Murtha worthy of the military's highest civilian honor?

Apparently Congressman John Murtha (D-Pa) was award the Navy's highest civilian honor earlier this year. Then, Drudge links to the following article highlighting growing outrage from Veteran's groups: Murtha Award Sparks Vet Outrage. Good you think, more and more constituents are rightfully concerned about his record of wanton earmarking to support home district defense contractors and apparent graft. Good to see.

No, actually. The outrage is over:
"(Murtha's) comments in the heat of the 2006 congressional mid-term election campaign, in a move some political analysts saw as an attempt to stoke the anti-war vote for a Democratic takeover of the House. The former Marine and distinguished Vietnam veteran continued his accusations in follow-up media appearances before an official Pentagon and Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation had been completed."

The article contains not even a passing mention of Murtha's broiling ethics scandal over earmarking. Which got me to thinking, surely no one with his long-term track record of defense contractor earmarking can continue unchecked without implicit or complicit allies in the defense department. At some point, some senior military brass somewhere might have said, "thanks but no thanks, not really a necessary project." I guess that conversation never happened....

Top reading recommendations from 2008

I recently (ok, so not so recently) asked friends to send me their favorite reads from 2008. There's something refreshing about seeing what people are reading - a glimpse into another side of friends and colleagues one often doesn't get. Since I didn't ask for permission to cite the comments for each recommendation, I've included only titles and authors here.

Here's my completely arbitrary selection of the Top Ten (Plus Two):

1. Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin.

2. The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

3. The Spectator Bird, by Wallace Stegner.

4. The Wild Braid, by Stanley Kunitz.

5. Fieldwork (a novel), by Mischa Berlinski.

6. The Long Walk: The True Story of a Trek to Freedom by Slavomir Rawicz.

7. The Leopard, by Guiseppe Lampedusa.

8. Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.

9. The Kite Runner.

10. Presentation Zen, by Garr Reynolds.

11. God Particles, by Thomas Lux.

12. (a blog recommendation) More than 95 theses.

I live for lines like this

from King Kaufman's recap of New Year's Day sports viewing, at Salon:

"How dumb is a business -- college football -- that doesn't have to pay its employees, but still manages to get outsmarted and outflanked by the NHL."

E-readers... perspectives from a Kindle owner

I got a Kindle four months ago, and I LOVE it. I am reading more now, spending more now (even though the books are much cheaper! Amazon must love that), and I feel very happy with my Kindle. However, I'm reading a lot of material lately about how the Kindle will never replace the book with all its wonderfully nostalgic feel and blah blah blah. As far as I can tell, most of this criticism comes from people who have not spent significant time reading on the Kindle or another similar device (and by significant, I mean probably at least two full-length novels). Many people are very nice if still slightly skeptical, though others are downright dismissive (she'll go nameless, but her initials are GC ;-)

Some people even go so far as to say that "the traditional printed book will be the best home for works that need to be lingered over, meditated, considered with care," referring to literary fiction. I don't mean to sound snarky, but the author's reason - that e-readers promote linearity of attention, which is best suited for narrative-dominated books - does not seem particularly sound to me. I was going to comment on his blog but as my comment got longer I thought I would turn it into my own post.

As a Kindle owner and one who enjoys literary fiction (I just finished Solzhenitsyn's "The Cancer Ward" on my Kindle and am getting ready to start "The Brothers Karamazov" - I think those probably qualify), I'd like to argue against the idea that the Kindle will not / cannot be more than an ancillary device for enjoying these types of work.

My argument breaks the reading experience down into three factors:

1. Content - are all the words, pictures and other literary and visual elements there? do they look like they are intended to look on the printed page and are they experienced visually, conceptually, and cognitively as they are intended to be?
2. Interface - when reading, how does the reader navigate the information and interact with the material? how does the reader turn pages, save his place in the book, look at a footnote or cross-reference, quickly go back to an earlier section of the book, make notes, etc (side note: these are all things that I think could be improve on future versions of the Kindle)
   
3. Form factor - what is the physical object that the reader holds actually like, and what physical sensations are experienced during reading, opening, closing, carrying the reader, etc?
   

If all of these things on an e-reader were identical to the experience of reading a traditional book, then it would be silly to say that one cannot experience any work of literature in as full or contemplative a way as when reading a traditional book. My thesis is that e-readers can be as good or better in both content and interface, and that the form factor differences are not central to the contemplative experience if the other two hurdles are overcome.

