I’m feeling particularly myopic lately, and it has nothing to do with my new eyeglasses (yay, flex spending account!). I feel singularly indisposed to offering a cool wrap-up of the year, or a prognosis of things to come. No top 10 lists or statistics. No, the most I can hope to think about right now is… January. So, without further ado, my January Resolutions.
1. Start nothing new
With the exception of the items to follow, I will start no project that cannot be completed the same day. Of course, I have some ongoing projects I need to take care of, and the Internet Research conference deadline is looming, but for the entire month, I will only work on projects I consider “outstanding.”
This means, as much as I hate to say it, no recording of my sister’s brilliant reworking of Iron Man: “I am Santa Clause,” and not actually trying any of the neat projects in Make Magazine.
2. Two new distance courses.
Not surprisingly, I’m well behind in planning for my two courses this semester, both of which will be distance courses. Almost all the materials—at least those I create—will be open access. My short audio “lectures” and other materials will be posted to the blog here. So, for January, I want a strong plan for each course, and a good launch mid-month. This is going to take up the greatest proportion of my time, I’m afraid.
3. See at least one play, watch at least three movies, and read at least one new novel.
I already have some of these lined up. I’ve ordered a used copy of Spook Country, and will see one of those films tomorrow morning.
4. Finish writing a book
Yes, I actually have started the book, to be published by Polity. It’s nearly done, but needs some revision in places. The book is called Search Engine Society and looks at the social place of search engines. It needs a bit more theoretical development and to draw in a more global perspective, as well as some other changes, which I hope to have finished—or nearly so—sometime around the end of the month.
5. Make progress on hire
We’re trying to hire a new colleague to teach in the Interactive Communication masters program. Hope to have visits scheduled and maybe even some completed by the end of the month.
6. Learn new manual skill
Yes, that’s a little obscure, but I have my reasons. I’ll be able to say more at the end of the month, I hope.
7. No more Digg.
Yes, have to quit something bad for me, and I’m afraid Digg is getting the old heave ho. I’ve just removed the gadget from my iGoogle page. The good stuff usually ends up (or comes from) BoingBoing anyway.
8. Do something about AoIR Wiki
I’ve managed to enlist others’ help on the major projects for AoIR, including the website redesign and the conference web. The wiki remains a target of spam, and is running a woefully out-of-date version of Mediawiki. After several attempts at updating to the current version, I’m thinking I will probably throw in the towel and spin off a new install (without the current accounts), but I want to see if I can transfer as much as possible. Then I hope to do some serious reformatting and weeding on the site.
9. Lose 10 pounds
This is here because it would be bad form not to include it in a list of resolutions. I lost a lot of weight last year, and gained nearly all of it back again. So, I suppose a more careful wording would be “Weigh 10 pounds less than today by the end of the month.” There are subsidiary goals here: more exercise, etc., but I’m already boring you.
10. There will be blog
Hope to get back to blogging a few times each week. That’s made much easier by the list above, which I will be blogging about. (Well, probably not as much about #5 or #6.) By January 31, I’ll see how well I’ve measured up to these.
The above was my automatic holidayomancy from the Worktank Holiday-O-Matic card generator. I was too slow to put together Christmas cards this year. I took some pictures in Central Park and Midtown on my way back from the dentist earlier this week, and I think I might be able to make a nice card out of one of those for next year.
Oh, and can I tell you how much I hate the phrase “happy holidays”? There isn’t a good reason for it. I wish we could just say “Happy Christmas” and be done with it. If someone says “Happy Hanukkah” to me, I certainly don’t find it insulting; I find it genuine. Anything would be better: “Killer Kwanzaa!” “Yauld Yule!” “Sultry Solstice!” “Bully Boxing Day!” “Gnarly New Year!” Just not “Happy Holidays,” OK? I suppose, as with all things, it will gradually become the norm, but I reserve the right to remain crotchety.
There has been a lot of talk lately about the long tail, and its effect on online retailing. Basically, the idea is that as the cost of inventory, advertising, and delivery come down, there is an incentive for online retailers to have very large inventories. This means that they can mine niche products, rather than only carrying the most popular items. In fact, for a store like Amazon, or like iTunes, a substantial proportion of their sales may come not from the items that are most popular, but from the deeper stock. Sure, they still sell U2 and Radiohead, but you can easily find slightly less popular acts, like Metric or SoKo. I was a bit surprised in my Christmas shopping to find that tail cut off.
