Tree of Knowledge

As outlined in my previous post, a change in my employment status has meant that I have had to stop blogging on politics.

However, for those of you who have failed to update their RSS feed or are slow learners about the lack of posting around here, you might be interested in following my new, non-political blog at Blogging the Bookshelf.

Here’s some background to what it’s all about from the blog’s welcome page:

The premise of this site is fairly self-explanatory; I’m going to blog my way through my entire bookshelf.

Why?

Well at the most prosaic level, I’ve recently returned to Australia from a period in the UK. Given that this was always going to be a temporary move, my books have been boxed up in a shed at my parents’ place for the past 18 months. Blogging my way through my newly liberated bookshelf seemed like an appropriate way to celebrate taking them out of storage, as well as to justify the cost of keeping and storing them when I sold literally everything else I owned.

But at a more significant level,  I’ve invested a completely inordinate amount of both time and money in the books on my bookshelf over the years – both in acquiring them and in moving them from one cramped inner-city sharehouse to another. Much to my fiance’s frustration, I can’t bend my reading habits to the strictures of library lending. Similarly, except for the most egregious examples, I can’t on sell or throw out a book once I’ve finished it. It’s strange, and highly inconvenient behaviour.

Once I’ve read a book, I’m always anxious not to lose any of the little inspirations, insights and trivia that come with the reading experience. Perhaps it’s the congenital ‘achiever’ in me, but I’ve always been motivated to get the most out of my reading. I’ve long dog-eared the bottoms of pages with particularly engaging passages and frequently delve back into my bookshelf to consume them a second time. Given the nature of the medium, I thought that blogging these little grabs might be a fun way to go back and explore what has really grabbed me in my reading to date.

That being said, this blog won’t contain in-depth or literary minded reviews as such. Instead, for each book I’ll just include a brief synopsis for the unfamiliar and then an eclectic mix of whatever interests me from it’s contents. In a similar vein, this blog won’t be representative of any particular cannon and will be heavily skewed to the peculiarities of my literary taste. If you’re a fan of Japanese or Chinese literature, ‘modern classics’, political biography or policy tomes – you’ll find plenty here to interest you. If not, maybe not so much.

No doubt my perceptions will be coloured by time and new perspectives, and I’m sure there will be plenty of books from my past that I’ll be embarrassed to have even read let alone to be blogging about today, but appreciating this perspective is exactly why I kept them in the first place.

This is my first foray into the world of ‘culture blogging’. It’s also my first attempt at blogging about something in which I have no formal education or experience. So we’ll see how it goes. Suffice to say that I don’t claim expertise about anything in the posts of this blog and welcome any input or insights that anyone else has to offer.

So without further ado, onto the bookshelf….

A number of the more perceptive readers at ToK blog have noticed that I have seemed to have dropped off the perch during the last fortnight.

The good news is that I am still live and kicking and am back in Australia after finishing up at the LSE.

The bad news is that I have returned to the fold as a political staffer and hence need to pull my head in on the blogging front. For the moment I am joining Andrew Leigh in professionally imposed blogging retirement.

Since this is something of a sign off I don’t think it’s being too self indulgent to say that I really enjoyed my six months of daily blogging and found it far more rewarding and informative than I had expected. The willingness of other Oz Bloggers to engage with a young Labor hack on the issues was a great experience (thanks in particular to Mark and Kim at LP, Nick G at Troppo and the Skepticlawyer). I certainly didn’t expect to attract as many readers as ToK was by the end of last month and their engagement played no small part in that.

Anyway, I hope to return to the blogging business sometime in the future – so don’t deactivate the ToK RSS feed just yet. You never know.

