precisely. sure, the material you're taught is not irrelevant, but the most important thing current students don't recognize is that college is about learning how to learn. speaking as someone who teaches philosophy and religion, many of the students in my classes would benefit from the realization that the simple fact that my class is not in "real-world" knowledge or skills (like jsp or burger-flipping) doesn't mean they have nothing useful to learn in it. if they can adapt to learn what i'm trying to teach them, then they can adapt and learn anything. and isn't that the single most useful job skill anywhere and at any time? surely no one who hires you out of college expects you to know everything you will need to know, but they do expect you to be able to learn it . . . and fast.
read wuthnow and ladd
on
Browsing Alone
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
a lot has happened on this topic since the publication of putnam's original essay and subsequent book. probably the most important rejoinder is robert wuthnow's book, Loose Connections: Coming Together in America's Fragmented Communities, wherein he argues (as you might guess from the title) that americans are still quite involved with the community, but in different ways, with different values framing their involvement, and with quite less stable relationships to specific kinds of community organizations--particularly those that form the backbone of putnam's analysis. everett carll ladd also argues in The Ladd Report that there remains compelling evidence that people are participating in society.
the question then is, what is the internet/web's role in a changing social/community structure? if anything, i'd be inclined to argue that the internet enables precisely the kind of loose connections wuthnow describes. i would also say (purely impressionistically) that we now have a greater sense of a world community of which we are part, and that is thanks largely to the expansion of the internet and its adoption as a source of news. i have one word, in this regard: nettime.
Unfortunately at least our local university library (University of South Florida) has moved to electronic journals with a number of publications. Not only do many of these not allow you to browse them, they also require a computer (and power) to view and often lack crucial graphics and pictures.
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
well, in the case of newspapers and news magazines like NYT and Time, i'll bet there's still microfilm of the issues covered by this ruling, if there's not paper copy (which there may well be in a lot of cases).
as for electronic journals, if you're talking about academic/professional journals, this ruling will be irrelevant to most if not all of those. authors rarely get paid in anything but free copies or offprints for those journals, anyway.
"Communities are emergent entities. You can't build them intentionally unless you realize that and create a product, service, or theme which inspires people to want to talk to others, not specifically to 'be part of a community,' but because they want to share at the more basic level."
you can't build an online community that isn't there already, at least potentially. that is, maybe all grandmas already talk to each other, and you let them do it on the web, too. or maybe all grandmas *would* talk to each other if only they could.
the first trick is accurately identifying those communities. the second is providing them an environment that actually works for them. and that *does* require building, in the sense that it requires discerment (what tools work for which communities?) and effort at getting people to stick around long enough to discover that they're part of a community that means something to them.
actually, the paper/punch ballots have significant error problems.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility concludes their analysis of the Hollerith readers used to score the ballots as follows:
"CPSR has been studying Vote-O-Matic-type vote counting systems for over ten years. Experts, including CPSR's own project personnel, have concluded that the Vote-O-Matic system has inherent accuracy limitations. Furthermore, careful manual counting of Vote-O-Matic ballots should always be more accurate than machine counts."
this is largely a result of the now-infamous "chads."
the electoral college is partly about minority rights and sectionalism, as well as a certain disdain for the ability of people to make their own decisions.
however, even if we admit that the EC protects small geographical constituencies, what it doesn't do is protect ideological minorities.
the constitution is all about restraining change. thus, the bicameral legislature, the arduous amendment process, and the electoral college. it forces minorities to try to wheedle concessions out of larger parties, while the larger parties do their best to bring on the smaller parties/constituencies (faction, in the parlance of the framers).
we can say this is wise, but like it or not, the ec is conservative, like the constitution itself and its framers. the framers (as a group) were not radicals, except insofar as they'd rather have power in the hands of landholders than royalty. they produced a constitution designed to protect those interests.
what's nice about first-past-the-poll or ranking systems is that both allow greater participation for smaller parties without relegating them to (alleged) spoiler roles.
Recall that originally, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. direct election of senators is provided for in the 17th amendment to the constitution. in other words, direct election can happen. you just need to want it to happen.