The mastiff we live with likes a particular dog toy, manufactured by Fat Cat, Inc. It’s a large and fairly expensive stuffed kitty toy that flops around nicely when a dog shakes it. You’ve probably seen a version of these if you have been in a pet shop: either in the smallest size, or the larger 14 inch size. You may not have seen the giant size that measures over 22 inches, and is our dog’s favorite. Although they are expensive, in the long run they make sense for us because even though the dog is fairly gentle with them most of the time, he would generally destroy the smaller size in a couple of days, and the larger ones tend to stick around much longer. When we went to order them, we found that pretty much every retailer has them listed as “discontinued.” It’s possible we were the only ones buying these toys, but I doubt it. Had we known they would stop making them, we probably would have stockpiled some. As it is, I guess it’s time to start watching eBay. I’m sure we can find an alternative he’ll be happy with for Christmas, but he does love a new “baby.”
My partner asked for a trackball like the one I use on my computer so that she could use it for work. She’s impossible to shop for, and so I was relieved to have such an easy shopping task. She is talking about the Microsoft Trackball Explorer, the best pointing device I have ever used with a computer. Microsoft really got it right with this thing. Anyone who uses it for more than five minutes covets it. When I bought mine, I think I paid something like $40 for it, so—given how the hardware market works—I hoped I might be able to find a discount on it. Despite wide adoration, Microsoft no longer makes it, and no one has stepped in to clone it. As a result, scratched and abused used versions of the trackball routinely sell for $150 on eBay, and that price is likely to continue to rise. I have bid on some of the lower-priced used versions, but I don’t hold out much hope for actually winning one of these auctions.
Now, these are both probably niche products. The big dog toy is probably a novelty unless you have a dog the size of ours, and there aren’t very many of those in the world. Likewise, although it turns out my trackball is nearly a fetish item for some geeks, the vast majority of computer users will continue to be happy with their mice, and wouldn’t even consider trying a trackball. (Like I once did, they probably associate it with Missile Command and Atari Football.) So these two products are both residents of that long tail—a tail that may have reached online retailing, but doesn’t stand up well to the scaling needed for Chinese electronics manufacturing.
We can probably try to replicate the dog toy. We do have a sewing machine, and I guess we can try to draw faces on with a permanent marker or something. I don’t know when we’ll find the time to make dog toys, but at least it is in the realm of possibilities. The same cannot be said of the trackball. The obvious way to do this would be to track down the factory that made the device in China and get them to do a short run. Even though there are people willing to exorbitantly for the devices, however, I suspect that the market is actually pretty small and deep. Unlike a short run for a T-shirt design or a book, I suspect there must still be a mass market before a complex gadget like the one I am using at this moment can be reproduced efficiently.
In the meantime, if you see a Microsoft Trackball Explorer on the back shelf of a computer retailer somewhere, and it’s priced at retail or below, snap it up—eBay is waiting.
I was watching my Sunday comedy program, which included an interview with Mitt Romney, who discussed his recent speech on “Freedom and Religion.” Romney said that America needed “morality and religion” though that religion was “of course, not a particular denomination.” Tim Russert questioned him on this, asking about whether atheists had a place in American government, and Romney admitted that it was possible, on a person-by-person basis, for an atheist to have a moral code (unlike the blanket morality of those in organized religion, one supposes). He went on to say that
the, the founders of the nation, coming from different faiths and different persuasions, nonetheless all believed that the, the creator was an instrumental part of the founding of this nation. And I believe that that part of history should be taught, I believe that we should recognize the divine with everything from celebrations in the town square, with menorahs and nativity scenes, as well as in our history books, talking about the fact that the creators did believe in a fundamental sense of, of the divine. And, and recognizing that that gives us a moral code, a suggestion of what is right and wrong, that is—that is, in many respects, unique in the world.
I have to assume that he would be open to other things showing up in the town square, including seasonal icons from latter day religious tradition.