In the mean time – keep voting Labor! J

This research position would be very interesting:

Research Assistant positions with The Cooperation Research Group: Case Studies in Commons-Based Peer Production

Project Description:

What makes Wikipedia or digg succeed?  What makes other collaborative efforts fail?  Peer production—large scale cooperation among human participants—has become an increasingly important mechanism for the creation of information, knowledge, and culture.  Civil society organizations like the Sunlight Foundation are building collaborative platforms to expose government abuses.  Businesses like Threadless T- Shirts and Amazon Mechanical Turk are using it to harness distributed intelligence and work capabilities.  The intelligence community has set up an internal Intellipedia, and the Army, Company Commander. Some diffuse social networks like CouchSurfing or BookCrossing are using it to share sleeping accommodations or books, while others, like DailyKos, harness political mobilization.

The Cooperation Research Group, led by Professor Yochai Benkler, analyzes the design of cooperative human systems through a combination of interdisciplinary observational, experimental, and theoretical studies. As part of this project, the group is embarking on a new effort to provide a map of commons-based and cooperative peer production today. The purpose of the study is to offer a systematic analysis of a wide range of information and knowledge production sectors, to identify practices, list them, describe them, and categorize them.

However, given that it’s almost exactly what I’ve been doing for my dissertation, I can’t complain too much.

At risk of going all Obama, all the time at this blog, this piece at Technology Review on Austan Goolsbee, Obama’s chief economic advisor was an interesting read:

(Goolsbee) is part of a generation of economists who have focused on the Internet, network effects, behavioral economics, and neuroeconomics. Whether Obama wins or loses, this is the first time a U.S. presidential candidate has had a chief economic advisor whose outlook and skills are those of a 21st-century economist.

Goolsbee has many sensible things to say about the impact of the Internet on the broader economy:

He soon caught on, however. “When the Internet first appeared, this heated debate developed among economists,” he recalls. “One side said the Internet will make it easier for companies to price-discriminate, and it’ll be fabulously profitable. The other side argued that the Internet will be the great equalizer–it’ll make markets close to perfectly competitive and people much more price-sensitive, and profits will be highly constrained. I’m probably the leading guy associated with that second position. Arguably, I got lucky, but what I wrote basically turned out to be correct.”

But what I liked best from the Goolsbee quotes in this article was his hearty endorsement of creative destruction:

“In 1910,” Goolsbee says, “if someone could have gone back and told people then how many phone lines would exist today in the U.S., they’d have responded that that was physically impossible, because every American would need to be a telephone exchange operator. That few switchboard operators exist today, nevertheless, isn’t a sign that all those people are unemployed. The labor economist Alan Krueger at Princeton has studied what share of the highest-paying occupations are occupation codes that didn’t exist in the 1980 census. The figure is very substantial. There’s always job churn.” Continual job destruction and creation, Goolsbee insists, is healthy.

All true and neatly expressed. But it’s also extremely politically sensitive. If I was Goolsbee I’d be leaving the economics seminar until after the election…

Another excellent article on Obama’s Online Outreach group to make you drool, this time from WaPo.

Highlights:

A year and a half ago, Rospars led a group of 11. It’s easily double that now, with staffers taping signs on the back of their furniture that read, “This is not an extra chair! This chair belongs to . . .” Rospars won’t divulge the total number of people in his team. “We don’t want to give away our entire playbook,” he says.

My understanding from my recent trip to the US was that it was closer to four times this number.

At least nine staffers have contributed to the video team — an astounding figure compared with many mainstream news organizations and past campaigns. (McCain’s aides declined to say how many videographers the campaign has. It has four staffers devoted to Internet activities, and has also hired an outside vendor).

And the investment has had a return:

Together, the videos on Obama’s YouTube channel have been viewed nearly 52 million times, according to TubeMogul.com, which tracks online videos. A viewer watching a video on the channel has an option to click on a “Contribute” button and, using a credit card, donate an amount from $15 to $1,000 using Google Checkout (McCain’s channel, whose videos have been viewed 9.5 million times, doesn’t offer this option.

The article also adds more detail to the emerging story of Obama’s organising via txt message:

Texting is also playing a crucial role in the campaign’s obsession with growing its database. Throughout last year, Goodstein sent at least a dozen texts to collect names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. Most important, the message came with “an ask,” meaning users were asked to do something upon receiving it…..

