Idiotprogrammer Blog

Category: Open Media

  • Macmillan vs. Harris County Library (and every other public library).

    You may have already heard about how libraries really dislike the new pricing model of MacMillan’s publishing company.

    (more…)
  • Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    Silly me, I realized that I forgot to link to an annotated bibliography (AB) I made of US Civil War fiction a few years ago. I did this as an appendix to a story collection ebook by Jack Matthews I edited a few years ago. This ebook sells for $3 on Amazon and $1.50 on Smashwords. Actually though I had so much fun compiling this AB that I ended up writing a post about it on Teleread. Here is a verbatim reproduction of that same essay. Enjoy.

    Map to the stars: The secret delights of annotated bibliographies

    The older I become, the more I seem to enjoy reading about books than actually reading them. Why do people read about books?

    Books are plentiful, and our time on this earth is limited. People need some method for picking and prioritizing what they read (or in general what they do with free time). The youthful reader is inclined to read indiscriminately, favoring whatever was unavailable at libraries or forbidden by parents.

    By early adulthood it dawns on people that reading time (or time in general)  is a precious commodity. Even if you are lucky enough to find a career that requires a significant amount of reading, there never seems to be enough time to read what  you really want. If you spend too much time on books that are crap (a highly significant amount) there is less time to read great and powerful stuff.

    Some degree of serendipity is crucial for discovering good reading material¹, but at some point you have to  find some method that will keep exposing you to  great reading material.

    I’ll devote a series of blogposts to such methods. For this one, I shall discuss an overlooked resource when  trying to decide what to read:  the annotated bibliography (abbreviated as AB for this essay).

    Annotated Bibliographies (ABs)

    Despite my love for reading, I could never imagine reading an AB —much less writing one – except under duress in high school English class.

    A year ago, though, I decided to make an annotated bibliography (AB) about Civil War fiction as an afterward for a Jack Matthewsebook my company was publishing.  It turned out to be an all-consuming project; truthfully just proofreading everything turned out to be a nightmare.  Nonetheless, I think the result was an admirable (and useful) contribution to the genre.

    It’s important to distinguish between a bibliography (which is a mere listing of titles in alphabetical order) and an AB (which not only lists the items, but also describes  why each source is interesting or important). A good AB (and honestly, most of them are good!) is usually worth reading on its own.  A few days ago I read two print  annotated bibliographies of Texas history. Delightful and fascinating!  Frankly, these two books revealed new books that I never could have found by looking in library catalogs or checking   bibliographies of other history  books.

    Perhaps print bibliographies don’t translate well  to web browsing, but AB’s have been on the web for over 20 years. Starting from the 1990s, you would find them everywhere as Description Lists  or (DL) in HTML. That was back when Internet search was iffier and you relied on links pages maintained by human editors to help you find what you wanted. These pages were usually static HTML and more focused on creating paths to other helpful resources. (Alas, nowadays, it seems that most websites aim to trap you or force you to sign up for a newletter or give them  your credit card).

    Even today, the sort of bibliographies which you find on Wikipedia just list book titles and possibly web resources. Nothing is wrong with that of course, but in an age of excessive information, we don’t need to know every work on a topic; we would just like to know which works contain the best information or are ideal for beginners or have the best photographs (etc.) Let’s use  my Civil War bibliography to illustrate how ABs  work and what they offer for readers.

    Why annotated bibliographies are awesome

    First, ABs don’t try to cover everything in a field — just the most interesting things (or the most interesting things that the preparer has encountered). My Civil War fiction AB tried to hit the big landmarks, but there is no doubt that this list overlooks many worthy works. Often the selectivity of these resources make it more helpful to the reader.

    Second, I tried to subdivide the huge list into several smaller categories(containing no more than 20 titles). Also,  I ordered the categories in a way to give certain works more prominence (i.e., Critical Overview and Classics).

    Third, in addition to arranging works by category, I decided against listing them alphabetically.  For the most part, I arranged works by date of publication — although this perhaps can be somewhat disorienting. But it isn’t hard to search for the name of an author or a title in a web browser.

    Fourth, this may not be obvious, but I don’t have any special expertise in the area of Civil War fiction. In fact, I have read surprisingly little Civil War fiction (though I will be correcting this deficiency soon).  Mostly I just did background reading, found some useful bibliographies (both in print and online) and then combined everything.  I found several notable critical studies of Civil War fiction and just listed most of the fiction titles discussed in them. In the 1990s there was a special award specifically for Civil War fiction, and so I list all those titles. By reading book reviews and comments on Amazon, I tried to include a fair summary as well as context (i.e., was this first of a series? Is there anything notable or unique about the author or the narrative angle? Did it win any awards? Was it made into a movie? )

    Fifth, I listed data about the books which might be useful for certain readers. I tried to identify which works were already in the public domain. I also indicated lexile scores for books geared toward younger readers. (Lexile is a method of measuring the relative difficulty of a text and is used by teachers).

    Sixth, online bibliographic resources can remain flexible in format. (This is something that the Wikihow article on ABs acknowledges).  I looked at various style guides  before making my AB. Then I realized that there was no need to give complete citations as required by MLA or Chicago Style Guide. (Besides, it would increase the prep time.) Generally, publication  data is reasonably easy to locate from Amazon.com and other places.

    Date of publication is relevant because it indicates which works are in the public domain (and can be downloaded for free). I debated whether to include links to Project Gutenberg (PG) or archive.org or Amazon.com or Wikipedia, but in the end I decided to keep  hyperlinks to a minimum. I did this mainly because I was making this bibliography for an ebook and worried that putting links here would just create  linkrot. It’s hard to predict how long Project Gutenberg or other web projects  will be able to maintain its URLs.

    This bibliography is (relatively) noncommercial. I stuck a small ad for a Jack Matthews title published by my company, but aside from that, it’s a static page unlikely to change (unless I forget to pay my hosting charges!) In contrast, you can find lots of listicles about Civil War fictionand Civil War books. All are interesting and helpful and written by people with interest or expertise on the subject.

    But listicles are a form of abbreviated journalism and  rarely  systematic. A good features writer can sniff out enough notable books in a field to make  a listicle, but often they are skewed towards newer books and books which are in the public eye (rather than books which are actually interesting or important). Sometimes publications can go offline or migrate to a different software platform — thus disrupting the continuity of URL addresses. Biblio-listicles  reside in an online world subject to various pressures (technical and commercial).

    It would be easy for a wiki site to facilitate the production of ABs. But such bibliographies are better produced by individuals (or small groups of like-minded individuals). I doubt that you can set  criteria for group editing  which are reasonably fair or neutral to all contributors. Wiki software helps in producing the ABs, but the neutral point of view (NPOV) philosophy  and notability criteria  used by Wikipedia isn’t really  compatible with the individual quirkiness which make annotated bibliographies so special and interesting.

    You would think that the proliferation of citation tools and content management systems would mean that ABs would be everywhere online. That is definitely not the case. Maybe in the 1990s when human editors cataloged web resources, this might have been true. Since then, Google Search and Wikipedia articles have taken over, worthy tools, but skewed in their own ways. Google Search can be gamed fairly easily while Wikipedia seems dedicated to  listing resources without trying to assess their value. (If you don’t believe me, try browsing through this top level category of Wiki bibliographies and try to find anything actually useful.)

    ABs are not easy to find using search engines. Every time I try Google to find a good annotated bibliography, the search results consist mainly of commercial products (some of whom are not even available for individuals!) When I try googling a more specific topic for an annotated bibliography, the pickings are usually slim.  Interestingly, it’s not as hard to locate ABs on abstract philosophical topics. Check out this   Chinese philosophy  AB or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy to see what I mean.

    chinese-book

    Online bibliographies have other problems. First, they tend to be database-driven, which means that the view in the browser is often truncated or chunked in an unusable way. Database-driven bibliographies offer advanced sorting and filtering capabilities and occasionally annotations, but their selection criteria might not match your own. For example, which resource in a list of 50 or 100  should you check first? Second, many of these tools cater to institutional customers and not  open to public surfing.

    Take for example the Oxford Bibliographies Online. Sounds and looks promising, but wait! You have to log in, and your institution has to subscribe. If your institution doesn’t subscribe to such a service or if you don’t even belong to an institution, you’re out of luck.

    Many of the best AB’s are in book appendices (i.e., not online).  Again, there is a lot of segregation between users who have institutional accounts (and better access to bibliographies and ebooks) and users who don’t.

    While I compiled material for my Civil War AB,  not having access to most of these academic services severely limited what I could find online.

    On the other hand, print versions of academic books from my city library often had ample  bibliographies in their appendices. (Perhaps they were not ABs, but they were still very useful.)

    This leads to my final question: If many academic books contain ample and carefully crafted  ABs in the appendix, why don’t more authors simply repost the appendix online?

    2025 Update. To my surprise and delight, making annotated lists seems to be something that AI engines excel in doing. It can gather and summarize in a line or two the apparent subject and the critical response. The main problem is that it swipes books from bestseller lists and misses a lot of interesting works which are not as widely known. Here is a prompt I used with Gemini:

    Give me an annotated list of 100 fiction titles written and published in English about the U.S. civil war. This can also include fiction about plantation life, slavery, reconstruction period and fiction taking place at a time near the time of the US Civil War (but not necessarily depicting it). Include graphic novels, YA novels and fictionalized versions of historical events, but exclude memoirs, biographies and historical correspondence. If any title has won or been nominated for a literary prize, mention it in the annotation. These fiction titles must be novellas or novels and must be published between 1930 and 2020.

    NOTES

    1  I actually think contemporary readers need to be more adventurous about what they read, even if it means having to struggle through crap once in a while. Indie publishing is flooded with perfectly interesting books which don’t win awards or get reviewed in notable places. This tendency to seek only books by award winners or books  have been widely praised  is perfectly understandable (and results in a higher probability that you will read a  winner),  but it also eliminates the thrill of discovery and also keeps hidden many remarkable literary works. It also lets you read with auto-pilot turned on; you are not really trusting your own judgment but instead simply trying to validate whether your opinions match what the critics have said.  My solution is to  download  and read a lot of first chapters and later abandon a lot of books after that. Sure, you can’t judge every book by a single  chapter, but at least I’m giving a lot of unknown authors a chance to enter my brain.

    (If you know of any annotated bibliographies online to recommend, feel free to list them in the comments). 

  • Copyright Ghosts of 1923 Come Alive Tomorrow!

    (I originally posted this on Teleread in 2007. The horrifying decision to freeze the public domain for 20 extra years has increased costs to libraries, schools, students and scholars. The works below would have gone into the public domain in 1999; instead, they will go into the public domain tomorrow! The openculture blog has more).

    “You are all a lost generation”
    Gertrude Stein, quoted in preface to Hemingway’s Sun Also Rises (1926)

    See also: Welcome to 1922! (Introduction), Ghosts of 1924. For Texas readers, see my tirade about why Dorothy Scarborough’s The Wind isn’t in the public domain.

    All the works listed below were scheduled to go into the U.S. public domain in 1999–except that a 1998 law mandated a 20 year delay–causing higher prices for students, teachers and libraries. Instead of 1999, these works will become part of the U.S. public domain only in 2019.

