.   

Urge and urge and urge, 
Always the procreant urge of the world.   

Out of the dimness opposite equals advance . . . . Always substance and increase, 
Always a knit of identity . . . . always distinction . . . . always a breed of life.   

To elaborate is no avail . . . . Learned and unlearned feel that it is so.   

Sure as the most certain sure . . . . plumb in the uprights, well entretied, braced in the beams, 
Stout as a horse, affectionate, haughty, electrical, 
I and this mystery here we stand.

Walt Whitman

 

Philip K. Dick is starting to get his due

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

I have to post this as vindication, for all my students who complained about my showing Blade Runner and making them do their first paper on it, for years in first-year composition.

I had a terrible nightmare this morning that had to have been something straight out of Dick, now that I think about it. It was just terrible, a flashback from my previous job. In the dream I sat for seemingly hours, trying to write three 15-second "stories," the details and order of which kept changing the entire time I was writing them, the whole time sitting in someone's ratty bedroom on some really uncomfortable upholstery. When I woke up, I was so sore, I could barely hobble to the bathroom.

They oughta do a study on how many people's dreams get polluted by waking up with NPR news bleed-thru into their dreams.

Anyway, I wasn't dreaming of electric sheep, but I do have a Dick novel I would option for a screenplay in a heartbeat. I'm not going to say which one it is, though. Someone else might get it first. [grin]

Link: Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come - New York Times.

Philip K. Dick: A Sage of the Future Whose Time Has Finally Come

By BRENT STAPLES

Published: June 8, 2007 

Philip K. Dick was still an obscure pulp novelist known mainly to teenage boys when a friend predicted that he would one day have more impact on the world than celebrated writers like William Faulkner, Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut. The prediction seemed almost delusional in the 1960s, when Dick was popping pills around the clock and churning out novels in a science fiction ghetto from which he seemed destined never to escape.

He did get out, but only posthumously. And with his recent celebration as the sage of futurism, and his pervasiveness on bookshelves and in Hollywood, the early predictions about the growth of his influence have come to seem prescient.

Dick was largely unknown to the general public at the time of his death in 1982. Most of his novels and short stories were out of print and seemed destined to stay that way. Things began to change after his favorite and best written novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,” was introduced to the country in the form of the now classic movie “Blade Runner.”

[...]

The film struck a number of chords in the real world. Its vision of the polyglot, environmentally ruined Los Angeles spawned the phrase “Blade Runnerization” among urban planners who recognized it as a frighteningly likely vision of things to come. In recent years, movies based on Dick’s work —“Minority Report,” “A Scanner Darkly,” “Next” — have become a cottage industry in Hollywood. Numerous other projects, including a film based on his life, are said to be in the works.

The movie craze carried over into the book world, where publishers have pushed more than 30 of Dick’s novels and scores of his short stories back into print, this time with book covers and promotional material designed to appeal to mainstream readers. The rehabilitation hit a literary high note earlier this month, when the Library of America issued “Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s,” which placed him in the company of Henry James, Saul Bellow, Faulkner and other heavyweights.

Dick wrote his share of bad novels, which is hardly surprising given that he wrote stoked up on drugs and suffered no end of paranoid delusions. His best books distinguish themselves from ordinary science fiction by focusing not on technology, but on the toll that technological advances often take on human values — and on the soul itself.

[...]

Dick was fully engaged in the science of cybernetics — which supposes a similarity between machine and human functioning — and deeply alarmed about what he saw as the encroachment of programmable machinery into human life.

His writing was shaped by the legitimate worry that human beings were merging with the technology that was supposed to be serving them and becoming less human (which is to say, more machine-like) in the bargain.

Androids in much of science fiction are cast as entertaining house pets. Dick’s androids are sinister and potentially dangerous, because they lack the leavening spark of humanity.

[...]

The science fiction writer’s job is to survey the future and report back to the rest of us. Dick took this role seriously. He spent his life writing in ardent defense of the human and warning against the perils that would flow from an uncritical embrace of technology. As his work becomes more popular, readers who know him only from the movies will find it even darker and more disturbing — and quite relevant to the technologically obsessed present.

