a thaumaturgical compendium

Brilliant talk by Clay Shirky:

There’s still a chance to vote on the finalists in the Obama in 30 Seconds contest for Citizen-created political ads.

This is so cool. Yes, Melodyne has been around for a while, saving vocalists from their own flatness. But what really makes this interesting is what it means for samples. It’s hard enough now to detect the use of a sample, as it is folded, spun, and mutilated. But at what point does it stop being a sample. Obviously, the phrasing of the original instrument remains important, but at some point, you’ve chopped the original up so much that it isn’t really a “sample” any more at all?

I mean, if you “sample” a paragraph from a book, and don’t cite it, you’ve clearly plagiarized, but when you take single words from someone, you clearly haven’t. Musical notes are not as discrete as words—the phrasing of a note by a violinist, or even by a pianist is fairly unique—but once you get down to the note-by-note level, it starts to feel a lot less like sampling.

Why was the left so mean when it went after Larry Craig, among others? Why, some said, would those who described themselves as broadminded be so adverse to a wide stance among their politicians? They failed to see that the issue was not Mr. Craig’s sexual orientation, nor even his relationship with his family, but his advocacy for policies that his experiences would seem to completely contradict. In other words, he was a victim of his own political positions.

It doesn’t particularly bother me that Elliot Spitzer, as the New York Times is reporting, made use of the Emperors Club VIP (“Every client is an emperor… ” even if he’s only a governor), a high-priced prostitution service. The public loves a sex scandal, and no doubt this will be front-page news for some time. There are lots of reasons Spitzer should be held to the fire for this. First, he violated the law when he was charged with enforcing it. I think that alone is the biggest issue. The cops in our neighborhood rarely bother to stop for red lights, even when it’s pretty clear they aren’t on their way somewhere, and I’ve seen a lot of near-misses for that reason. You expect those sworn to uphold the law to apply that to themselves as well.

The second issue, whether he violated the trust of his spouse, is chiefly, in my opinion, a private matter. The public does have a right to judge the character of their leaders, but how someone relates to their family is really only the family’s business.

I suppose you could suggest that the money that was spent was a waste of his taxpayer-supplied salary. After all, these were not inexpensive professionals (though the claim of $5,500 an hour seems to contradict the agency’s price list). But I don’t think this has a lot of traction.

The biggest issue seems to be that Spitzer made prostitution rings a special target of prosecution. This, to me, raises a lot of pretty substantial issues: most pointedly whether this group received protection in trade for their services. Even the appearance of this besmirches his office, his reputation, and the reputation of the state of New York.

What it doesn’t change is my opinion that prostitution should be legalized. I am perfectly capable of condemning Spitzer for hypocrisy and for breaking the law, and at the same time recognize that what he did shouldn’t have been illegal. Too bad he couldn’t stand up for what he thought was right, either by not patronizing sex workers, or advocating for legal structures (i.e., legalization) that would provide them with fuller access to the law.

Never thought I would encourage sock puppets on my blog, but Kiki & Bubu (with a guest appearance from Trekkie Monster’s cousin) explains that the seeming shift of ownership to workers is just another version of false consciousness. I don’t happen to agree entirely, but it’s an interesting way of presenting the message.

The State of Connecticut has a list of criminal convictions since 2000 on the web for easy searching. Unlike other states, this one includes minor infractions like traffic violations. Nosy person that I am, I checked on some of my fellow faculty. Was hoping to find some dark secrets that would reveal something of their psychology: convictions for mayhem with suspended sentences, for example. No such luck: just some speeding tickets and the like.

(via Research Buzz)

danah boyd has posted a short manifesto declaring her intention to no longer participate in the production of journals that publish “locked down” content. First, let me recapitulate my comments on her site.

If we take a cynical view—and that is a very good idea when looking at academic publishing—journals are in the business of banking and distributing reputation; they are whuffie banks. Displacing trust in the “top journals” is a bit like making the Kennedys look bad. They can do an awful lot of bad things and still remain a dynasty because they have always been considered as much. Many of the top journals are dusted with a patina that is difficult to achieve in a new launch: whether open access or not.

Boycotting the broadly accepted top journals—which in our fields are generally not open access—guarantees scholarly marginalization. It will be very hard to make tenure or get a job at a competitive institution (or even a less competitive institution) without publications in these top journals. Moreover, the mechanisms of reputation do not distinguish between self-exclusion and exclusion-because-you-suck. As a result, if you limit yourself to publishing in second and third-tier journals that also happen to be open source, you virtually guarantee that these remain ghettoized. My recommendation, then, is to publish in open access journals, but also to publish in top journals. That is, you’ve got to maintain scholarly credibility in order to help drive both commercial and non-commercial publishers to open models.

I’m in strong agreement with many of her other suggestions.

If you are an established scholar, of course you should publish in open access journals. It’s an effective way of lending your credibility to the venture. However, I think you can have an even greater impact by lobbying public and private granting institutions—including NSF—to require publication in open access journals.

Perhaps the most compelling way to encourage open access journals is to cite them. It would be pretty impossible to boycott citing closed journals, but you can limit it significantly. You can also choose to cite self-archived or draft versions of an article. danah points to an early essay version of an article she has recently published in Convergence, and if I ever have the need or opportunity, I will cite her online version rather than the version in Convergence.

Now, while I criticized her boycott as a bit quixotic, I’ve been surprised by the comments on her blog and on the AIR-L list that seem to favor the current model. People seem to take pretty extreme positions, perhaps because she has staked out a clear position on one side. Some suggest that it is time to do away with all commercial publishing, and peer review as well. They see the publishers as rapacious, and one suggested that they were “flesh peddlers.” That kind of hyperbole just makes the open access model look silly.

On the other end were those who suggested that the work of creating and maintaining a journal could only be accomplished with the resources of either a commercial publisher or grants to support the time required for editing. While I appreciate the amount of work that goes into producing a journal, I think many of the examples of peer production currently available on the web suggest that such a view is far too conservative. The fact that a non-commercial, distributed model has not worked yet hardly convinces me that it is not possible. Indeed, if anything, it encourages me to launch my my own journal. You know, for the lolz.

The solution is probably somewhere in the middle. Clearly, software solutions like Open Journal Systems reduce some of the technical overhead, and more radical systems of peer review are already being tried. I am certainly interested in being a part of those experiments in a pro-active way, without cutting off the existing venues for research.