    Caveat: This is a work in progress. It may not be accurate. However, it will be updated over time (and hopefully made more accurate). Some of the works listed below might be very well be in the public domain or special arrangements might have been made to make them available in digitalized form. Always google to be sure. If you have edits/additions, send them to me here: idiotprogrammer at fastmailbox.net .

    How I Compiled This List

    First, let me explain how I located works specific to each year. I’m no expert on that decade, and frankly I did nothing that no other savvy Net Surfer could do using google and well-known resources.

    1. Wikipedia uses year pages as a central reference point to events, people and creative works particular to the time period. If you go to Wikipedia’s entry to 1923, you will find links to Literature and Film. I’ve found a lot of discrepancies about dates on wikipedia, so you shouldn’t take for granted that dates are absolutely correct (you should probably verify these dates elsewhere). However, they are usually in the ballpark. One of the problems with this dating system on Wikipedia is that it based on self-reporting by wikipedia posters; many well-known works probably haven’t been listed yet. Still, it’s enough to get a person started.
    2. University of Pennsylvania has a great listing of prize winners by year. Obviously not all great works were prize winners, but this helps you to be sure you haven’t overlooked any prize-winning works. This site links to digital copies when available. Sometimes it happens that post-1922 works have made it in the public domain for one reason or another. Also, because copyright law in Australia is Death + 50 Years, Project Gutenberg in Australia, they are sometimes able to carry certain works not yet available in the U.S. (Suddenly my heart is surging with a feeling of Australian nationalism).
    3. For general reference information about copyright, check University of Pennsylvania’s listing of copyright laws by country and Cornell U.’s reference guide to U.S. copyright law.
    4. Google Book Search tends to be pretty conservative about which books it allows full text for, but on the other hand, the best two things about it are 1)easy access to the copyright page to verify date (regardless of whether it’s in public domain) and 2)google-produced PDFs which are just a collection of screenshots of scans. I haven’t tried it, but now Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreader’s Project is using these PDF’s to OCR these works, saving individuals and libraries a lot of time and effort (horray Google!) .
    5. Here’s a list of copyright renewals by year. For example in 1923, works needed to be renewed in 1950, 1951 or 1952. This table provides a gigantic page of 1923 works which were not renewedand a list of works which were renewed (zip). I can’t really say how accurate or complete this information is (and by the way, I generally did not consult it when listing works below).
    6. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is the only literary source that lets you narrow by year. Its purpose seems to be sci fi/fantasy, but for now the database lists lots of general works as well. It also lists short stories and essays printed in a particular year–particularly useful. This website is still buggy and lists incomplete/unedited information. Also, the dates may contain second editions, so some might already be in the public domain. Still a good resource, and likely to improve with time.
    7. Project Gutenberg lists a lot of works that are post-1922 but are not put in the public domain by virtue of publication date. Maybe they have made alternate arrangements. The PG Clearance team is pretty sharp; I seriously doubt they would make a mistake.
    8. The Golden Age of Detection wiki lists detective novels from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, period between the 1920s and 1930s in England and (to a limited extent) the U.S. There are many ways to find detective novels in a certain time period. The most direct seems to be to enter “1923” as a search term in its search box.
    9. The IMDB database offers lots of ways to browse films by date. The problem is that even in 1923 there were 2099 listings. This is a cumbersome way to search. However, links on the left side allow you to list by total votes and by average vote. These two links have further links to the 100 top links in that category. However, I’ve observed discrepancies in dates. Also, many of these films are foreign, and you can’t tell the release date of these films in the US. I’m limiting myself to American releases (generally). Don’t forget to click on the Review link for individual films. BTW, make sure to check whether the film has a link to an External Review; some of the notable ones do.
    10. In archive.org you can do search by Date Ranges. You have to use Advanced Search, and it’s a bit cumbersome, but it works; . Also Openflix is distributing early public domain works. You can’t neatly search by year, but often entering the year into the Search box produces tidy search results. They used to provide p2p links, but now they provide links to streaming videos and cheap editions you can find on amazon.
    11. See also the National Registry of Films list. You can list films by date, and pretty much see which films that historians and archivists deemed notable/significant for a particular year.
    12. Other Categories: I am generally not listing literary works originally other than English here. For English-speaking audiences, we care about the copyright date of translations (although it is true that a person living today could write their own free translation from the original and post it online). Also, I haven’t listed much in the way of history/nonfiction/essays simply because I have no way of finding out what’s out there.

    The Ghosts of 1923–A Synopsis

    1923 was a great year. The country was suffering under an incompetent U.S. president, and in midyear another took office to fix the mess he’d created. William Butler Yeatswon the Nobel prize. Both Robert Frost and E.E. Cummings produced their first major collections of poetry (so did Wallace Stevens, but luckily it contained previously published works now in the public domain). W.C. Williams wrote two volumes of poetry; curiously even his pre-1923 works haven’t made it onto Gutenberg. A female sci fi writer named Gertrude Atherton published a sensational, semi-autobiographical novel Black Oxen, about a middle-aged woman who miraculously becomes young again after glandular therapy. It was made into a well-received film a year later. Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer created Cane, a series of poems and short stories considered to be an important work of high modernism. English writer (and friend of Rosetti) Hall Caine wrote an anti-war novel of a romance between a German POW and an English girl; it was made into a film in 1927. Feminist dramatist/fiction writer Zona Gale wrote another love story that satirized life in a small town. Edwin Lefèvre wrote a classic novel describing the life of a professional stock-trader on Wall Street (akin to a 1920’s Bonfire of the Vanities). Elmer Rice wrote Adding Machine, widely considered an early expressionist classic of American theater. P.G. Wodehouse had another Jeeves book out; G.B. Shaw had another play; Willa Cather had two novels; H.G. Wells had one, and adventure writer H. Rider Haggard had one too. Arnold Bennett had his last great masterpiece Riceyman Steps (now on Gutenberg).

    IMDB shows a mere 2099 movies produced in 1923 (a good percentage, we may assume are not American). Everything is still silent (obviously), but still there’s a wide variety of productions. Laurel and Hardy released 19 new films; Buster Keatonproduced three; Hal Roach’s Our Gang comedies started appearing with 19 in 1923; so did the classic Harold Lloyd‘s Safety Last (where he hangs off a clock on a building). Cecil de Mille produced two more epics. We also see an early work of Fay Wray (who starred in King Kong 10 years later). Alla Nazimova produced the controversial and lavish avante-garde Salome version of Oscar Wilde’s play, replete with “bare-chested boys, blond Nubian slaves, metallic potted palms, art nouveau floral patterns, and birdcage dungeons (wrote a Village Voice critic recently). There was Covered Wagon, a Western with a giant budget and other films with various plots about orphans, Irish immigrants, woman heading off to Hollywood to be a star (Hollywood was big even then).

    Of course, I have only scratched the surface. Obviously there are many more books, plays and movies and paintings I haven’t had time to describe here. Now, thanks to 1998 legislation passed by your congressmen, these and other works will have to wait an extra 20 years for Americans to have easy access to them. You have 12 years of waiting to go.

    Literary Works of 1923–Poems/Drama

    • E. E. Cummings – Tulips & Chimneys
    • Robert Frost – New Hampshire (won Pulitzer)
    • William Carlos Williams: Go Go, Spring and All
    • Elmer Rice – The Adding Machine
    • George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
    • John Masefield — Dauber And the Daffodil Fields
    • Wallace Stevens – Harmonium
    • Owen Davis, Icebound (won Pulitzer for drama)

    Literary Works of 1923–Fiction

    • Gertrude Atherton – Black Oxen (racy sci fi later made into 1924 film). Update: Expired copyright.
    • Sherwood Anderson – Many Marriages
    • Max Brand – Seven Trails (writer of Westerns/pulps)
    • Hall Caine – The Woman of Knockaloe
    • Willa Cather – A Lost Lady; One of Ours
    • Marie Corelli – Love and the Philosopher
    • Zona Gale – Faint Perfume
    • Georgette Heyer – The Great Roxhythe (Heyer wrote historical romances/detective novels)
    • Dark Frigate by Charles Boardman Hawes (Children, Newberry)
    • A. A. Milne – The House at Pooh Corner
    • Jules Romains – Knock
    • Felix Salten – Bambi, A Life in the Woods
    • Dorothy L. Sayers – Whose Body? (expired copyright)
    • James Stephens – Deirdre
    • Jean Toomer – Cane
    • H. G. Wells – Men Like Gods
    • Margaret Wilson -The Able McLaughlins (Pulitzer) . Wully McLaughlin, a member of a Scots community in frontier Iowa, is alarmed by the behavior of his sweetheart when he returns from battle in the Civil War.
    • Edwin Lefèvre – Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (free on the net)
    • H. Rider Haggard – Wisdom’s Daughter
    • Arnold Bennett – Riceyman Steps (now at PG)
    • Weeds by Edith Summers Kelley, First published in 1923, Weeds is set amid the tobacco tenant farms of rural Kentucky. This pioneering naturalist novel tells the story of a hard-working, spirited young woman who finds herself in a soul-destroying battle with the imprisoning duties of motherhood and of managing an impoverished household. The novel is particularly noteworthy for its heartbreaking depiction of a woman who suffers not from a lack of love, but from an unrequited longing for self-expression and freedom
    • Novels by Anzia Yezierska : Salome of the Tenements and Children of Loneliness

    Films of 1923

    • Gasoline Love (early film with Fay Wray)
    • Burning Brazier (surreal French/Russian detective ) Ivan Mozzhukhin
    • Little Old New York, comedy of Irish female immigrant who comes to USA starring Marion Davies), dir. Sidney Olcott
    • Zaza, story of French music star battling with her rival
    • The Extra Girl, actress wins a contest to become a star
    • Our Hospitality & Balloonatic, Three Ages, Love Nest (1923) Buster Keaton classic
    • Covered Wagon, Western with giant budget
    • The Daring Years, starring Mildred Harris, Charles Emmett Mack and Clara Bow
    • The Hunchback of Notre Dame, starring Lon Chaney
    • The Purple Highway, starring Madge Kennedy, Monte Blue, Vincent Coleman and Pedro de Cordoba
    • Safety Last!, starring Harold Lloyd. In one scene, Lloyd is seen climbing around and hanging off the side of a tall building, including a very famous scene where he hangs off a clock. Lloyd did all of his own stunts, and worked without a safety net. Also in the same year, Why Worry?, silent comedy about hypochondriac millionaire
    • Salomé, starring Alla Nazimova; directed by Charles Bryant, stylized avante-garde version of Oscar Wilde’s play (deemed a “culturally significant film by the National Film Registry).
    • Souls for Sale, starring Richard Dix and Eleanor Boardman; look at gliterati of Hollywood
    • A Woman of Paris & Pilgrim , starring Edna Purviance; directed by Charles Chaplin
    • It’s a Gift & 18 other Our Gang films (written by Hal Roach )
    • White Rose, D.W. Griffith tale of an orphan girl who goes out into the world.
    • Bright Shawl, adventure/political/spy thriller Edward G. Robinson, Mary Astor, William Powell
    • Adam’s Rib & 10 Commandments Directed by Cecil B. DeMille
    • Laurel & Hardy: 19 videos (!!!)