      

 

Kurt Vonnegut R.I.P.: the world will miss one of its most sarcastic voices

I couldn't do a steady diet of Kurt Vonnegut, but I always had a love of his arch sensibilities. We also shared a birthday, something that every newspaper horoscope column would tell me every year on my birthday. Sort of makes you feel like you're buddies or something, you know?

My favorite Vonnegut story is Player Piano. What's yours? 

Here are some other obits:

Link: Kurt Vonnegut | Special reports | Guardian Unlimited.

Link: Democracy Now! | Novelist Kurt Vonnegut Dies at 84.

Link: US writer Vonnegut dies from injuries sustained in fall - North America - World - Breaking News - Belfast Telegraph.

US writer Vonnegut dies from injuries sustained in fall

Thursday, April 12, 2007

The US writer and novelist Kurt Vonnegut has died at the age of 84 from injuries he suffered in a fall at his Manhattan home a number of weeks ago.

Vonnegut was the author of 19 published novels, many of them best-sellers, as well as dozens of short stories, essays and plays.

He was regarded as one of the United States' most articulate and imaginative social critics, using satirical commentary to get his message across.

Vonnegut is best known for his novels Slaughterhouse Five and Cat's Cradle.

Link: NPR : Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor.

Remembrances

Novelist Vonnegut Remembered for His Black Humor

by Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne 

Thos Robinson

Kurt Vonnegut and his wife, Jill Krementz, attending the opening night of  What the Bleep!?: Down the Rabbit Hole at Biltmore Theatre on Feb. 2, 2006 in New York City. Getty Images

NPR Interviews with Vonnegut

• Sep. 12, 1999
  Vonnegut on a new collection of his earliest short stories, Bagombo Snuff Box.
• Sep. 10, 2003
  Vonnegut on the British firebombing of Dresden, Germany, near the end of World War II.
• Sep. 11, 2005
  Vonnegut on the release of a collection of essays and speeches, A Man Without a Country.
• Jan. 23, 2006
  Vonnegut on how society has changed in the last 50 years.

Morning Edition, April 12, 2007 · Novelist Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays, died in Manhattan Wednesday. He was 84.

Vonnegut leaves behind many novels, including that iconic novel born out of his memories of war and its absurdities. Vonnegut's mother killed herself when he was a young man leaving to serve in World War II. As a private in that war, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a former slaughterhouse in Dresden. From there he stepped out into the hellish, surreal landscape that Dresden became after it was firebombed. It took him 25 years to turn that experience into Slaughterhouse-Five.

"You can't remember pure nonsense," Vonnegut told Renee Montagne in 2003. "It was pure nonsense, the pointless destruction of that city, and, well, I just couldn't get it right. … I kept writing crap, as they say."

Slaughterhouse-Five, filled with the blackest of black humor, was finally published in 1969 — and became an instant bestseller. Vonnegut said he saw the book's publication as a kind of liberation.

"I think it had not only freed me, I think it freed writers," he said, "because the Vietnam War made our leadership and our motives so scruffy and essentially stupid that we could finally talk about something bad that we did to the worst people imaginable, the Nazis, and what I saw, what I had to report, made war look so ugly. You know, the truth can be really powerful stuff."

Vonnegut was a committed humanist and an outraged critic of the war in Iraq. On the lecture circuit in the years before his death, he told students that teaching is friendship, and he told artists that their anti-war protests had the power of a banana cream pie. Vonnegut also asked people to notice when they feel happy.

Fellow author Gore Vidal says Vonnegut was a writer like no one else. "He was a witty writer. He was a very good science fiction writer, which meant that he could deal rather safely in satire at the times in the '50s when other people didn't really dare."

Indeed Vonnegut approached the darkest subjects with humor, which was also the way he described his own life. He was a longtime smoker who once explained the habit by calling it a "fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide." In Vonnegut's case, it never quite took: He lived into his ninth decade, and died from complications from a fall.