Then as the primaries and caucuses neared, what Goodstein calls “a big experiment” started paying off. One Sunday afternoon in early December, minutes before Oprah Winfrey and Obama addressed about 29,000 people at a rally in Columbia, S.C., Jeremy Bird, Obama’s state field director, asked the crowd to take out their cellphones and text “SC” to 62262, Obama’s short code. The code spells “Obama” on phones.

In the following weeks, Goodstein sent texts to the numbers he’d collected and asked supporters to make phone calls, volunteer in precincts and vote on Jan. 26 in South Carolina. Obama won that state by 28 points.

“South Carolina was a defining moment in what we were going to do with text messaging — not just with young voters but with all voters,” says Goodstein, who spent three weeks there to oversee the texting strategy.

Looks like they’re also doing their own SuperCrunching to measure the effectiveness of different strategies:

There’s a design team that develops content for BarackObama.com, as well as staffers who place ads across the Web to drive people to the site. A group known as the “analytics team” tracks which ad at what time drew the most traffic and what kinds of e-mails from the campaign get opened and read most. Usually campaigns hire outside companies to do this work.

Finally, I really liked the Online Outreach team’s motto:

“Meet the voters where they’re at.”

That’s really what it’s about at the end of the day.

Doorstops with Peter Costello are becoming more and more like conversations with the Cheshire Cat:

Cheshire Cat: If I were looking for a white rabbit, I’d ask the Mad Hatter.
Alice: The Mad Hatter? Oh, no no no…
Cheshire Cat: Or, you could ask the March Hare, in that direction.
Alice: Oh, thank you. I think I’ll see him…
Cheshire Cat: Of course, he’s mad, too.
Alice: But I don’t want to go among mad people.
Cheshire Cat: Oh, you can’t help that. Most everyone’s mad here.
[Laughs maniacally; starts to disappear]
Cheshire Cat: You may have noticed that I’m not all there myself.

In this vein, it amused me to see that News Ltd were reporting last week the exchange below constituted Costello ruling out a challenge for the Liberal Party Leadership:

He was asked why he was not letting his party and the Australian people know whether he intended to challenge for the leadership.

“Well I am not,” Mr Costello said.

Asked if that meant he was not challenging, he replied: “Everyone knows that.”

I’m sorry, on the face of it this really doesn’t rule anything out. Grammatically, it is deeply ambiguous and when informed by knowledge of Costello’s historical disposition towards quivering indecisiveness it really just confirms his continuing inability to make his position clear. The real story is in this observation:

He was not asked if he would stand for the leadership if Dr Nelson stepped down.

And yet, this was exactly the issue that dominated subsequent commentary on the doorstop. Clearly there’s either some substantial speculation going on (and the journalists at the doorstop were too dopey to seek out the necessary fodder) or Costello has been briefing journalists about his intentions (and the journalists at the doorstop were simply in the dark as a result of Costello’s obtuseness). Appropriately enough, if Costello really is waiting in the wings for the leadership to fall in his lap, the Cheshire Cat gets the last word again:

Cheshire Cat: Well, some go this way, some go that way. But as for me, myself, personally, I prefer the shortcut.

Not the hard yakka of leading an Opposition out of an electoral loss for Peter Costello. Not the blood and gore of a party room challenge. The only way Peter will take the leadership is if it is gift-wrapped for him. I prefer the short-cut.

Gary Langer, (US) ABC News polling guru has interesting things to say about Presidential Nomination Convention polling bounces:

Convention bounces became apparent in 1968 (election polling was too infrequent for reliable conclusions before then), but the focus owes much to Bill Clinton and the Mother of All Bounces: He soared from a dead heat against incumbent George Bush before the 1992 Democratic convention to nearly a 30-point lead after it, and never trailed for the remainder of the race.

…..