    Essays/History/Autobiography/Nonfiction

    • Studies in Classic American Literature, by DH Lawrence; famous litcrit.
    • Robert Henri – The Art Spirit (essays and conversations about art by artist/teacher who led Ashcan Art movement of realistic American art).

    Detective Fiction

    (I haven’t verified these titles, but a commenter to the original article referred me to the Golden Age of Detection Fiction  )

    • Baroque (1923)
    • Behind Locked Doors (1923)
    • Black, White and Brindled (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • Bones of the River (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Captains of Souls (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Cheri-bibi and Cecily aka Missing Men (1923) by Gaston Leroux
    • Chick (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • Children of the Wind (1923) by MP Shiel
    • Cole, GDH & M – The Brooklyn Murders – (1923)
    • Contact and Other Stories (1923) by Frances Noyes Hart
    • Craig Kennedy Listens In (1923) by Arthur Reeve
    • Days to Remember (1923) by John Buchan
    • Dorothée, danseuse de corde (1923)
    • Dr Thorndyke’s Casebook aka The Blue Scarab (1923)
    • Feathers Left Around (1923)
    • Hounded Down (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • Impromptu (1923) by Elliot Paul
    • Jim Hanvey, Detective (1923) by Octavus Roy Cohen
    • Jim Maitland (1923)
    • John Dighton, Mystery Millionaire (1923)
    • Klondyke Kit’s Revenge (1923) by George Goodchild
    • La poupée sanglante & La machine à assassiner (1923)
    • Many Engagements {short stories} (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • Michael’s Evil Deeds (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • Midwinter (1923) by John Buchan
    • Monsieur Jonquelle (1923) by Melville Davisson Post
    • More Lives Than One (1923)
    • Mr Fortune’s Practice (1923) by HC Bailey
    • Once In A Red Moon (1923) by Joel Townsley Rogers
    • Secret Service Smith (1923)
    • Spooky Hollow (1923)
    • That Fellow Macarthur (1923) by Selwyn Jepson
    • The Affair at Flower Acres (1923)
    • The Ambitious Lady (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Astonishing Adventure of Jane Smith (1923) by Patricia Wentworth
    • The Big Heart (1923)
    • The Blackguard (1923)
    • The Books of Bart (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Brooklyn Murders (1923); by GDH Cole
    • The Call Box Mystery (1923) by John Ironside
    • The Cartwright Gardens Murder (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Cat’s Eye (1923) by R Austin Freeman
    • The Charing Cross Mystery (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Clue of the New Pin (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Copper Box (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Eyes of Max Carrados (1923) by Ernest Bramah
    • The Flaming Spectre of Cloome (1923)
    • The Four Stragglers (1923)
    • The Green Archer (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Green Eyes (1923)
    • The Groote Park Murder (1923) by Freeman Wills Crofts
    • The House at Waterloo (1923)
    • The Inevitable Millionaires (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The King’s Red-Haired Girl (1923) by Selwyn Jepson
    • The Last Secrets {essays and articles} (1923) by John Buchan
    • The Lone Wolf Returns (1923) by Louis Joseph Vance
    • The Mazaroff Murder {aka The Mazaroff Mystery} (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Million-Dollar Diamond (1923) by JS Fletcher
    • The Missing Million (1923) by Edgar Wallace
    • The Moth-Woman (1923) by Fergus Hume
    • The Murder on the Links (1923) by Agatha Christie
    • The Mysterious Chinaman (1923) {aka The Rippling Ruby}
    • The Mysterious Mr Garland (1923) by Wyndham Martin
    • The Mystery of Glyn Castle (1923)
    • The Mystery Road (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The Nature of a Crime (1923), with Ford Madox Ford by Joseph Conrad
    • The Orange Divan (1923) by Valentine Williams
    • The Other Story, and Other Stories, (1923) by Henry Kitchell Webster
    • The Red Redmaynes (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • The Return of Anthony Trent (1923) by Wyndham Martin
    • The Rover (1923) by Joseph Conrad
    • The Secret of the Sandhills (1923) by Arthur Gask
    • The Secret of Thurlestone Towers (1923)
    • The Seven Conundrums (1923) by E Phillips Oppenheim
    • The Sinister Mark (1923)
    • The Step on the Stair (1923) by Anna Katherine Green
    • The Thing at Their Heels (1923) by Eden Phillpotts
    • The Valley of Lies (1923) by George Goodchild
    • The Veiled Prisoner (1923) by Gaston Leroux
    • The Vengeance of Henry Jarroman (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • The Whipping Girl (1923) by Ralph Rodd
    • The Wild Bird (1923) by Hulbert Footner
    • The Woman Accused (1923) by Roy Vickers
    • The Yard (1923) by Horace Annesley Vachell
    • Tut Tut Mr Tutt (1923) by Arthur Train
    • Wheels Within Wheels (1923)
    • Whose Body? (1923) by Dorothy L Sayers
    • Why They Married (1923) by Mrs Belloc Lowndes

  • Holiday lethargy (Smashword edition)

    My first installment of Robert’s Roundup Smashwords edition is scheduled for Saturday. Might be a stretch — although I’ll certainly try.  Holiday frivolity is keeping me away from my goal; it might not go live until Sunday.  Stay tuned! 

    Monday Update: I feel that I’ll do the weekly roundup on Wednesday (tomorrow) and the Smashwords update on Wednesday/Thursday — stay tuned!

  • Why does Fort Bend public library sanitize Pulitzer Prize winners?

    June 25 Update. I emailed this message a month ago to one of the library branch managers. After receiving no reply, I forwarded the message to Clara Russell, the Fort Bend library director.  Below is the note I included with my original letter and then the original letter itself. 

    Letter to Ms. Russell

    Dear Ms. Russell:

    On May 6 I wrote a complaint letter to the branch manager of the library I regularly visit (Cinco Ranch) without receiving a reply. The complaint was about buying “clean versions” of music CDs.

    Just recently I checked out a Grammy-nominated best-selling music CD, “Rainbow” by Kesha. Kesha is not only a critically acclaimed pop singer, she was also embroiled in a recent dispute with her music producer over sexual harassment. Regardless of what you think about this dispute, it is indisputable that  Kesha is in touch with the cultural zeitgeist, the “Me too” movement and youth culture. She uses a moderate amount of profanity in her songs, but in one or two songs of the “Rainbow” album,  she uses profanity pointedly as a form of cultural reappropriation. Indeed, the nation’s leading music magazine “Rolling Stone” published a long essay about her song “Woman” where Kesha explains that in the context of this “female empowerment song,” she had earned the right to use swear words:

    That day in particular I felt like I had earned the right call myself a motherfucking woman. I have always been a feminist, but for much of my life I felt like a little girl trying to figure things out. In the past few years, I have felt like a woman more than ever. I just feel the strength and awesomeness and power of being female. We hold the key to humanity. We decide if we populate the Earth, and if so, with whom. We could just decide not to have any more kids and the human race would be over. That is power. I just really fucking love being a woman and I wanted an anthem for anyone else who wants to yell about being self-sufficient and strong. (Yes, men, this song can be for you too.).

    Here’s what the Fort Bend library version of this song sounds like:. In effect, the Fort Bend version of the song ruins the effect of the lyrics  and undermines the very empowerment message embedded inside the song.

    Here’s how the artist intended the song to sound:

    This is not a selected instance of censorship. To me, this seems to be an institutional effort to systematically remove musical examples of vulgar language in its collection — while making no such effort in prose or cinema.

    If this were the 1980s, perhaps you can justify the removal by pointing to examples of misogyny or hate speech in the rap music genre. But now Fort Bend is censoring songs across the spectrum, including a well-known album described by critics as embodying female empowerment.

    If your acquisitions department didn’t have enough funds to buy the album or if it thought that buying other items were more culturally important, I could at least respect your decision. But here your library has decided as an institution and as a matter of policy to refrain from buying an entire category of  material simply because of word choice.   That is unfortunate and harmful in the long run.

    Original Letter (sent 1 month ago)

    Dear Fort Bend Library Manager:

    I am writing about the music CD collection both at your branch and the Fort Bend library system.

    Thank you for maintaining a  growing collection of music in CD media form. I realize that library systems experience pressure to stream/digitalize their collection, but CD media are more permanent and can be repurposed for a variety of platforms. They also are not encrypted in any way and do not depend on Internet access.

    This may sound counterintuitive, but having access to streaming music and music CDs through the library makes it MORE likely for patrons like me to spend money on music. No matter how much a library tries, the amount of albums it has in its collection will remain only a small fraction of what recordings have been made and sold.  The chance to hear library copies of one or two albums by an artist increases the likelihood that I will support the artist (through concert tickets and purchasing downloadable music).

    But I am concerned that the Fort Bend Library system has a clear preference for purchasing  “clean” or “edited” music CDs over the normal commercial versions.

    I don’t normally listen to rap music with explicit lyrics; on the other hand, I would expect that a library collection not to exclude the explicit version of these albums.

    I recently checked out two albums from Cinco Ranch: “Damn” by Kendrick Lamar and “Beautiful Trauma” by Pink. Both are extremely popular albums and have mainstream appeal. Neither is particularly known for using vulgar or derogatory lyrics. I have taken the time personally to check the uncensored lyrics for both albums. The profanity on both albums is very mild.

    Unfortunately, Fort Bend bought the “edited” music CD of both the Kendrick Lamar and the Pink album. This library system chose NOT to buy the original unedited version of either album.

    Kendrick Lamar’s album won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Music. This actually was historic because it is the first time ever that a popular music album has won this prestigious award.

    As I explore Fort Bend’s collection of music CDs, I keep noticing that a huge number of rap albums CDs are available from Fort Bend only in “edited” versions. Indeed, just to satisfy my curiosity (and to waste maybe 15 minutes), I went to Cinco Ranch branch’s music section, pulled all the rap music CDs and checked the online catalog. My spot check of rap music CDs at Cinco Ranch branch library  is that about 80 percent of the albums at the branch are marked “clean”, and probably ZERO of the albums with clean versions have explicit versions circulating in the library system. Further study would be required, but I am guessing that this trend is true not just as this branch but the entire music collection in the system.

    Hoopla carries original versions for SOME of these albums, but not all and certainly not the older albums.

    I am not a huge fan of rap music or or profanity in general. I can understand how in some contexts (at school or on the radio), it may be necessary to restrict the playing of songs with explicit lyrics. On the other hand, I value being able to hear the work as the artist originally intended. The Pulitzer judges apparently decided that the profanity on the Kendrick Lamar didn’t detract from its cultural importance; why should Fort Bend library decide otherwise?

    We are not in middle school. I  am 52 years old!  Presumably, someone who checks out a music CD is playing it for private use, and social mores have changed to a point where teenagers today listen and watch material with a lot more explicit language than during the years of my youth.

    During my last visit to Cinco Ranch branch’s DVD section, I noticed    Clockwork Orange, The Godfather and  Seven. All three are lauded R-rated  movies with explicit and highly provocative content. It would not occur to most people or libraries to ask that the Hollywood Studios which made these movies to  sell a “sanitized” version of these movies.  Why then should public libraries have different rules about music albums?