And here, of course, I am speaking of Pastafarianism. While I am not devout, I was proud to be one of the founding members of the First Buffalo Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and yet, was chagrined to admit that I did not immediately know what would be appropriate to put alongside the menorah and nativity in the town square. Of course, in September I always celebrate the doctrinal Talk Like a Pirate Day, bringing a bit of diversity into the classroom in subtle ways, but can’t we follow in the footsteps of the popes, and bull ourselves a holiday to piggyback on Yule? I did some preliminary research, finding some information on Jólasveinarnir, The Yuletide Lads, and other alternative Santa Clauses, but no Pater Pasta. In the heartland, however, this battle is already in full force.
It’s bad enough that schools are banning our religious garb, it seems that universities are turning out to be equally bigoted when it comes to Pastafarian celebrations this time of year. Some students at Missouri State University attempted in a small way to celebrate the FSM:
The administration was not content, however, and has steadfastly refused reasonable requests by the active MSU Pastafarian community (including a large number of students and faculty) to celebrate the holidays with displays alongside other religious paraphernalia.
While I find little evidence of a “War on Christmas,” this seems to be a hard season to remain a devout follower of Its Noodly Appendage. A very happy holiday to you, however you choose to celebrate it, ramen.
I finished my grading today, and so allowed myself a brief moment of apartment porn. No, I don’t mean browsing through Apartment Therapy, or Curbed, though both are always fun. I went straight to the mother lode, the New York TimesReal Estate Section. I’m definitely not in the market. Frankly, it seems very unlikely that my partner and I will be ever be able to afford to buy an apartment if we remain in Manhattan, and we are disinclined to leave. But, it’s a good time of year for window shopping, especially when you find something like an apartment on Pomander Walk.
Locals, no doubt, know all about Pomander Walk, but I was stumped. On the Upper West Side? Really? Google Maps was helpful. Odd, I thought, I have walked that block a dozen times and never noted another road. The first photo to the right (from Google’s “Street View”) shows you what the “street” looks like from 94th. It’s a cool Tudor pair of buildings, with what looks like access to a gated spot for trash or something. In Harry Potteresque fashion, however, the gate hides a private street created in 1922 by the King & Campbell architects, in celebration of a popular play of the time, Pomander Walk. The apartments on the mew were designed to look like an English street, complete with varying Tudor façades. The street has an illustrious history, home to Humphrey Bogart (after he lived up the street from us on 103rd), and used as a set for Hannah & Her Sisters.
Not only is the street an anachronistic, Disneyesque throwback in the middle of a downtown area, it has other oddities, like external dumbwaiters for half the units. It was a declared an historical landmark in the early 1980s, and now there is a small two-bedroom apartment for sale. A unit sold in 2000, before the boom, for $200,000, but unfortunately, the real estate boom coupled with some renovations means that a a tiny, antiquated apartment (linkrot will likely kill that link quickly) now lists well north of $800,000. Those of you reading from anywhere other than New York or California will likely gawk at paying that much for an apartment that is probably less than 800 square feet, but that price is actually well below the average apartment purchase price on the Upper West Side. If I had a spare couple of hundred thousand dollars for the down payment, and didn’t eat for the 30 years it would take to pay off the mortgage, I’d be getting ready to move. As it is, I remain a happy renter.
That’s the question Richard Corliss, Time film critic, asks. He reports on the New York Film Critics Circle’s picks this year, and laments that some of the top grossing films this year did not make the list. He complains that films like No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, and Away From Her, movies that few actually saw, led the list. That this made him “realize that we critics may give these awards to the winners, but we give them for ourselves. In fact, we’re essentially passing notes to one another, admiring our connoisseurship at the risk of ignoring the vast audience that sees movies and the smaller one that reads us.”
He goes on to ask rhetorically whether The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or The Lives of Others will win out, and then goes on to suggest that these “obscure” films make readers restless. The thing is, these are obscure only because they show up in the art house theaters and not on the main screens. I agree that Ratatouille and Enchanted were very well made, entertaining films. But not everybody gets an Oscar just for making good cinema.