Vonnegut's last work was a collection of essays called A Man Without a Country. In it, he suggested the way that music helped him through tragic times.

"Why this is so I don't know," he explained in a 2005 interview. "Or what music is I don't know. But it helps me so. During the Great Depression in Indianapolis when I was in high school I would go to jazz joints and listen to black guys playing, and man they could really do it. And I was really teared up. Still the case now."

Though he was a vocal religious skeptic, Vonnegut wrote in that final essay collection that "if I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: 'The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music.'"

[...]

                                                            

Human Subjects Review Boards gone mad?

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

I ran into this kind of ridiculousness in grad school as well. The thing is, my study was massively attentive to research ethics, and I went far beyond whatever ethical requirements a review board might make, because the theoretical frame of my study took a strong position against the exploitation that comes with colonialist thinking, even with scholarly "territories."

But even so, I ducked out on the Human Subjects review with one quick trick. It may not have been the best solution, and, as the absurd issues pointed up in the article below highlight, the Review Board probably could have still taken an insanity pill and come after me.

Basically, even though I was technically conducting an ethnography in cyberspace, I chose to ONLY collect texts that would have otherwise existed in the public domain, a linguistic fiction that worked because communication in cyberspace domains is a hybrid of both published texts and live interaction.

The article below accurately points out, such restrictions certainly limit the kinds of findings that can come from any research. To my end, I still did "informal" research, and just removed it from any connection to my formal data-gathering process, through forming personal and private relationships in the group I was studying, but keeping them out of the study. But they surely did inform my larger breadth of knowledge on my subject.

Another reason why this is just nuts occurred to me when working back in the field of journalism the last five years.

Since the journalistic enterprise is not constructed as formal "research," journalists can do many more things to gather information from human subjects than academic researchers can. How does this affect how knowledge is made, how truths are constructed, when academic censorship becomes a major influence in the social construction of that knowledge?

Journalists operate with a Jeffersonian epistemology of sorts, where the supposedly free flow of ideas helps them arrive at the best-guess contingent truths. Yet, by default, because academics stay in their disciplinary walled gardens and rarely participate in public knowledge-making as public intellectuals, the journalistic research methods construct more of our common truths than anything else, simply because academics have ceded the Commons to them.

Meanwhile, Human Subjects Review Boards seem to have morphed into Cotton Mather and the good folk of 1692 Salem, Massachusetts, seeing evil lurking in every nuance and human interaction, every specter, every hint of a specter.

And do you know why? It's because I've been coming into their homes in the night, during their dreams, and pinching them, over and over. Pinch, pinch.

Link: As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits:Colleges and Universities - Institutional Review Boards - Ethics - New York Times.

As Ethics Panels Expand Grip, No Field Is Off Limits

By PATRICIA COHEN

Published: February 28, 2007

Ever since the gross mistreatment of poor black men in the Tuskegee Syphilis Study came to light three decades ago, the federal government has required ethics panels to protect people from being used as human lab rats in biomedical studies. Yet now, faculty and graduate students across the country increasingly complain that these panels have spun out of control, curtailing academic freedom and interfering with research in history, English and other subjects that poses virtually no danger to anyone. 

Photo by Marko Georgiev for The New York Times

Bernadette McCauley, a historian who was temporarily banned by an ethics panel from doing any research.

The panels, known as Institutional Review Boards, are required at all institutions that receive research money from any one of 17 federal agencies and are charged with signing off in advance on almost all studies that involve a living person, whether a former president of the United States or your own grandmother. This results, critics say, in unnecessary and sometimes absurd demands.

Among the incidents cited in recent report by the American Association of University Professors are a review board asking a linguist studying a preliterate tribe to “have the subjects read and sign a consent form,” and a board forbidding a white student studying ethnicity to interview African-American Ph.D. students “because it might be traumatic for them.”