    Having only edited versions of albums sends an unfortunate message to patrons that individuals are not entitled to experience art works the way the artist intended. Also, by making only edited versions available, you are trying the hide the coarseness that the musician wished to convey.

    I don’t particularly object to libraries deciding not to purchase works with too much vulgarity; but if you think that an item is worth purchasing, you should buy the version that is closest to what the creator wanted.

    As much as I enjoy checking out music CDs and appreciate what resources you offer to the patrons in your county, I recognize that fairly soon it will make more sense for the library to focus on investing in its streaming collection.

    Regardless of how this library develops their music collection, I would like to see the library system commit itself to no longer buying “clean versions” of music. Doing so strikes me as culturally retrograde.

    Sincerely,

    Robert Nagle

    PS, One other thing is that although the metadata in the catalog discloses that a CD is edited, the physical CDs show no such indication, making it practically impossible for patrons to know whether the music CD is the original version or a sanitized version.

    2021 Update. I forgot to mention the outcome. A few weeks after sending the letter, I eventually received a reply from the Fort Bend library director. The reply (implicitly) reaffirmed the no curse word policy on music CDs while at the same time mentioning that the streaming music services (Hoopla and freegal) offered “uncensored versions” of songs. I should add that I wasn’t sure that Hoopla and freegal offered streaming version of every censored albums. Indeed, I recently checked out Reclassified by Iggy Azalea music CD (which is not available for streaming) and was unpleasantly surprised again to learn that most of the songs were edited to remove the occasional profanity.

  • The only text messages you’ll ever need to send

    Text messages — who needs them?  Although I’ve always been an early adopter, I find that I almost never send text messages. More generally, I haven’t yet gotten a smartphone and don’t really feel like I’m missing out.  It’s funny. A lot of people get into sending clever text messages or participating in a threaded chat on their iphones,  but I’ll have none of that.

    Here are the only text messages that I have sent or ever will send:

    • Arrived home.
    • The panel will be at  Ballroom B. (This actually is the first text I ever sent).
    • Ok/thanks.
    • Meeting has been changed to 9:45 AM
    • Still alive.
    • Class is cancelled.
    • Running late. Expect to arrive at 2:25.
    • Please order me the Kung Pao Chicken
    • Feel like talking?
    • Feel like playing tennis?
    • Yes, I’ll attend.
    • Call me.
    • Call me  ASAP.
    • Do you have a stapler?
    • Address is 6121 Winsome Apt 7B.
    • Can you pick up the kids?
    • Do you already own this (include photo of product at store)
    • I’ll remain here until 11:00 PM.
    • Don’t forget to feed the dog.
    • Joanna isn’t here yet and not answering her phone. What’s up?
    • How much does it cost?
    • Can’t talk.   Too Busy.

    You’ll notice that the text messages listed above have a single purpose and impart usually one fact.  Texters should stick to these kind of task-oriented messages. The shorter you make  the text, the more likely people can misunderstand or take something the wrong way. You can’t express feelings except in a stereotypical way — you might as well just send an emoticon.  Also because text messages have a tendency to pile up, you can miss one message and totally miss out on the texter’s intentions.  True communication shouldn’t be this confusing and unwieldy.

    I used to do chat via yahoo and skype. I still do occasionally, but for the most part, I find that it is a time-consuming and grueling way to conduct a conversation. Probably the most common text I send via skype is “Do you want to talk by telephone?” Typing and waiting for other people to type replies requires a lot of effort and patience. And I speak as someone who is perfectly comfortable typing thoughts rather than saying them.

    Actually, skype is good when crossing time zones and doing brief technical interviews. The interview subject or technical support person can drop links into a chat window and paste troubleshooting information. That’s a situation where it works.

    Before the Internet became big and affordable, web chat allowed you to communicate in real time with people far away.  Sure, it was fun. I enjoyed chatting with former students in Eastern Europe. Sometimes we had in-depth conversations via web chat. But that was on a computer and back in the days that Internet phone calls still weren’t practical. I won’t deny that text chat sometimes brought web conversations in unintended directions, but for a the most part it was nothing more than a lousy substitute for voice chat.

    Text messages can help in certain contexts, especially situations where there is no free wifi access or where the noise level is too loud.  I was once at a nightclub where the noise level was so loud that I would never be able to hear the person calling; Text-messaging was the perfect solution. The ability to share photos and start group threads on texting platforms is helpful. But phones are an inferior device for typing and reading  (and storing) texts. Maybe it’s ok for making plans, but a phone call can resolve a lot of the details much faster than  text messages can.  Also, texting isn’t an appropriate way to have a deep  conversation or  communicate anger or love.  I debated whether I would include two other messages on my list: “I love you” and “I’ll pray for you.”  I understand that some people may prefer using these kinds of phrases often, but for me it is way too perfunctory a context to  make these expressions. If you love somebody, dammit there are better ways to express it than by  a text message. (If I recall correctly, a driver  in the famous anti-texting video who texted before causing a fatal car crash had been sending his girlfriend the text,  “I love you.”)

    You will notice that most of these text messages I listed here require only one or two followups (if that much!)  You want to receive text messages only when you think there is a time-sensitive reason to be interrupted from your job or nap. Interruptions are not really good things.  The bell or beep announcing the arrival of a text message might seem inconsequential and not really distracting, but to have any kind of extended chat means having to sit through a parade of unending beeps that announce yet another uninteresting message.  Sure, if both parties are in different places and have time to kill, then it’s a pleasant diversion.

    Text messages might be part of a successful dating/courtship ritual — although I’m way past high school and college dating situations where I might experience this phenomenon first hand.   I’m not talking about sexy poses or lewd messages. I’m talking about photos or videos or the occasional joking remark.  I once had an ill-fated long distance relationship before the time of webcams and camera phones. Phone calls were still extraordinarily expensive; I’m not saying that anything could have saved the situation (probably not), but photos and video  might have given things more immediacy. It might have given one  person better insight into the other person’s thought processes. Instead, she and I were talking to one another on a 35 cent per minute international phone line even though  I’m not sure we were really   communicating.  But compared to a bland text message, a voice conversation is practically a psychotherapy session.  A phone call can convey attitude and emotional level.

    I’m all in favor of people having several different tools to help them communicate. The more, the merrier. My problem with texting is that it’s a last resort method of communication which nowadays people are starting to use as  a first resort.  The historical curiosity about text messages is that they grew independently  from email and web chat because phone providers refused to make them interoperable. They started out as single platform and only later became interoperable with other phone platforms (but generally not web-based ones).   Texting is also  used as a bonus promotional feature to encourage people to buy more expensive cell phone plans.  Texting — like snapchat — is designed for ephemeral conversations. I doubt people would want to save their phone chat sessions or that phone providers would make this easy.  Sure, there are privacy reasons why you might want texting sessions to disappear, but the user should always have this  option to save.  I have a hard time believing that most  texting sessions are interesting enough even to be worth saving. And if something is not interesting enough to save, why bother doing it at all?

    September 2021 Update. I actually did buy a smartphone 3 months after writing this post. But it’s funny how rarely I have sent text messages or shared multimedia over the years. Only on one occasion would I have called text-messaging to be indispensable. In February 2021 a winter freeze caused power outages everywhere, and cell phones were still barely able functional. You couldn’t make or receive phone calls, but it was still possible to send and receive text messages because they were so low bandwidth and asynchronous.

    Here’s a new acronym I invented when you think it is better to handle the matter with voice rather with text. TITASPEED: Texting Is Too Awkward; Speech Produces Easy Effective Decisions.

  • Why Facebook is no longer relevant to content creators (or readers!)

    A few months ago, Facebook  did something so shocking and stupid that it left me no choice but to leave Facebook. For good.

    Up until that time I have enjoyed Facebook for what it is. It’s a great way to keep up with friends from school and work and overseas. Frankly, I have avoided these kinds of social media web apps, but the first tipoff that FB  was actually useful came when Texas uberblogger Gary Denton announced that he was abandoning his Easter Lemming blogs in order to focus on Facebook. Amazing! Soon, too, I found a lot of the same link-sharing which I normally did on my blog could  be done just as easily on Facebook — and more people would read it too. I also found that I was learning about lots of new URLs and essays through Facebook which I’d normally learn about through bloggers. Suddenly FB was a better source for content than bloggers were.

    If you think of it, Facebook is nothing more than a microblogging platform with a little bit of messaging and relationship management  thrown in. It’s not rocket science,  and for news junkies and readers, you could follow lots of people and content sources by RSS feeds. But most Americans never paid attention to RSS feeds, plus you had lots of news sources not allowing full feeds (a real pain for readers). Even when things started moving into mobile platforms, few people used naked RSS readers, instead obtaining their content by “Liking” things on Facebook or using an intermediary like Flipboard to browse through cool stuff.

    I could talk about some things which annoyed me about Facebook. (such as everchanging privacy controls, unsafe third party apps and difficulty suppressing trolls and promiscuous posters). But for the most part FB was doing many things right. More importantly, 2 or 3 years ago Facebook introduced a personal archive of your data which you can download for safekeeping.

    Swell. Every two or three months I would request another personal archive to be made, and shortly thereafter I would receive via email a link to a zip file containing my data in html form. This is a case where everything worked exactly as expected. All my data was there and easy to find offline. I could easily refer to it and look things up on it. I found that I did that often. I posted some of my things onto Facebook  just in case.

    But around June 2013, I began to notice that the latest zip of the FB archives was missing stuff. At first, I attributed it to a bug. Facebook is a gigantic system always in flux, and I had read reports that the archiving feature was causing problems for many users. Give it time, I thought.

    Then, I noticed that my latest personal archive no longer included the URLs to the links I was making to my facebook posts. Let me explain. One “trick” about Facebook is that when you paste a link into the posting space, FB will automatically discover the Title, Summary and preview image of the link in question. In fact, you can even delete the URL you posted and Facebook will still keep the link in your wall post. It’s a really cool thing, and if you think about it, why does the tiny wallpost form need to include URLs when you already have the preview as a hyperlink?

    I had been embedding links into Facebook wall posts that way for over a year now. But now I discover that not only were my personal archives missing comments from others, Facebook had also stripped out every single link I had added.  It had also removed all my friends’  comments by friends to my posts as well as my own comments. Bastards!

    The Old Facebook Archives

    Here is what the old Personal Archives used to look like for my wall. In this particular screenshot you don’t see comments by others, but in fact, specific posts in my archives do include comments by others (depending on their privacy settings).

    fb-good-archive-debate

    The “New and Improved” Personal Facebook Archive

    Stripped of all my links, none of the posts make sense, and my own comments are removed.

    fb-bad-archive-debate

    My original descriptions are there, only the links are nowhere to be seen!

    There is a way to keep the URls so that they can (for now) be included in personal archives. That is to leave the URL’s in the status bar. But even when you do this, the links themselves will no longer be “clickable.”

    Furthermore, comments are removed totally from the archives. I can understand not showing comments by OTHERS (if it conflicts with a user’s privacy settings). But I do not understand why it has removed MY OWN COMMENTS to MY OWN POSTS!