The absence of any bounce can be a danger sign. Neither Hubert Humphrey nor George McGovern took significant bounces out of their nominating conventions in 1968 and 1972, both en route to their losses to Richard Nixon.

While the averages by the candidate’s political party are similar, more of the action has been among Democratic candidates – a standard deviation of 10 in their bounces (8 without Clinton’s in 1992), compared with 4 in the Republicans’. …

The varying size and durability of convention bounces suggest that they’re not founded simply on the quantity of that week’s news coverage, but on more substantive evaluations of the content the parties and their candidates present. A focusing of the public’s attention may inspire the bounce, but a more deliberative judgment determines its size, staying power and ultimate impact.

Interesting that conventions seem to play a much greater role in galvanising Democratic support than they do for Republicans – are right leaning voters just more rusted on than those of the left?

*Apologies to Snoop

Making the greatest foreign policy mistake in the last thirty years would have this effect I guess:

THE Coalition lost its traditional position as the party of choice on defence and security last year, helping Labor win the election, a new study reveals.

..

Report author Ian McAllister said the coalition held a decisive lead over Labor on defence and security issues at the 2001 and 2004 elections, but that had evaporated by 2007.

Professor McAllister, a political science expert at the Australian National University, said that was partly because the coalition was in power at the time of the 9/11 and the Bali terrorist attacks, with the public largely approving of the government response.

At the 2001 and 2004 polls, Labor trailed by 23 and 29 per cent as the party regarded as best able to handle security matters.

But for the 2007 election, there was a major turnaround in public opinion.

On both defence and terrorism, Labor improved its position by a substantial 20 percentage points, he said.

Somehow I don’t think that moving from the arrogant incompetence of Howard government security policy to the shambolic incompetence of the Nelson reign is going to turn this around.

Those looking for a more considered political response to the Russo-Georgian conflict than John McCain’s bellicose rhetoric need look no further than UK Foreign Minister, David Miliband’s Op-Ed in The Times. Here’s a taste:

At the emergency Nato foreign ministers meeting today I will argue for political and practical support for Georgia. Politically we need to reassert our commitment to its territorial integrity and, like the EU last week, to immediate international engagement with the long-term settlement of the frozen conflicts. Practically we need to confirm the commitment made at the Nato summit in April to membership for Ukraine and Georgia and to follow it up with serious co-operation - militarily and politically - as part of a structured route map to eventual membership.

…

We have significant shared interests with Russia, whether on energy, trade or stopping Iran from developing a nuclear bomb. And with a declining population and an economy not much bigger than Spain’s, Russia needs positive international partnerships.

Our response should be to welcome them into systems such as the World Trade Organisation - if they are willing to abide by the rules. We should forge greater European unity on issues such as energy, and then engage with Russia: together we are Russia’s energy market, and while it is a dominant supplier negotiating with 27 separate countries, it is far less powerful in the face of a concerted European negotiating position.

On the international stage, the UK favours reform of the G8 - notably expanding its membership to reflect the modern realities of the economic balance of power, and the position of countries such as India and China. I do not support Russia’s expulsion from the G8: that would encourage Russian sense of victimhood, fuel Russian revanchism, and allow the Russians to position themselves as the champion of reform for those currently outside the G8.

HT: Liberal Conspiracy

A Tip/Wag for the BBC’s new linking policy.

A tip of the hat for the fact that the BBC will be introducing a form of in text linking and will be providing readers with links to background material from around the web including user generated content sites like Youtube, Flickr and Wikipedia.

However, a wag of the finger for not simply joining the rest of the WWW by using hypertext links, but instead only offering a ’screen in screen’ pop up system because:

it’s a way of testing whether we can make background content quicker and easier to add, find and access, without getting in the way of those readers who don’t want to be distracted by it. And it’s part of our ongoing work to improve people’s experience on the site in general.

Come on guys, the WWW has been around for more than 17 years now, I think people can handle reading a webpage without being ‘distracted’ by links. Strangely outdated thinking from the BBC….