“It drives historians crazy,” said Joshua Freeman, the director of the City University’s graduate history program. “It’s a medical model, it’s inappropriate and ignorant.” One student currently waiting for a board to approve his study of a strike in the 1970s, Mr. Freeman said, had to submit a list of questions he was going to ask workers and union officials, file signed consent forms, describe the locked location where he would keep all his notes, take a test to certify he understood the standards.

Review boards, first created in 1974, were initially restricted to biomedical research. In 1981 the regulations were revised to cover all research that involves “human subjects” and is designed to contribute to “generalizable knowledge.”

Yet precisely how to interpret these rules has largely been left to each review board — 5,564 in all. And while the regulations apply specifically to research that gets federal dollars, many colleges use Institutional Review Boards to monitor all research, no matter where the funds come from. This system of helter-skelter enforcement, critics say, has no meaningful oversight and no appeal process.

[...]

But to many faculty and graduate students, review boards are like a blister that gets worse with every step. Those outside of the hard sciences say the legitimate concerns over ethics and safety are largely irrelevant to most of their research.

According to a stack of reports, symposiums and studies by academic associations and scholars, the system’s “mission creep” is having a pernicious and widespread effect on humanities and social science research. Legal scholars also argue the boards violate the First Amendment.

The growing number of complaints in recent years apparently stems from an overall crackdown after a series of medical-research blunders beginning with the death of an 18-year-old in a gene-therapy trial at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

[...]

In the past year, discussions about what some call the “I.R.B. wars” have sprung up in specialty publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education, conferences, scholarly journals and blogs. Although research proposals are rarely rejected, scholars argue that the requested changes in the wording of questions and consent forms can alter the nature of the study and scare off participants.

Bernadette McCauley, a historian at Hunter College, said she ran into trouble a couple of years ago when she tried to help students working with the Museum of the City of New York on an exhibition about Washington Heights. She asked if a few nuns who had grown up in that neighborhood and whom she knew from her research would talk to the students. And that, Ms. McCauley said, was “when things went haywire.”

The review board discovered the request and lambasted Ms. McCauley for failing to consult with it, she said. The board also demanded proof that previous research for a completed book did not use any archival material involving living people and banned her from doing any research.

Michael Arena, the director of communications at City University, said in an e-mail message that Ms. McCauley initially refused to send in a “brief description” of her research so that board members could determine whether federal regulations covered her work. Ms. McCauley hired a lawyer and after six months of negotiations, the board agreed that her research was exempt.

[...]

Ms. Dougherty, an associate professor of communications at Missouri, said review boards were needed because “historically, social science has done things abhorrent to human subjects.” Unfortunately the current process “obliterates a lot of research,” she said, because untenured faculty and graduate students on a timetable cannot afford to spend months waiting for approval. So, for example, “instead of talking to people who are victims of violence, you might look at newspaper articles,” she said, echoing a common complaint that the requirements cause academics to steer clear of controversial topics. Research decisions “should be guided by science,” she said, “not whether or not it’s going to get through the board.”

Ms. Dougherty said she was willing to speak openly, unlike many graduate students and faculty, because she had tenure.

[...]

Mr. Schwetz said there was no chance that some subjects like oral history and journalism would be altogether excluded from review, as some academic organizations have urged. “If we were just to say, ‘Assume you don’t have to take them before an I.R.B.,’ I think we would regret that,” he said. But he said the new guidelines “will give a lot of examples and will give more guidance on how to make the decision on what is research and what is not.”

Some critics fault the universities, placing blame either with overzealous panels or with university administrations that have not done enough to differentiate between research that receives federal money and research that does not.

Mr. Freeman of City University said that within the humanities “most faculty members don’t know these rules exist.” He added, “If they in fact followed these rules, the whole I.R.B. system would grind to a halt.”

 

Oh no! Hendrix College is going URBAN?!

What is the world coming to?! I spent four of the most utopian summers of my life teaching at Arkansas Governor's School on the Hendrix campus in Conway, Arkansas. This photo below is the track right next to the faculty dorm. I suppose the focus on school is just too intense for hyperstimulated kids these days, but for me, the beautiful campus was heaven on earth, even with the intense summer heat in central Arkansas (hey, that's what the air conditioned faculty lounge was for!)