    Again, the personal archive from last year did EVERYTHING perfectly. Now let’s look at the monstrosity that motivated FB to ruin its own archiving capability.

    Facebook Activity Log: Disaster in search of a problem

    Facebook introduced something called the Activity Log. I don’t know why they did it; I’m sure there is some crass commercial motivation behind it; never mind about that.

    The fig leaf behind this function is that it’s supposed to make it easier for users to look up past posts. This is a worthy goal; Facebook has always been horrible about having to look up anything older than a week old. I have probably spent hours continuously clicking the More button just to find some link I posted a few months ago.

    But here’s the thing. When FB introduced the Activity log, it seems that that they also crippled the personal archive.

    Now let’s look at that some post I made about the presidential debate in the Activity Log.

    facebook-activity

    Everything is posted in unthreaded reverse chronological order without including user comments, making it practically impossible to understand the context of the original remarks.

    That means: if you posted on a controversial topic on Friday and on Tuesday someone makes a comment on that same thread (or maybe you do too), any of your other activity in the intervening time will be mixed in with it.

    Facebook has a helpful table describing exactly how they are screwing you. Here is the relevant listing of what from your wall posts they will be saving:

    facebook-table

     

    What’s the Alternative?

    Facebook is where everyone is at, so we can’t just leave Facebook willy-nilly, can we?

    Or can we?

    Google Plus is a newer and cleaner alternative to Facebook. It is not as full featured as Facebook (and doesn’t have 1/10 of the users), but it has some other cool features. Plus, you can’t beat it as an integrated solution.

    More relevant to today’s post, Google has made a full commitment to data liberation. Here’s what they say:

    For this reason, we always encourage people to ask these three questions before starting to use a product that will store their data:

    1. Can I get my data out in an open, interoperable, portable format?
    2. How much is it going to cost to get my data out?
    3. How much of my time is it going to take to get my data out?

    The ideal answers to these questions are:

    1. Yes.
    2. Nothing more than I’m already paying.
    3. As little as possible.

    Google Plus has a free service called Google Takeout which lets you export ALL of your data out of the web application. That includes not only Google Plus, but also Google Docs, Blogger, etc.  I haven’t played that much with Google Takeout, except that it does exactly what it says it does. I noticed that Google Plus archives are exported as individual html files. So your archive will accumulate dozens (if not hundreds)  So each individual post is a separate html file. That is inconvenient, yes, but at least I’m not losing any data here. Sure, it’s not as easy to search through in offline mode, but a single grep command in linux  or a good text editor could probably help you find what you want easily.

    For me as a writer, I want to keep a record of as much as possible. I never gave free web apps the right to hide my own data from me. It no longer makes sense to use Facebook if I can no longer know for sure if I can export my data outside of Facebook.

    The Post-Facebook and Post-Google-Plus Era

    I jumped pretty quickly  onto blogging and  other web services. Probably in about 2006-8, things changed. Smart phones came and with that came producing and receiving content from your phone. Then Facebook came  — which managed to straddle both desktop  and mobile devices.

    Now we are entering a phase where we want to repurpose content into other platforms. You may have noticed that many people automatically  re-publish their twitter posts or blog posts  to facebook  or to twitter. (To say nothing of instagram, etc).  I used to find that very annoying — especially because things reposted in Facebook seemed ill-formatted or inappropriate for it. For example, I wouldn’t want to repost all my blogposts onto Facebook (although I feel differently about doing so on Google Plus).

    I don’t heavily use Evernote, but the concept is alluring: it can keep archived versions of certain web pages as well as your own content. Couldn’t I just store all my content streams there?

    I have discovered two services which deal with cross-posting things onto multiple platforms.

    First, there is HootSuite, a tool online marketers use to republish content onto multiple platforms. Which only raises the question: if you are creating your content originally in Hootsuite, how do you archive your Hootsuite content?

    Second, there is IFTTT (short for If This, Then That) which lets you create or use different recipes to convert and publish your content from one platform to another. It basically lets you set up notifications too. Everything seems to be RSS-based, and sometimes the various platforms have special rules and restrictions which make it hard to import/export stuff. Sometimes just browsing through the known recipes can help you figure out a solution; sometimes you need to use a search engine to find what you want. Here for example is a good way to create feeds out of your Google+ posts which then can be scooped up by Facebook.

    Note: this solution isn’t recipe is hosted on a third party site, so it is not likely to last too long. But for now it is the only solution I know of.

    The ultimate goal for a blogger like me is to post at one place where I have full control and high confidence (like my blog) and then use customized RSS recipes to re-post certain things where relevant.

    Don’t count out blogging software. With blogging software you remain in control over data; you own it, and then you simply use intermediary tools to connect things to another. I’m not sure that there’s a clean solution for replicating or backing up comments (though Disqus makes a compelling argument for outsourcing it altogether).

    Of course, you need to take into consideration the specific characteristics of each platform and the nature of the audience. But  I am finding that it is no longer necessary to depend on or live inside these social applications as much. Sure, I stop by Facebook.  It’s certainly nice visiting old friends, but I certainly wouldn’t want to park there and create content ONLY for Facebook.

    The flaw with Facebook (and other community sites) is that they succeed only with good content and mindshare. But when the good content can be found elsewhere (or anywhere!), suddenly there no longer is a compelling reason to park there.  Suddenly that mindshare — which seemed to have so much self-sustaining momentum — seems to  disappear.  The time will soon come when more people will be  reposting onto Facebook than posting. And that will be a good thing.

    Postscript: Making the Blog Cool Again

    A few years ago Virginia Heffernan remarked that with Facebook and Twitter, suddenly it was no longer cool to be blogging anymore. At the time I thought she was mistaken, but over time I  had to admit that my blogging output was significantly less after Facebook came along. I was spending more time on longer articles, less time on casual blogging and linkdumps.

    Intermediaries like IFTTT make it possible to have content originate in WordPress. But that does not solve the problem at all. Here are the issues that initially jump out:

    1. How can a personal blog or website feature both short content and long content without making the site itself unusable?  (The theme would have to do this,  you’d need better front page management and you’d need to have separate content types probably).
    2. What are the rules for displaying short content on  the various platforms? What images show up? How many characters? Does the link show up, etc?
    3. How do you make it easy for people on one platform to see comments people have made on other platforms?

    About the first question, bloggers have typically made linkdump pages on a daily/weekly basis, but does that solve the problem? One thing fun about FB/G+ is that the posts are really short. There’s really no elegant way to repurpose a linkdump post onto facebook. I need time to think this through…..

     

     

  • Best Happy Birthday Songs: I am Super Psyched!

    You may not be aware that Free Music Archive is running a contest to identify some excellent birthday songs. There’s a real need for restaurants,  moviemakers and radio people to identify a song which can be sung royalty-free at any time.

    Out of the 137 songs, here are my 10 favorites. They are all great.

    Some comments about the genre itself:

    A birthday song should be memorable, easy-to-sing, short, inoffensive and slightly offbeat.  It’s a challenging song format. On the one hand, you want to make it as simple and short as possible; on the other hand, you want to make it memorable too. Just the lyrics are a challenge. The songs  needs to have direct rhymes; that means you have a lot of monosyllabic words ending with “ay” (yuck!). Ironically,  the bolder the musical ideas in a birthday song, the less functional the song actually becomes.

    Out of all the songs,  the Danimals’ Super Psyched for your Birthday and Older than Dirt are the most memorable.  Every time I come to the moment where the Danimals scream, I laugh.

    Older than Dirt and Chris Trapper’s “Birthday Song” have the best lyrics, although to be fair, many of the songs don’t even try to be clever or poetic. As a  compromise, the Rodger Rainono “Happy Happy Happy  Birthday” just uses a  refrain where you can add extra lyrics ad infinitum (and some of the lyrics in the recording they use in this recording are pretty damn clever). Who would have ever thought that a birthday song would inspire such humorous and poetic meditations on aging!!

    For brevity, awards go to Monk Turner’s “It’s Your Birthday”, Jazzy J’s “One Year Older” and Caston  Deluca’s “Happy Birthday.”   Deluca’s song is minimalist and charming. Ironically, she is an avante-garde music composer of hazy music landscapes. ( I have already written a profile and interview about songwriter  Monk Turner).

    For singability (i.e., singable by people with limited voices), Rodger Rainono’s “Happy happy happy birthday” and “Older than Dirt” are great.

    For musical ideas, I thought Hendrik Left Engelmann-Löffler’s song had nice interweaving melodies, and Chris Trapper’s song had lots of nice touches (a tuba!). Both songs are too out there to win though.

    The songs I want to win: Superpsyched for your birthday, Older than Dirt, and Chris Trapper’s Birthday.

    Here are the songs that I predict will win: “Happy  Happy happy birthday!” Superpsyched for your birthday and one of the longer songs (either  “Older than Dirt”  or Chris Trapper’s Birthday).

    The grand prize should go either to Superpsyched or “Happy happy happy birthday” because either song does exactly what a birthday song should do.  Interestingly, both songs have multiple verses (which is NOT something you would expect for a birthday song), but the chorus for both songs are easy to remember.

    Finally, I should mention something interesting about the Danimals. Apparently they write and sing a LOT of different birthday songs. I think they write custom songs for people on special occasions. They have 2 versions of the same song: a clean version (“Super-psyched”) and a not-so-clean version (“F*****ing psyched”).

    Believe it or not, I have boycotted the “Happy Birthday” song for several years now, so I am eager to get some new stuff to sing….. I am super-psyched!

  • Chron.com’s lack of coverage of hunger strikers is truly shocking

    Progressives in Texas may already know about how Houston climate change activists are protesting the XL Keystone Pipeline with a hunger strike. But do most Houstonians know?

    A hunger strike is a blatant attempt to manipulate public opinion by staging a public act of self-denial. The thinking goes, if the activist demonstrates that his willpower is stronger than his  oppressors, that has enormous persuasive value.  These things can be very annoying for public officials who for one reason or another find themselves on the opposite side of the policy question.

    The Houston hunger strikers are protesting their wrongful arrest at a Valero refinery. As of this date, they have been striking for 18 days.

    That is not a trivial amount of time, and the issues behind this strike are not trivial either. Diane Wilson and Bob Lindsey broke the law by locking themselves to Valero tanker trucks in November. Valero is likely to benefit from the XL pipeline, and local environmentalists accuse Valero and other companies of poisoning the area around the refinery. The protest website states,

    Valero Energy Corp’s refinery emits life threatening poisons and pollutants that directly impact Manchester residents. Valero fills the air, water, and land in and around the community with toxic chemicals linked to terrible rates of cancers, asthma, and lung and skin ailments, with the full knowledge that the impacts of its pollutants will disproportionately affect the people of Manchester. With a nearly 90% Latino population, this is an obvious example of environmental racism.

    Manchester is completely surrounded by industry. To the north and east is the Valero refinery with the Lyondell-Bassal refinery to the southeast, Texas Petro-Chemicals plant to the south, a Rhodia chemical plant and a trash shredding facility to the west, a wastewater treatment facility to the east, a Goodyear Tire plant to the southeast, along with the Interstate 610 overpass bisecting the community and an industrial rail yard forming the community’s southern perimeter.