I understand that Time has a particular anti-intellectual stance on some issues, but I am convinced that the main reason No Country doesn’t pull in huge numbers of dollars is that distributors decide in advance how much money it is going to make and where. Critics play an important role in pushing people to see good movies, even when those movies don’t have a huge buy in television commercials and “soft” advertising (making rounds on the Daily Show, Letterman, etc.). The Oscars tend to do this as well; movies that are runaway award winners at the Oscars are now re-released and actually draw audiences. In other words, critics perform a correcting function for the industry.
Instead of complaining that critics like movies that most people have never heard of, perhaps we should be complaining about an industry that relentlessly pushes Transformers, while relatively ignoring a little gem like Juno. In sum, I don’t mind film critics’ connoisseur orientation toward movies. Why should people who love movies dumb down their opinions to match a public that uses movies as distraction? The industry already serves (and serves to inculcate) a movie-going audience that doesn’t want very much from their films; critics form a counterweight to that, even when they can be accused of their own groupthink.
I haven’t blogged about the ongoing saga of the Quinnipiac Chronicle, our student paper, which is facing administrative censorship. An editorial printed in the paper lays out the problems: efforts to constrain the way the paper represents the university and its policies. The president doesn’t like how his position has been portrayed in the paper, and the editor has been told it is not appropriate for him to criticize Quinnipiac policy, even when such policy hinders the way in which the newspaper operates. There are other issues, and like any sort of conflict, it’s a lot more gray than black-and-white. What is clear is that the university administration has taken a position that is regressive, and that hurts our reputation as a School of Communication, and, of course, our reputation as a university.
Tin Foil Hat
I have a pet theory. The president of the university, John Lahey, is nothing if not public relations-savvy. What is the guaranteed way of getting publicity for your campus newspaper? Threaten to shut it down, let things stew for a while, then make a firm statement that clearly endorses the autonomy of the newspaper. Think of this as a kind of “Pentagon Papers” for our own little newspaper. In a year the Chronicle may be seen as a beacon of student activist journalism, simultaneously propelling our journalism program to national prominence and dispelling the idea that the Quinnipiac campus is particularly apathetic.
It’s almost a given. If you want publicity, threaten the editor of the university paper when he criticizes an administrative policy. Even better, make sure that the president is directly involved. This is like sending an email to journalists saying “free hooks.” And at least a few of those journalists have bitten. An article appeared last Sunday in the New York Times detailing the conflict, and another article appeared earlier this week in Inside Higher Ed.
On the Other Hand?
On first blush, it looks like there is little to prop up the administration’s position. They offer two issues. The first is that they claim that things have been misquoted or taken out of context in Chronicle articles. This is almost certainly the case: after all, newspapers always fail at incorporating what everyone would like to see in the paper. Newspapers cannot please all of the people all of the time.
However, I am particularly cognizant of this criticism because of an exchange that occurred on this blog. I noted a quote in the Chronicle that seemed odd, and the person quoted argued that she never said what the paper said she said, or that if she did it was taken out of context. She complained to the paper, and the automatic response in these cases—the ethical response—is at the very least to make clear to the readership that the quoted individual disputed the article’s quotation. When I read a response on this blog that suggested that the paper was unwilling to do this, it raised serious flags for me: journalistic ethics require that reporters and editors are sensitive and responsive to their audiences and their sources. I think this is something that the paper should take seriously, and review their procedures for handling complaints about quotes and either publishing retractions or letters from sources contesting the quotation.
The second issue, which comes in a letter from the administration to faculty that I will not quote, suggests that there is an issue of legal liability: if the newspaper publishes content that is libelous, or that reveals protected information about the student (presumably issues protected by FERPA), the university could be held liable. I won’t hold them to this argument, since it seems not only misguided, but potentially damaging. If they are suggesting that by publishing the paper they are editorially responsible for it, I think they are setting them up for a fall down the road. It is almost inevitable that a media outlet will at least be threatened with lawsuit at some point. Even this lowly blog has received such threats from more than one corner. Does the administration really want it on record that they think they have an oversight role in determining content in the paper? If they assert such a role now, it will lead to a lot of back-peddling if and when the paper is sued and the administration tries to wash its hands of culpability.