For those of you on the left who are actually thinking of voting Nader... gadzooks, do you know anything about that person? A gadfly needs personality traits that would be calamitous in a President. Learn more about him, for Gaia's sake. Then think about Global Warming, the Supreme Court and the Internet. You'll hold your nose and vote for Gore.
you might be more effective if you didn't start with the insulting presumption that i don't know anything about nader and that's why i'm voting for him. on the contrary, is it just possible that i'm voting for nader because i know something about him? in that case, a more detailed critique would at least be debatable.
for myself, i'm no great nader apologist, and i have my own problems with him. doug henwood had a good leftist critique of nader back in 96 which is still useful today on two scores: 1) why leftists might have problems with nader, and (2) why leftists should still vote for him. the scene is a little different now, but much of this is still applicable, adding in the fact that votes for nader could get matching funds for the greens -- ahem, mr. environment.
i realize nader isn't going to fly among libertarians and objectivists, but let's not expect potshots to be persuasive to people who have actually thought about voting for nader.
ok, my first response to the publication of this book (which i have not yet read) was, "uh, ok, and . . . ?" but the review has persuaded me to read it, if only for all of the anecdotes.
but while it disturbs me (honestly), i also find it very interesting in several ways:
first, there is something of a conundrum in the relationship between libertarianism and open source, and the answer is not, as an early poster suggested, in the notion of "compete [sic!] freedom." rather, i would argue that libertarian open source types have organized themselves (even if in a distributed fashion -- although, e.g., linus still owns "official" linux releases, or whatever) in response to the threat known as microsoft, or something like it. they hate organizing, but there seems a tacit recognition that collective (not authoritarian) action is required when you aim to fight (authoritarian) power effectively. the only upshots i see to this are nevertheless important: a notion of distributed (a.k.a., collective) organization, rather than hierarchical, and a notion of collective ownership (there is a way in which none of us individually owns linux, for example, but we all do).
second, the above is not the only such paradox, but libertarians/objectivists seem surprising unaware of them as paradoxes. they may be resolvable, but explaining them away with phrases like "comp(l)ete freedom" simply doesn't work, whether it was a typo or not. the truth is we all have the freedom to modify the code, but none of us individually has the freedom either to make money from that (is that libertarian? no liberty to make money?) or to add it to any official release. that's just an example.
Finally, i will point out something i noticed reading the review: what is now called "bionomics" used to be called, "social darwinism." the rise of bionomics just goes to show that if you call something with a catchy new economy name, you can get away with anything, and that to deny that libertarianism is ultimately about a pseudo-darwinian "survival of the fittest" applied economically is a sham.
"It is frequently easier to be honest, when you have nothing at stake."
IMHO, this applies to reviewers, too. When there is there nothing at stake, you can afford to express your own opinion, free of bias. But reviewers (unlike Slashdot) DO have a lot at stake. They've their jobs, their advertisers and their journal/magazine's readership at stake.
And their own writing careers. Think of all the movie reviewers who give movies like Battlefield Earth great soundbite reviews (ok, maybe not Battlefield Earth, but you get the point). You start to see their names, and then they're famous -- not on the strength of quality reviews, but on the quotability of their reviews to a mainstream audience in ads (or on videos, or back covers of paperbacks, or whatever). Get yourself quoted a few times, and your career is off to the races.
To be honest, I'm not sure this applies to software. I'd be curious what people think about that.
Slashdot Mirror
All college does is to prepare you to learn.
precisely. sure, the material you're taught is not irrelevant, but the most important thing current students don't recognize is that college is about learning how to learn. speaking as someone who teaches philosophy and religion, many of the students in my classes would benefit from the realization that the simple fact that my class is not in "real-world" knowledge or skills (like jsp or burger-flipping) doesn't mean they have nothing useful to learn in it. if they can adapt to learn what i'm trying to teach them, then they can adapt and learn anything. and isn't that the single most useful job skill anywhere and at any time? surely no one who hires you out of college expects you to know everything you will need to know, but they do expect you to be able to learn it . . . and fast.
the question then is, what is the internet/web's role in a changing social/community structure? if anything, i'd be inclined to argue that the internet enables precisely the kind of loose connections wuthnow describes. i would also say (purely impressionistically) that we now have a greater sense of a world community of which we are part, and that is thanks largely to the expansion of the internet and its adoption as a source of news. i have one word, in this regard: nettime.
In this case, if there is no paper copy of a publication in a library, and the library relied on the electronic database, the worry is real.
well, in the case of newspapers and news magazines like NYT and Time, i'll bet there's still microfilm of the issues covered by this ruling, if there's not paper copy (which there may well be in a lot of cases).
as for electronic journals, if you're talking about academic/professional journals, this ruling will be irrelevant to most if not all of those. authors rarely get paid in anything but free copies or offprints for those journals, anyway.
"Communities are emergent entities. You can't build them intentionally unless you realize that and create a product, service, or theme which inspires people to want to talk to others, not specifically to 'be part of a community,' but because they want to share at the more basic level."
you can't build an online community that isn't there already, at least potentially. that is, maybe all grandmas already talk to each other, and you let them do it on the web, too. or maybe all grandmas *would* talk to each other if only they could.
the first trick is accurately identifying those communities. the second is providing them an environment that actually works for them. and that *does* require building, in the sense that it requires discerment (what tools work for which communities?) and effort at getting people to stick around long enough to discover that they're part of a community that means something to them.
Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility concludes their analysis of the Hollerith readers used to score the ballots as follows:
"CPSR has been studying Vote-O-Matic-type vote counting systems for over ten years. Experts, including CPSR's own project personnel, have concluded that the Vote-O-Matic system has inherent accuracy limitations. Furthermore, careful manual counting of Vote-O-Matic ballots should always be more accurate than machine counts."
this is largely a result of the now-infamous "chads."
however, even if we admit that the EC protects small geographical constituencies, what it doesn't do is protect ideological minorities.
the constitution is all about restraining change. thus, the bicameral legislature, the arduous amendment process, and the electoral college. it forces minorities to try to wheedle concessions out of larger parties, while the larger parties do their best to bring on the smaller parties/constituencies (faction, in the parlance of the framers). we can say this is wise, but like it or not, the ec is conservative, like the constitution itself and its framers. the framers (as a group) were not radicals, except insofar as they'd rather have power in the hands of landholders than royalty. they produced a constitution designed to protect those interests.
what's nice about first-past-the-poll or ranking systems is that both allow greater participation for smaller parties without relegating them to (alleged) spoiler roles.
Recall that originally, senators were chosen by the state legislatures. direct election of senators is provided for in the 17th amendment to the constitution. in other words, direct election can happen. you just need to want it to happen.
you might be more effective if you didn't start with the insulting presumption that i don't know anything about nader and that's why i'm voting for him. on the contrary, is it just possible that i'm voting for nader because i know something about him? in that case, a more detailed critique would at least be debatable.
for myself, i'm no great nader apologist, and i have my own problems with him. doug henwood had a good leftist critique of nader back in 96 which is still useful today on two scores: 1) why leftists might have problems with nader, and (2) why leftists should still vote for him. the scene is a little different now, but much of this is still applicable, adding in the fact that votes for nader could get matching funds for the greens -- ahem, mr. environment.
i realize nader isn't going to fly among libertarians and objectivists, but let's not expect potshots to be persuasive to people who have actually thought about voting for nader.
ok, my first response to the publication of this book (which i have not yet read) was, "uh, ok, and . . . ?" but the review has persuaded me to read it, if only for all of the anecdotes.
but while it disturbs me (honestly), i also find it very interesting in several ways:
first, there is something of a conundrum in the relationship between libertarianism and open source, and the answer is not, as an early poster suggested, in the notion of "compete [sic!] freedom." rather, i would argue that libertarian open source types have organized themselves (even if in a distributed fashion -- although, e.g., linus still owns "official" linux releases, or whatever) in response to the threat known as microsoft, or something like it. they hate organizing, but there seems a tacit recognition that collective (not authoritarian) action is required when you aim to fight (authoritarian) power effectively. the only upshots i see to this are nevertheless important: a notion of distributed (a.k.a., collective) organization, rather than hierarchical, and a notion of collective ownership (there is a way in which none of us individually owns linux, for example, but we all do).
second, the above is not the only such paradox, but libertarians/objectivists seem surprising unaware of them as paradoxes. they may be resolvable, but explaining them away with phrases like "comp(l)ete freedom" simply doesn't work, whether it was a typo or not. the truth is we all have the freedom to modify the code, but none of us individually has the freedom either to make money from that (is that libertarian? no liberty to make money?) or to add it to any official release. that's just an example.
Finally, i will point out something i noticed reading the review: what is now called "bionomics" used to be called, "social darwinism." the rise of bionomics just goes to show that if you call something with a catchy new economy name, you can get away with anything, and that to deny that libertarianism is ultimately about a pseudo-darwinian "survival of the fittest" applied economically is a sham.
cheers,
3j
IMHO, this applies to reviewers, too. When there is there nothing at stake, you can afford to express your own opinion, free of bias. But reviewers (unlike Slashdot) DO have a lot at stake. They've their jobs, their advertisers and their journal/magazine's readership at stake.
And their own writing careers. Think of all the movie reviewers who give movies like Battlefield Earth great soundbite reviews (ok, maybe not Battlefield Earth, but you get the point). You start to see their names, and then they're famous -- not on the strength of quality reviews, but on the quotability of their reviews to a mainstream audience in ads (or on videos, or back covers of paperbacks, or whatever). Get yourself quoted a few times, and your career is off to the races.
To be honest, I'm not sure this applies to software. I'd be curious what people think about that.