    Valero refinery entrance in Houston

    I once  visited this area for a tour organized by the Sierra Club.  It’s about 30 minutes away from where I live. It is a heinous place to be; no person would want to live anywhere close to this hell hole. Yet the place is inhabited by a lot of lower-income people and families. There is a school a few miles away that because of its proximity was once labeled the most dangerous school in America.

    Even if fewer people lived there, the place would be a nasty eye sore and a potential hazard for Houstonians. Even if we didn’t have to worry about climate change, the place would still be a bad source of carcinogens and a possible source of dangerous accidents.

    The two people who were arrested were seasoned activists. Bob Lindsey had a father and cousin whose deaths can be traced to toxic chemicals released into the Gulf; his sister developed cancer which can also be tied to the petrochemical industry. Diane Wilson, a 4th generation shrimper in the Gulf Coast, has continuously petitioned the Courts and lawmakers to prevent chemical companies from polluting the  bays where her family and friends went fishing. Diane has used hunger strikes before, and both are serious committed people.

    I suppose I could talk about the reasons why the Keystone pipeline are to be opposed, but they have been adequately covered in many places.  Honest people could disagree both about their tactics and the policy they are protesting. Why then has the Houston Chronicle provided so little coverage of the hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that almost 3 weeks ago the  FuelFix energy reporter wrote a “he said, she said” article about their arrest. Not a bad article considering, but the Chronicle has never followed up on it. And certainly the subject bears revisiting — 18 days is a long time to wait before writing the follow up on a hunger strike article. Do these nonviolent activists have to go on a killing spree to awaken any media interest?

    Shouldn’t a city newspaper report on such events? Or should it instead provide reports about the zoo’s cheetahs, a winning football team, or Christmas decorating tips? I can’t explain the Chronicle’s avoidance of this current event. Is it just lack of resources? Or does the Chronicle have a policy against covering hunger strikes? Googling a bit, I see that a week ago the  Chronicle published a news service report about Iranian hunger strikers and has even figured out a way to “monetize” site visitors  looking for news about hunger strikes.   hunger-strike-search-results

    I have a unique perspective on the issue because in fact some of my college  students in Albania participated in hunger strikes against their government.  A few days before it happened,  the US embassy had already brought me to the capitol city of Tirana, but when I heard about what the students had done,  I predicted (correctly as it turned out), that it would  cause all the schools in the country to shut down. True, Albania is a much smaller media market country, and in this case there were 60 students protesting, but the issues are no less important in Houston. The fate of the planet is at stake.

    In Albania, the hunger strikers precipitated a series of unfortunate events. The Berisha government declared the hunger strikes illegal because the students hadn’t received the proper license (apparently it is illegal to have any strike without obtaining the proper license). That caused the police to sneak into the university building to arrest the students, causing a fierce gun battle which cost lives.  It was a tragedy for all, and that action triggered lots of violence and civic unrest (which eventually caused Peace Corps to send us home).

    When these events happened in Albania, emotions were strong on all sides. But it would have been unthinkable NOT to cover the hunger strikes. Even the state-run Albanian  TV covered the hunger strikes.  To contrast, there is practically no coverage in any mainstream outlets of the Pipeline hunger strikers  (except Channel 39) and skimpy coverage even by progressive media.

    I’d almost prefer to think that there was some conspiracy not to cover this event in the mainstream media. Instead,  it’s more likely that mainstream media is too busy with other things (some important, some not-so-important). I really don’t have a problem with general news site providing news about entertainment, sports and technology. These things are certainly important in their own way.  But if the bigger news sites focus too much on these things, the burden of reporting these things  falls on unpaid bloggers and Facebook groups.

    Bloggers can certainly do a good job of reporting (see here ) , and Facebook groups like this and this can provide you with interesting news (and that not just  about  consciousness-raising/media manipulation events  like hunger strikes).  Both bloggers and Facebook groups provide incomplete versions of what’s happening. But does that mean mainstream news is better? In many ways, these mainstream news sources are much much worse because they provide the illusion that they are covering all the news that ought to be covered.

    The sad fact is: if I want to find out what’s going on in Houston, reading my city paper is probably the least helpful thing to do. That’s very sad.

    P. S. Both individuals are my heroes.

    Update #1. The hunger strike has now lasted 29 days. The Houston Chronicle still not deigned to provide any coverage of it.  As I write this, the top story on the web edition of chron.com is (I kid you not!) Best Lines of Ron Paul’s Career.

  • Stumbling Upon a Book Idea

    Over the last month or so, I’ve been obsessed with the subject of building and organizing a digital music collection. So much so that I have decided to write an ebook about the subject.

    I’m writing as a dedicated amateur (not an expert), and the treatment will be somewhat technical, somewhat journalistic, somewhat superficial.

    I write a lot of “serious” stuff and often it takes forever to  get them into finished products. Also, I write my serious stuff  under pseudonyms, so it would be nice (finally) to write something under my own name for a change.  Although I plan to make this ebook useful and interesting and personal, I also will make it short – something I can finish in 6 months, and then update over time.

    I may or may not blog about some of the subjects for this ebook.  But I want to mention an outlining/note-taking tool which I’ll be using for this book project. Over time I have used Personal Brain mind-mapping tool to store my research and organize my thoughts.

    The web dump is here: http://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/9E6A5930-6FFC-DBCD-DF75-35B2D4DCCB77;jsessionid=342C824536322A57D5F17127FCA1B14E#-1

    (I am not linking to it because I don’t want search engines to know about it, plus I may eventually mark it as private).

    The desktop interface is a little better.  You can open your brain up in an expanded view (See this screenshot).

    Personal Brain is a costly tool ($200-250, although there’s a free version), and I would not use it for certain kinds of projects, but it does two things extraordinarily well:

    1. It lets you store disparate kinds of information in the note section.
    2. It lets you display and organize your ideas in a very visual manner.

    There is another important and easily overlooked advantage.  I often work with projects over a long period. Sometimes I start with a lot of enthusiasm and start writing and researching. Then – for various reasons –  I have to put the project on the back burner. Later when I try to pick up the same project, I discover that I cannot get into it again.  Either I  misplace my notes or cannot read them. Also I cannot remember the logical connections I once made. When I keep my thoughts and notes in Personal Brain, I am also retaining the logical relationships I am making as well.  Now it becomes much easier to resurrect my notes when I return to the project later.

    Interestingly, although I have used Personal Brain for mind-mapping big projects, often the finished product bears no resemblance to the brain I made for it. That is not the point. The primary purpose of personal brain is not to provide a skeleton for the actual book or essay you will write. Rather it is  to organize and store  thoughts for easy reference before the writing actually begins. The organization in Personal Brain may roughly correspond to your writing outline (especially at high level), but that would merely be a coincidence;  the writing process is much too fluid to be tied down to a preset organization structure.

    Thebrain  lets you sync your local brain with a webhosting site.  I paid for the web brain component  as part of my license. The cost is not small, and my subscription lasts only for a year (after which I will have to renew). I don’t really need public or web access – that is just a nice extra feature. A local brain is good enough.

    Personal Brain has a lot of advanced features which I have not investigated.  I would love to reorganize thoughts and add lateral relationships and jumps (which I know is possible, but I keep forgetting how to do it). 

    Personal Brain seems to be the ideal tool for a book project of this nature. (The superficial and middlebrow Malcolm-Gladwell  kinds of books).  Actually I think historians and literary critics  might find it useful as well.  I haven’t actually started, but I have 3 other projects which I’d like to transfer onto a Personal brain.  This tool not only stores information; it provides   a glimpse of where your ideas are bringing you. When you write things, you may not even know that until after finishing the first draft.

  • The Keys to the City are Yours

    I have many opinions about Wikileaks,  none of which are original or interesting (if you want that, try here, here, here, here, here, here and  here).

    What I find more interesting (and disturbing) is the reappearance of Anonymous to defend Wikileaks. Three  thoughts:

    1. If a bunch of anonymous hackers can take down several notable sites so easily, how can owners of smaller sites rest at night?
    2. Although I’m glad that the New York Times is finally tackling Anonymous, it would be harder for bloggers and smaller sites to speak with such candor (especially since Anonymous is so arbitrary about its targets).
    3. I have to wonder whether Anonymous will ever go legit (especially against such obvious targets like the Chinese government). How easily could an anonymous flashmob movement be manipulated to carry out an attack on behalf of a  well-funded  interest?

    Related: Tom Scott envisions a flashmob nightmare scenario.

  • What CNN Headline News looks like before the election

    Here’s an amazing comment on a Washington Monthly thread about cable TV news. I am reprinting it in full:

    On Nov. 1, the day before the election, I spent an hour watch Headline News and making a record of how much time they spent on each story. Here is what I came up with:

    Commercials 17:30
    Cargo Terror Incident 5:15
    Negligence lawsuit against 4-year olds 5:00
    Calif. Law Against Violent Video Games 4:30
    Local Story – Early Retirement Scams 4:30
    Jim Leyritz Trial 3:45
    Gonzalez Murder Trial in Florida 2:45
    Bret Favre 2:45
    Teasers 2:30
    Elizabeth Smart Case 1:45
    “Off the Beaten Path” 1:45
    Clark Howard Advice – Car Service 1:30
    Election – only about the CNN poll results 1:00
    Parents leaving kids in casino parking lot 1:00
    Suicide following Webcam Incident 0:45
    Arizona Immigration Law 0:30
    Airbag Malfunction 0:50
    Randy Quaid 0:40
    Lancet Study on Alcohol v. Cocaine 0:40
    Space Shuttle Launch 0:20
    Steam line explosion in Utah 0:20
    Indonesia Volcano 0:20

    Note this was the day before the election. The ONLY political story involved CNN’s own poll of the President’s popularity and the generic ballot. And they did a 30 second spot on that every half hour.

    I would submit that none of this is "real news," except, perhaps, the coverage of the "cargo terror incident," which by then had happened 3 days earlier, and the coverage consisted mainly of experts relating how many holes in our security there are when it comes to air cargo.

    Note that the commenter is talking about CNN headline news, not the "real CNN." CNN Headline News does shorter segments which are repeated endlessly. Aside from the context of watching it on the airport or the dentist office or elevator, I don’t think anyone would go out of their way to watch it. The real CNN does have legitimate in-depth shows. It has some recycling and entertainment news, but if you watch long enough, you can find some good in-depth analysis about the Scandal or Disaster of the Day. I particularly recommend Fareed Zakaria’s GPS Podcast.

    Related: Jon Stewart and cohorts once  did a hilarious satirical look at what the schedule for a 24 hour news network looks like.

    Anecdote: I personally cannot stand these headline news channels. Besides being shallow and repetitive, they have an unusually high amount of advertising. When I lived overseas, they had something equivalent called EuroNews which provided nothing but fancy graphics, weather reports and bland  multilingual headlines. It was mind-numbing and borderline torture.

    At a previous job  they had a crazy arrangement where the company cafeteria had TV sets playing headline news (either Fox or CNN) continuously. It drove me crazy! Oddly, the TV audio was piped into the restrooms right across the cafeteria. It was disconcerting because you heard the same story over and over during the day to the point where you could almost recite it. I got to know way more about certain topics (like the Wynona Ryder trial) than I ever wanted to.