What will they do next? Will Massachusetts institutions Amherst College and Williams College start putting up bland cement high-rises? Hendrix College was just such a perfect place...

In the world of the mega-church, with fast food joints replacing church basement coffee and the out-of-tune piano, turning campus villages into generica malls can only be next, right about the time the rest of the world is abandoning malls for being so bland and look-alike.

I should talk. I taught at Clemson, SC, a "town" far smaller than the university that dominates it, and the "Death Valley" football stadium that triples the population of the university on game day. The "town" consists entirely of one of those fake "main streets" that is really just a college strip.

Link: Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize - New York Times.

Rural Colleges Seek New Edge and Urbanize

Stephen B. Thornton for The New York Times

At Hendrix College in Conway, Ark., ball fields and woods that the college owns near the main campus will be replaced by an urban-style village.

By ALAN FINDER

Published: February 7, 2007

CONWAY, Ark. — Across from the red-brick Collegiate Gothic campus of Hendrix College in central Arkansas lie a few beat-up ball fields, tennis courts and an expanse of woods. Downtown Conway is only a half-dozen blocks away, but it is “not overflowing with amenities,” as Frank H. Cox, a member of the Hendrix board of trustees, diplomatically put it.

For decades, colleges like Hendrix in rural areas of the country embraced a pastoral ideal, presenting themselves as oases of scholarship surrounded by nothing more distracting than lush farmland and rolling hills. But many officials at such institutions have decided that students today want something completely different: urban buzz. “You can’t market yourself as bucolic,” J. Timothy Cloyd, the Hendrix president, said.

At the same time, officials have realized that a more urbanized version of the ideal campus could attract a population well past its college years — working people and retiring baby boomers — if there is housing to suit them. And so a new concept of the college campus is taking root: a small city in the country that is not reserved for only the young.

At Hendrix, construction will begin this year on a large urban-style village on the 130 acres of ball fields and woods that the college owns across the street from the main campus, with stores, restaurants and offices. Soon, officials hope, will come nearly 200 single-family houses, many with rental apartments above the garage; 400 town houses, apartments and loft-style condominiums; and a charter school with the college as a participant.

On the corner of the property, a large student fitness center is already being built, which will be available to the owners of houses and condominiums and to the apartment dwellers, probably for a fee, as will many of the college’s other cultural and educational facilities.

Similar projects are under way at about a dozen other institutions nationwide, including the University of Connecticut in Storrs; the University of Notre Dame; Furman University in Greenville, S.C., where a retirement community on campus is being planned; and Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., where construction will begin soon on 120 condominium apartments on campus for working people and retirees.

“It’s part of a pattern of colleges and universities realizing that they have elements that are appealing to a population far broader than 18- to 25-year-olds,” said Ralph J. Hexter, president of Hampshire College. “It’s often said of a college education, ‘It’s a shame it’s wasted on the young.’ ”The distinctive marks of many of these campuses are shops, restaurants, offices and housing that, together, create a destination. The idea is to produce street life and to promote social interaction.

Nearly all of these developments are being built by institutions with vast tracts of unused land; officials hope to take advantage of that asset to help build endowments. Generally, these are also institutions that are not looking to expand significantly the size of their student bodies.

Students graduating from high school these days seem particularly attracted to urban settings, said Dr. Cloyd, the Hendrix president. Many come from the suburbs, he said.

“I think students crave the kind of vitality you have in an urban space,” Dr. Cloyd said. “The images that reveal an active social life are urban-based.”

[...]

      

Steve Jobs: The Greatest Living Showman on Earth?

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Doesn't everyone sit and play Steve Jobs's new product introduction keynote addresses over and over?

I know, it's his schtick, and comedians should be parodying it, but he does it because it works, even with the predictable jeans and black mock turtleneck. Each time I try to guess how much more his hair has thinned, how well he looks in recovering from his illness. I have to care. What would my world be like without Steve Jobs in it?

