Links for the Week [March 26 - April 1 2012]

Most of my reading this week was health-care.  Obviously, the Supreme Court's hostile questioning of the Obama Administration's signature legislation was a big shock.  Still, it was  useful to see the ACA defended in ways that the Administration wasn't able to before the Supreme Court.  Here's a Tumblr summary of some of the arguments I found interesting.  

About a "creepy" application called "Girls Around You" and what it says about social networking, data and privacy. 

John Lancaster on Marx in the London Review of Books.  A wonderful piece on what Marx means to us today -- and what he was right about. 

Dahlia Lithwick on the twisted idea of "liberty" that the conservative wing of the Supreme Court has.  I usually find Lithwick's prose a bit too hectoring but I agree with every point she makes here. 

How to be an Academic Failure: A Guide for Beginners.  The title says it all.

When writers have as much power as J. K. Rowling, they can transform the publishing industry single-handedly.  More seriously, the Web has given writers more bargaining power w.r.t. publishers and distributors. 

How much work is it to teach at a community college? Probably a lot.  Henry Farrell comments. 

I am very late to this really really good Ethan Zuckerman post on the blurring lines between advocacy and journalism.  The Passion of Mike Daisey: Journalism, Storytelling and the Ethics of Attention, by Ethan Zuckerman.

And finally, a dense philosophical meditation on computation.  Ian Horswill: What is Computation? Crossroads Magazine, March 2012, ACM
 

Links for the Week [March 18-25 2012]

My new years resolution this year was that I would write a blog-post every week.  Something meaty, something substantial, blah blah, you get the idea.  Alas, that hasn't happened.  So I've decided I'm going to cheat.  I'm going to post at the end of every week, the articles that I read and found interesting.  This will probably involve me posting stuff straight from my Tumblr page - but oh well, that's life.  So, without further ado, here are some interesting reads:

• William Saletan reviews Jonathan Haidt's latest book "The Righteous Mind."  I am ambivalent about Haidt:on the one hand, I find his views on reason convincing, but I am not too happy with the way he "naturalizes" his ideas by grounding them into the structure of the human brain.  

• The sociologist of knowledge, Donald MacKenzie gave a talk here at MIT about high-frequency trading and what it might mean for sociologists who are trying to understand the nature of prices in the economy as an aspect of social organization.  So I was naturally intrigued by this Wall Street Journal  piece which talks about the IPO of a trading firm that fizzled because of the wide fluctuations in price (a consequence of high-frequency trading).  (H/T: Kevin Drum).  

• The India Ink blog at the NYT ran a fascinating series on the problems faced by the National Archives in New Delhi.  The whole series is worth reading in full: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. 

• We read Alfred Chandler's magisterial "The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business" for class last week.  And Aaron Swartz (yes, that guy) has a really nice summary of the book that I found very useful.   

• Finally, have you heard of Pinterest?  I hadn't - not until last week, that is, when I read this piece.  (Yes, it's another social bookmarking site, except that it collects bookmarked images and is often used by its users to curate different kinds of commercial products.)  The most interesting part is Pinterest's business model:

  Unlike other social networks, which waited years to monetize through advertising, Pinterest has taken a different route. They’re monetizing already by taking a cut on sales that pins on their site help generate. They partnered with a firm called SkimLinks, which automatically scans through every link posted on the site to see if it goes to a retail site with an affiliate program. If it finds that kind of link, it secretly adds an affiliate code that ensures Pinterest will make some cash from sales that derive from that link. It’s a clever game, particularly given the site’s users’ retail focus, but Pinterest probably should have disclosed the practice more openly.

On Government 2.0

Tom Slee's twin posts on Government 2.0 (here and here) are definitely worth your time.

Tom is a little more pessimistic than I would be (although his pessimism is the principled, rigorous type, which is always welcome). 

Quickly, these are his main objections:

1. The rhetoric of citizen engagement too often masks a reality of commercialization (last time)
2. Information is not always democratizing.
3. Information is not always the problem.
4. Transparency is an arms race.
5. Privacy is the other side of the coin.
6. Money flows to Silicon Valley.

Point 2, that information is not always democratizing is well-taken.  Slee points out that people who take most advantage of information that is made freely available are those who are already privileged and posses a certain amount of capital (both economic and cultural).  He links to this article, which in turn links to this very interesting paper, on how the digitization of Bangalore land records has turned out.  Both are also well worth taking a look at (and I should mention that I only skimmed the paper).

But point 2 also strikes me also as too broad.  It strikes me that the same thing can be said of the deployment of any technological framework; its use can only be made by those who have the skills and the cultural capital to access it.  Again, like everything else, it is all contextual.  One could argue that Government 2.0 will also make it easy for NGOs, watchdog groups, and so on,  to do their job, which in turn may end up helping the underprivileged.  As always, everything depends on context.

Links

Since I haven't posted in a while, I thought I would link to the (my) pieces I particularly like:

In praise of skimming: A reply to Nicholas Carr's "Is Google making us stupid?"

Why do the "best and the brightest" high school students in the U.S. suffer from math-phobia while those in India don't? An analysis of the styles of pedagogy.

The process of sight-seeing (navigating) with a guidebook.

The strange street-signs of Madrid and what they tell us about the importance of context for interpretation.

A review of "Dreaming in Code" by Scott Rosenberg.