    We soon  became  used to hearing silly news on the TV whenever  we took a leak or ate lunch. Then a strange thing happened. Real news started to happen. The Iraqi war delivered constant headlines. Yes, the headline channel  blandified everything (you had to, or you couldn’t run commercials for cars and mutual funds), but still it was unsettling. A little  later, Katrina earthquake caught the restroom goers by surprise;  during restroom breaks and lunch hours, we were seeing live feeds of utterly crazy things: helicopters flying over stranded homeowners, African-American residents  accusing the government of indifference.

    Suddenly the peculiar fact that the company left the TV on in common areas now became a source of constant stress. I’m sure I was not the only one who wished the TV could just be turned off. Permanently.

  • July Linkdump Social/Political 1

    Why is it standard operating procedure  for beauty pageant contestants to favor world peace & world leaders to favor war? — Constant Weader

    I’ve become a real fan of Constant Weader whose  realitychex blog covers a lot of the usual liberal haunts for commentary and analysis in a succinct & entertaining way. I found out about this woman by seeing the URL on all the great comments she made on NYT articles (which she generally reposts on her blog).

    Where  should one  go to read about current events? Reading the NYT headline page is a safe choice. For a while I would go to ThinkProgress/Matt Yglesias site, but I like the idea of checking an offbeat blog for a summary of the good stuff in NYT.

    By 2015 75% of American adults will be overweight or obese, and 41% will be obese.

    According to recent studies, as many as one in five girls between 10 and 18 years of age are now cutting themselves with razor blades or burning themselves with matches (according to Leonard Sax).

    In other words, the girls who are most successful at meeting gender-specific societal expectations appear to be just as likely as other females to be cutting themselves.  Not so for boys.  How come?  That’s one of the questions I try to answer in my book Girls on the Edge.  My bottom line is that these pretty girls are searching for a sense of self that’s not about how they look, but about who they are.  We reward them for how they look but we — i.e. American society — are much less interested in what’s going on inside.  Self-cutting fills that need for some of these girls — just as anorexia does for others, and obsessive perfectionism does in others.

    According to a Chronicle report, white children make up less than 8 percent of the Houston ISD enrollment… None of the 181 Texas state lawmakers are Hispanic Republicans.

    According to this NPR Article:

    "Children of parents who reported having a rule about bedtime scored about 6 percentage points higher on an assessment of their vocabulary compared with children whose parents did not report a rule about bedtime. They scored 7 percent higher on assessments of early math skills."

    Health care information site. Good and easy to find things.

    Melvin Goodman on how much of the defense department is privatized and lacking in accountability:

    Nearly a quarter of the federal budget is devoted to contracts to the private sector, with the new Department of Homeland Security and Office of National Intelligence serving as conduits for this money.

    Private contracts are now responsible for 70 percent of the intelligence budget, and private contractors represent more than half of the employees of the new National Counterterrorism Center. The trumpeting of "cyber war" marks the next cash cow for the defense industry.

    See 2 other articles by Melvin Goodman here and here.

    Steve Benen and commenters debate the soul of the Washington Post. I think the downfall began when Bob Woodward started writing Tell-All books about the Bush Administration.

    Realclimate asks whether we can provide different levels of reporting for differing proficiency levels.

    Joe Keohane reports on how brain science is finding that people cling to certain political beliefs, regardless if proven wrong.

    People ignorant of the facts could simply choose not to vote. But instead, it appears that misinformed people often have some of the strongest political opinions. A striking recent example was a study done in the year 2000, led by James Kuklinski of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He led an influential experiment in which more than 1,000 Illinois residents were asked questions about welfare — the percentage of the federal budget spent on welfare, the number of people enrolled in the program, the percentage of enrollees who are black, and the average payout. More than half indicated that they were confident that their answers were correct — but in fact only 3 percent of the people got more than half of the questions right. Perhaps more disturbingly, the ones who were the most confident they were right were by and large the ones who knew the least about the topic. (Most of these participants expressed views that suggested a strong antiwelfare bias.)

    Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

    Other insights: people with wrong ideas are more likely to change when presented with direct contradictory evidence; just showing them an article doesn’t do any good. Self-esteem has something to do with it:

    Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

    Alan Bellows talks about how the 1985 New Coke marketing campaign overlooked the tendency of people to develop irrational reactions based on groupthink. The concept is informational conformity, defined as “the human tendency to unconsciously adjust one’s opinions to correlate with the outspoken views of the social group.”

    Informational conformity was first formally documented by Dr Muzafer Sherif in 1935, when he placed a group of subjects in a dark room with a single point of light in the distance. He asked them to estimate how much the light moved around, and although each person perceived a different amount of movement, most of them relinquished their own estimates to conform to the predominant guesses within the group. In reality, the light had not been moving at all; it only appeared to move because of the autokinetic effect, a quirk in visual perception where a bright point of light in complete darkness will appear to wander. It is thought that this imagined movement occurs due to the lack of a fixed visual reference point, and it may be the cause of many nighttime UFO sightings.

    (Michael Tobis relates this groupthink tendency to climate change).

    (I remember that era well, and New Coke was on everybody’s minds, even to the point where during a homily, my parish priest held up a can of New Coke and asked rhetorically whether there were more important things to worry about).

    David Corn explains why Politifact sometimes gets things only half-right:

    Yet PolitiFact didn’t evaluate Cheney’s remark. So here’s the real problem: Huffington made a charge that was rooted in reality. Cheney responded with a statement that had no basis in reality. Yet PolitiFact zeroed in only on the former and let the real lie escape. True, Huffington had dared PolitiFact to review her remark. But Adair and his intrepid band were free to expand the mission. The greater public service would have been to compare Huffington’s and Cheney’s comments and determine who was closer to the truth. This is where PolitiFact truly fell short.

    Matt Thompson talks about how news media drowns you with episodic content when  we yearn for  system content: 

    Chances are that most of the information you’ve encountered about this subject has been what I’d call episodic. Over time, you may have heard a lot about budget reconciliation, insurance premium hikes, the public option, the excise tax, the Wyden-Bennett bill, the Stupak amendment, and on and on and on. You know that Democrats are trying to do something to the health care system, but it’s either a government takeover or an insurance industry giveaway. Hard to tell.

    This constant torrent of episodic information is how many of us encounter information about current events. This has been true for as long as any of us has been alive, but in the wake of the real-time Web, it’s become ever more constant and ever more torrential.

    Hundreds of headlines wash over us every day. And part of why many of us engage in this flow is because we have faith that over time, this torrent of episodic knowledge is going to cohere into something more significant: a framework for genuinely understanding an issue. And we live with it ’cause it sort of works. Eventually you hear enough buzzwords like “single-payer” and “public option” and you start to feel like you can play along.

    See also:  Matt Thompson on 3 key parts of news stories you don’t usually get. Later Thompson describes 5 ways journalists can improve the news:

    You might have heard about Politico’s notorious goal of “winning the morning,” i.e. finding a scoop that’ll lead each day’s news cycle. That’s great, if you’re content with your stories having about as much impact as a popular tweet. Too many of us follow Politico’s lead.

    Instead, try to win the story. Aim to produce a work of journalism so excellent it’ll get passed around for weeks. Put your best storytelling chops to work on this. Try to supplant Wikipedia as the top Google result for your topic. This might not be a single article; it might be a nicely-packaged collection, a wiki, or something else you devise. The key is that it should be long-lasting and distinctive.

    Essay on the same topic by  Tristan Harris and Jay Rosen. Also Thompson has 10 questions journalists should ask themselves.  Also, there is a modest amount of discussion on the Future of Context website even though it doesn’t seem to be actively maintained.

    10 Mistakes JFK Jr. on the day his plan crashed. Interesting insights into the minds of nonprofessional pilots.

    Beijing and Mexico City have the worst traffic congestion. Houston has one of the best.

    Robert Sullivan on new ways to use buses in mass transit to improve efficiency:

    Flexibility remains the bus’s chief advantage—unrailed, they can go wherever we want them to go—and they’re a relative bargain. But over the last decade, in a few transit-enlightened cities around the world, the bus has received a dramatic makeover. It has been reengineered to load passengers more quickly. It has become much more energy-efficient. And, most important, the bus system—the network of bus lines and its relationship to the city street—has been rethought. Buses that used to share the street with cars and trucks are now driving in lanes reserved exclusively for buses and are speeding through cities like trains in the street. They are becoming more like subways.

    For me, this leaves out another obvious issue: decentralized mass transit system protects  against terrorist attacks.

    Great list of reasons why using cameras to give traffic tickets is a bad idea. (PDF Alert). I would add:

    • Before these red light cameras, were we facing an outbreak of people running red lights? In my experience, I haven’t seen much redlight running….
    • There are reasons to run red lights on occasion. But the ticketing process makes it impossible for the ticket recipient to have a specific memory about the incident in question (which would be necessary to defend himself). If there were a way for the ticket recipient to be receive immediate feedback about the violation, my opposition would be greatly reduced. But if I receive a ticket and a photo in the mail two weeks later, chances are I will have no memory of this specific incident (and be powerless to oppose it).

    Here’s one reason that I could find persuasive: saving police manpower! If police don’t have to handle routine stops, that could free up their time to do more pressing things. But the benefits of that would have to be proven. For example, traffic tickets may be a good excuse to stop cars exhibiting suspicious behavior.

    My personal problem with camera tickets is that I don’t know the threshold for ticketing. If i follow a car across when the light is yellow, I don’t know if that would be considered a violation. Are the firms looking for egregious cases? Somehow I feel that if there is revenue involved, the tendency will be to fine all people who meet some minimum threshold.

  • David Edwards: 5 Things Everyone Ought to Know

    This came from a great 2000 interview with David Edwards on Medialens. It is a long quotation, and I’m highlighting the 5 points because they get a little obscured in the discussion. Between the fourth and the fifth point there is a fascinating discussion about distraction, self-delusion and how journalists are influenced by corporations as well (which I am not including).  It’s amazing how relevant these insights still are 10 years later.

    Jensen: You’ve said that there are five things everyone ought to know. What are they?

    Edwards: The first is that the planet is dying. One way to chart the damage is to look at insurance figures. Between 1980 and 1989, the insurance industry paid out, on average, less than $2 billion a year for weather-related property damage. From 1990 to 1995, however, hurricanes, cyclones, and floods in Europe, Asia, and North America cost the industry an average of more than $30 billion a year. The Red Cross is warning that climate change is about to precipitate a century of natural disasters. We have already seen a number of “superdisasters” in Honduras, India, Venezuela, and Mozambique, all “clearly tainted by human actions,” according to climatologists.

    Global warming affects more than the weather. Last year, marine biologists estimated that between 70 and 90 percent of the coral reefs in the Indian Ocean have died due to global warming. Coral-reef ecosystems are home to one-fourth of all fish species. And they’re just the first major victims of global warming. Others will soon follow. Scientists now predict that the polar bear will be extinct in the wild within twenty years.