In the end, what needs to happen is a clear statement from the administration that they have no interest or desire in acting as a censor for the newspaper. That is a vital first step. The second issue—whether university officials are allowed to speak to student journalists directly—is important to the quality of the education QU students receive, but if the administration chooses not to speak to the press, internal or external, there isn’t much that can be done about it. In some ways, the worst possible public relations is limiting your relations with the public. As the university seeks to become better known nationally and internationally, it needs to abandon parochial views and embrace a role that is very much in the public eye.
All of this comes back to an instigating issue. A number of racial epithets were scrawled on the doors of black students’ dorm rooms and elsewhere on campus. In some sick way, this makes Quinnipiac quite a bit like some other major campuses, where racial insensitivity is rising. Unfortunately, it represented yet another black eye for Quinnipiac, in part because of a (correct) impression that it is not particularly diverse. Quinnipiac ranks among the “top” ten whitest law schools in the US, and despite some interesting efforts, many of the students are strikingly unaware of the world outside of this little slice of the eastern seaboard, or outside of their own neighborhoods. It is important that the president not sweep racism under the carpet; like many social ills, it racism breeds best when kept under wraps, quiet, and unchecked. Many students on campus reacted against the racial incidents that occurred, and it is important to reflect the tolerance of our community proudly. We need to demonstrate our beliefs publicly, and conversations with our president should be equally open and public.
What Doesn’t Kill Us
As I said, I am hopeful that good can come out of this incident. As one commentator has noted, this act has energized otherwise placid students at Quinnipiac. She notes this rather ominous YouTube posting, suggesting that there is an undercurrent of activism on campus:
If there is such an undercurrent, it is well hidden. Many of the differences between this campus newspaper and that at the The Daily at the University of Washington are night and day, in part because the latter has successfully navigated efforts at censorship. It’s about page proudly trumpets its independence:
The Daily is the independent student newspaper for the University of Washington. The Daily is produced exclusively by students, with the exception of four non-student UW staff members who provide fiscal and administrative assistance. Any UW student may work for The Daily and will be paid for their work.
All content and advertising is approved by student staff members with no interference by UW staff or administration for an uncensored press. No non-student staff members review editorial content before publication.
A nine-member Board of Student Publications oversees the newspaper, reviews finances, resolves disputes and selects the editor and advertising manager. The board is comprised of representatives from UW administration, the Faculty Senate, the Department of Communication, ASUW, GPSS, a professional publication and The Daily newsroom.
The Daily began as the Pacific Wave in 1891. It became The Daily in 1909 when the paper began publishing five days a week. The Monday edition of the paper was dropped in 1933 during The Great Depression. The Monday publication resumed in 1985 and has run on schedule ever since.
The uncensored approach to student journalism has been controversial at times, but the First Amendment and Supreme Court decisions guarantee this right for students at the University of Washington.
Former UW Communications professor, Don Pember, stated “While freedom of expression has been considered a basic right for the press in this country for nearly 200 years, this right was not articulated for college and high school newspapers until quite recently. Until the 1960s, college and high school journalists enjoyed about as much freedom of expression as the newspaper’s advisor, the high school principal or the college dean was willing to allow.”
In the 1967 Supreme Court decision Dickey vs. Alabama, it was ruled “censorship of school papers is allowed only when the exercise of freedom of speech interferes materially and substantially with the requirement of appropriate discipline and order in the school.”
It remains as the law today.
UW faculty, staff and students can be proud that this university was a pioneer in clarifying the freedom of student press and that University presidents have defended that Constitutional freedom ever since.
The Daily won the Apple Award at the 2006 College Media Adviser Spring Convention in New York City for the best overall four-year college tabloid-sized newspaper in the nation.
Obviously, The Daily has about a century of a head start on the Quinnipiac Chronicle, but I hope that the current efforts to curtail its freedom act as a kind of annealing process, giving student media on campus a more common set of values and objectives.
There has been a lot of talk lately about 
I finished my grading today, and so allowed myself a brief moment of apartment porn. No, I don’t mean browsing through 
Not only is the street an anachronistic, Disneyesque throwback in the middle of a downtown area, it has other oddities, like external dumbwaiters for half the units. It was a declared an historical landmark in the early 1980s, and now there is a small two-bedroom apartment for sale. A unit sold in 2000, before the boom, for