In the world of traditionalist High Priests (Hierophants), he's a High Priestess. He sits between the two pillars in front of a pomegranate curtain, the bottom of the skirts of the Empress (the goddess of creativity). He says, "Come, let's see what's behind my curtain."

And we watch as he starts his reveal, peeling back the layers in the extended "and... and... and..."

Which would mean little if what was behind the curtains were not so utterly dazzling, were not such exemplary design. Put me in an audience with Steve on stage, and you couldn't make me leave, not for a movie premiere, or a cliffhanger of my favorite TV show. Right now I can't even think what it would take to upstage Steve, for me, at least.

Yes, I know this is demagoguery, and I'm very silly. Gush gush gush. I want to invent things with huge teams of engineers, like Steve has at his disposal.  In another age, he might be William Blake or Shakespeare or Picasso, but his canvas is technology and communication devices, communication revolutions. I've been on this ride since BEFORE 1984, and I'm not getting off any time soon.

Link: Apple - QuickTime - Macworld 2007 Keynote.

Here's another fun article on the topic:

Link: Apple's Steve Jobs: A man with plenty of options - The Boston Globe.

BOSTON CAPITAL

The iReality of options

By Steven Syre, Globe Columnist  |  January 11, 2007

What a show.

Steve Jobs is in a class by himself when it comes to the technology product launch as consumer spectacle. Jobs practically invented the concept years ago, and proved this week that he remains peerless in his ability to knock the socks off a normally jaded crowd. Apple Inc.'s glitzy iPhone isn't for sale yet, and the company doesn't even own the rights to the name. But the new phone is an unqualified hit.

The iPhone launch went so well this week that it was easy to lose sight of the fact that Apple and Jobs have a big problem on their hands. Apple's acknowledged past practice of backdating employee stock options and the company's investigation into its own actions leave a lot of serious questions to be answered.

Of course, Apple isn't the only company with a stock-option investigation on its hands. Nearly 200 public companies have been caught up in the scandal. Dozens of executives have retired, been fired, or otherwise pushed out of their companies, and a few have been charged with crimes.

Not everyone is incensed by the options scandal. Some see it as an empty creation of corporate governance scolds. Those skeptics have seized the Apple situation and posed a question: What are you going to do, fire Steve Jobs?

That's a good question because we could come to learn that Jobs did or failed to do things, crossing thresholds that got other chief executives fired. And that would be a disaster.

Steve Jobs is the force of ambition, innovation, and vision at Apple, influencing a big company to a degree matched by few other chief executives. He has built Apple into a real leader and made his shareholders huge amounts of money in the process.

Since Jobs returned to the company as interim chief executive in 1997, Apple shares have earned more than 34 percent a year. The stock has appreciated by nearly $10 billion in just the two days since the iPhone was unveiled. Whatever Apple's future, it depends heavily on Jobs.

While Apple was preparing for its iPhone launch, the options-backdating story dripped out in stages, and Jobs seems to be more involved in each new version.

More than 6,000 options grants were improperly dated at Apple, and Jobs sometimes recommended specific dates. The record shows Jobs himself was awarded options at a board meeting that never really took place. But Jobs did not get much, if any, personal benefit from the options that were later swapped for stock.

A small committee of outside directors, including Al Gore, investigated. Its conclusion: Two former executives were to blame. Jobs didn't appreciate the accounting issue. He's all clear.

Apple was never going to throw Steve Jobs under the options bus. But how should stockholders think about Jobs and all the other executives in similar situations?

That depends on the answers to these three questions:

How bad were the specific offenses? What was the motivation? What has the executive contributed to his company and its shareholders?

Apple's misdated options were widespread, but I'm still not sure how culpable its chief executive is. Some executives who lost their jobs were options-abuse pigs, but Jobs clearly does not fall into that camp. Finally, Jobs has directly created many billions of dollars of value for Apple stockholders in the past decade.

[...]