    Now, many environmentally conscious people would argue that the scale of the environmental crises threatening us is being communicated. After all, most newspapers these days have environmental correspondents. But the level of coverage in no way matches the severity of the threat. Think for a moment about the media response to the supposed threat of the Soviet Union during the Cold War: Hollywood churned out pro-America films; novelists wrote thrillers pitting the “free world” against the “godless communists”; headlines decried the dangers of communism; and so on. By comparison, there’s next to nothing being said or written about the threat of global warming.

    Jensen: I know what you mean. I like baseball, but it breaks my heart to see ten pages in the newspaper every day on sports and maybe three column inches a month devoted to the biodiversity crisis.

    Edwards: This leads to the second thing that everyone should know, which is that huge numbers of intelligent, motivated people are working all-out to prevent action that could save the planet. No matter how clear the evidence or how stern the scientific warnings, time and again, effective action is obstructed. The Global Climate Coalition, the United States Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers are all vigorously opposing even the trivial cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions proposed by the Kyoto Climate Treaty. The irresponsibility is breathtaking.

    The so-called debate on global warming is a war between the biggest enterprise in human history-the worldwide coal-and-oil industry-and the planet’s ability to sustain life. And our hearts and minds are battlefields in that war. The corporate press and corporate-financed politicians keep talking about global warming as if there’s significant doubt about it, yet the “debate” pits perhaps half a dozen high-profile skeptics bankrolled by this trillion-dollar industry against the consensus of twenty-five hundred of the world’s most qualified climatologists working as part of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. How is it that the opinions of these six-whose arguments are often shot full of illogical and absurd statements-carry the same weight as all that scientific evidence?

    This brings us to the third thing I believe everyone should know, which is that the death of the planet is symptomatic of a deeper, institutionalized subordination of all life-including human life-to profit. Algeria is a typical example. It’s been ruled by a military dictatorship since 1962. Elections were held in 1991, but the government scrapped them when it became clear a militant Islamic party would win, and since that time some eighty thousand people have died. In some cases, armed attackers have descended on defenseless villages at night to cut the throats of women and children. The violence has been characterized by psychotic frenzy, including the dismemberment of infants. It’s not exactly clear who is doing all of it, although the government is heavily implicated. But one thing is for sure: the world has done nothing about it.

    Jensen: Why not?

    Edwards: I can answer that question with one word: oil. Algeria has gas and oil deposits worth billions and supplies the gas for Madrid, Rome, and many other European cities. It has a $2.8 billion contract with British Petroleum. Because of this, no Western government wants to make trouble with Algeria. John Sweeney-just about the only British journalist who has written anything about it-called the eighty thousand deaths “Europe’s gas bill.” Instead of demanding an end to the slaughter, the European Union is giving Algerian generals $125 million for “restructuring and democratization.”

    This story, of course, has been repeated any number of times: Guatemala, El Salvador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Russia, Indonesia, East Timor, Iraq, Vietnam-anywhere there are profits to be made. Yet few people in the media want to talk about this pattern in which the economic interests of the U.S. and Britain are synonymous with the systematic exploitation and impoverishment of Third World populations. It’s the same with the environment. Although the planet is being demolished before our eyes, the media remain content to artificially isolate each new disaster, leaving us to try to complete the jigsaw puzzle.

    The absence of discourse about these patterns leads us to the fourth point, which is that the economic and political forces that profit from destruction and atrocity also profit from the suppression of truth. It’s the job of the corporate media and the politicians to prevent us from digging beneath the surface and uncovering the truth.

    It’s important to be clear, however, that our delusions are not just the result of some conspiracy on the part of a few business moguls. The real problem is much more structural and psychological. Modern thought control is primarily dependent not on crude, conscious planning, but on the human capacity for self-deception. One of the biggest obstacles to social change is the propaganda system working undetected inside our own heads-mine included.”

    ….

    Jensen: What, then, are we afraid of in this culture?

    Edwards: Emotions, for one thing. We in the West seem to take it for granted that emotion and reason are in conflict. We think that to be rational is to be like Mr. Spock from Star Trek; that being unemotional gives one the capacity to see clearly. You see this often among business-people and scientists: when they want to be taken seriously, they speak in a cold, unemotional manner. On one level, this is quite reasonable; we’ve all experienced what infatuation or anger can do to our ability to perceive something accurately. But Buddhists believe that greed, ambition, and selfishness keep us from perceiving the world as it is, whereas compassion and affectionate love (as opposed to romantic infatuation), actually help us perceive the world more clearly.
    This comes back around to the last of the five things everyone should know, which is that, if the planet is being killed by institutionalized greed and the sacrifice of life for profit, then the solution is to undermine the illusion that greed is "normal" and even desirable. And one way to do this is through compassion. When we reinforce our capacity for compassion and love and concentrate on other people’s needs, rather than on our own, we begin to weaken the psychological system that powers the selective inattention and self-deception we were talking about.

    Of course, it’s not enough just to sit there and have compassionate thoughts. Your compassionate thoughts need to be reflected in what you do, how you behave. How can you aspire to compassion and yet work for an arms manufacturer? You need to help other people, or at least experiment with working in that direction.

    And trying to be more compassionate should include being compassionate toward ourselves: we shouldn’t expect to start out being fantastically, perfectly compassionate. It’s like becoming a weight lifter. Your ability to feel and act out of compassion and love has to be developed through learning and practice. Just as no one expects you to come out of your first weight-lifting session and lift up a car, there will be situations where you’ll try to be compassionate, but it will be beyond you; you’ll get angry, be selfish, whatever. Sometimes the best thing to do is just to run away.

    I think compassion is especially important for dissidents seeking to change society. Think about it. The distinguishing characteristic of writers like Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Sharon Beder, and Mark Curtis is that, unlike many mainstream writers, they refuse to place their personal concerns for wealth, status, respectability, and even physical safety above the needs of the wretched of the earth. Compassion is at the core of what libertarian radicals are about, or should be, yet we rarely discuss it.

  • Pseudo-journalists with a camera

    Simon Owens on how activists with a camera practice gotcha journalism:

    But what should be pointed out above all else is that Thomas did not seek out the spotlight to air these views. She did not say them during a speech before a university or include them in one of her columns. She had an activist come up and thrust a camera in her face and ask her a slew of politically loaded, vague questions. We don’t see the context of how Nesenoff introduced himself or what happened after the video cuts away. We have a completely manufactured incident that never would have happened if it weren’t for an activist’s — yes, I’ll say it — entrapment.

    Do we really want to live in a world where you can get fired because some guy comes up to you unannounced, launches questions for which you haven’t prepared, forces you to say things you had no plans to say, then edits the video down into the most damning soundbite before hanging you with it?

    James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart would say this is a world where corruption and malfeasance is uncovered, but I say it’s a world in which mainstream journalists unquestioningly carry the water of political activists who masquerade as fellow journalists.

    I was thinking some of these very thoughts during the Helen Thomas thing. She was being flippant and a little crude (and possibly ironic).

    By the way, why should we start ignoring the writings of a noted journalist and instead start focusing on the random remarks she made extemporaneously to some nobody? If Helen Thomas had simply said, “The Israels should get the f—- out of Gaza and the West Bank,” she would have still been fired.

    There are occasions when circumstances warrant an on-the-run or undercover interview, but most of the time it seems unnecessary. The problem I have with these kind of surprise interviews is that the interviewee is not at his or her best. He doesn’t have his positions ready; he hasn’t had time to consider the implications of his remarks. If Helen Thomas had been writing those remarks in an editorial, she would have given the sentence more nuance.

    One of the underlying problems behind gotcha video journalism is that American politicians are so inaccessible and many don’t make public appearances. They will talk to local TV stations and maybe CNN or Fox, but if you’re a freelancer or (worse) a print journalist, you’re out of luck.

    A question remains about how the legal system can deal with people who make fake entrapment vids. ACORN is not a private company, so they’re not likely to start a SLAPP lawsuit. If a libel suit were ever initiated, would O’Keefe be held solely responsible or would broadcasters like Fox? I have to wonder if Fox made O’Keefe indemnify Fox against lawsuits when it started running his videos.

    See also:  how Sascha Cohen got his subjects to sign legal releases .

  • Nuclear vs. Solar, Permanent Temperature Increases

     

    This thread gives a great discussion about nuclear vs. solar.  The comments are more interesting than the article itself. From the comments, here’s a map of the US along with its solar energy generation potential and a fascinating article by Australian Peter Lang about how significantly lower the costs of nuclear power are over time when compared to solar. One informed  commenter summarizes the Lang article:

    Peter Lang does a thorough analysis of the cost of supplying all of Australia (one of the best locations on Earth) with Renewables. Conclusion:
    Solar PV with Pumped Hydro storage: $2,800 billion
    Solar PV with NaS battery storage: $4,600 billion
    Solar Thermal with storage: $4,400 billion
    Nuclear Power: $120 billion
    Just the cost of the Power Transmission TRUNK lines (500kv AC – not superexpensive superconducting ) to supply Australia with Wind & Solar Energy is $180 billion — 50% MORE THAN THE ENTIRE NUCLEAR OPTION!!
    CO2 emissions for all of Australia for 30 days:
    Solar PV: 71 million tonnes
    Coal: 219 million tonnes
    Coal with CCS: 33 million tonnes
    Nuclear: 3.3 million tonnes

    (I don’t deny that the devil is in the details, and that each proponent is armed with their own set of numbers justifying their own economics, but still these numbers should make stop and pause at least. Joe Romm offers a lot of articles with the opposite viewpoint). A lot depends on what kind of nuclear power plant are you talking about. Third Generation and Fourth Generation nuclear power plants have solved many of the common problems cited about nuclear power. Joe Romm summarizes about nuclear as a climate change solution:

    Based on a post last year on the Keystone report, to do this by 2050 would require adding globally, an average of 17 plants each year, while building an average of 9 plants a year to replace those that will be retired, for a total of one nuclear plant every two weeks for four decades — plus 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste. I also doubt it will be among the cheaper options. And the uranium supply and non-proliferation issues for even that scale of deployment are quite serious.

    Fascinating audio recording of one of the last negotiating round tables between presidents.   Notable details:  Obama warns that the meeting can’t go on forever,  China refused to send their Premier to this session (a major slap in the face), EU nations seem unaware of how differently developing nations see the negotiations (in fact, developing nations made their own agreement in a separate negotiating session). The Mexican Environmental minister commented on the aftermath: "When more than 190 countries are supposed to reach a consensus, it’s simply too complicated."

    About the oil spill, I have been following it closely. I don’t have much new to say about that, except that PBS’s coverage of it has been pathetic .. mainly because of their choice of guests. This has happened before.  Also, the New York Times has sometimes failed us although overall they have been providing good coverage.  Houston Chronicle’s coverage has been ample but industry-focused. (You have to remember that Oil and Gas are the cornerstone of the Houston economy. Tuesday May 18 is officially  Exxon Mobil Anniversary Day in Houston).   I regret that most newspaper sources are focusing on forensics and not really on global or long term implications.  My rule of thumb for reading media reports is to disregard all company spokesman. They may have interesting information to impart, but only a skeptical or critical eye can understand what it means (and does not mean). 

    Craig Severance reviews the latest Peak Oil research and Sima Gandhi reviews tax subsidies for the oil industry.