Although I think the current generation of e-readers actually gets a pretty low grade on both content and interface, these are both solvable issues that will improve with technology. This will happen quickly and before long the e-reading experience will be as good as or better than the traditional reading experience on both these fronts.

Form factor is another issue (which is potentially solvable, though much more difficult), which I will cover later.

On the content and interface fronts, I agree that today's e-readers and their capabilities do not match those of a printed book. The Kindle doesn't do so well with illustrations or with non-standard textual layouts. When reading works which use lots of illustration or rely on unusual fonts / typographical settings / etc to convey meaning, readers will by definition miss something, because the content is actually different. But, to the degree that e-readers can faithfully represent the content of a work, at least some readers can and will experience the work and its meaning fully, in all its contemplative glory. Future versions of the Kindle and other e-readers will almost certainly get to this level of faithfully representing content, it's just a matter of time and technology development. It's simply a matter of better "e-ink" or similar technologies, and more computing power packed into the device to power the visuals.

Furthermore, I think interface or "reading experience" features will quickly improve. I can imagine an iPhone-like interface where a user swipes a finger across the screen to turn the page, and where an animation shows the text bending and moving so that it looks as if the page itself is being "flipped." The form of the reader will be the same but I think the experience may continue to evolve towards being "book-like." Again, this is a technology issue and will be solved, not a fundamental form issue. The fact that all of these features are already basically in use on computers already is itself proof that we'll get there if we want to, and there is probably a host of even better ideas waiting to be thought up by someone more creative than me. Many of them are not possible with traditional books, so the interface will eventually be even better (for example, how about a voice-activated search function that allows one to quickly find an earlier narrative section... maybe you prefer flipping through pages for five minutes mumbling "now where was that..." and maybe that's part of the contemplation, but you could still do it that way manually if you wanted to...)

And, I can even imagine an e-reader where notes can be written in the margins, pages marked up in my own handwriting, etc. Again, a technology issue, solvable.

Finally, there is the form factor or "look and feel" issue. I am holding in my hands a plastic box, whose weight doesn't shift in my hands as I make progress to give me clues about how much is left to read. There is no slightly gritty feel on the pages when I rub with my finger, there's no resistance from the binding when the book is new, etc. I think that even both of those could potentially be solved, although it's a more challenging problem than content or interface (too much writing already, I won't go into the ideas... I'll just file a patent... ;-)

I know that for many folks, they love the look and feel of a book, but I do think that if you still have the armchair, the coffee, the lighting, and whatever else suits your fancy, the right content and interface can allow you to fully experience the meaning of the work. You may not ever confuse the experience for that of reading a traditional book, but I don't think you have to do that to have a great reading experience. I think fixing the first two issues is enough, and that will happen sooner than we think.

[hastily added: I just realized that the experience of swapping and lending books among friends is not at all addressed here. I'll just say that there's no reason why that can't also be replicated in e-readers, except the fact that publishers are going to try to strictly enforce DRM. Of course, just like in music and in movies, somebody will find a way to crack it, and we'll all be fine if we want to share our books. =)]

Deviant Globalization

Forwarded from Randall – “an address on "the Global Illicit Economy" by Nils Gilman to the European Futurists Conference last month. In it he sketches the outlines of what he calls "deviant globalization:"” Well worth watching here.

Nils scopes out an overview of deviant globalization (the “global illicit economy”) with examples from human organ harvesting to narcotics to software and shipping. From those examples he builds a few principles of how this global economy works.

Nils seems to have two main points. First, crackdowns and uneven global regulation serve to create opportunities, drive innovation and professionalize deviant industries. He uses malicious software development in Brazil and anti-drug policing in the US as examples, among others.

Second, Nils postulates that professionalized deviant economies create powerful non-state actors (e.g., “big men”, “tribal leaders”, “business networks” etc.) that take over sovereign state activities such as providing security, black market health care services etc. Tribal leaders in Nigeria are an excellent example of this. Ultimately, Nils believes these deviant non-state actors present a real threat to legitimate sovereign states. So much so, that in the future the delivery of traditional state goods and services (again, security, education, social welfare etc.) in developed nations might end up resembling today's so-called “failed states” and not the other way around.

There’s a lot there to react to. The first overarching point makes a lot of intuitive sense, but begs the question what to do about it. Specifically:

• While there might be subsets of the deviant economy it makes sense to decriminalize (many would say narcotics), are there effective vs. ineffective ways to do so?
  
• Are the pragmatic difficulties in regulation and policing an adequate argument that all of these activities should be decriminalized? Of course not. One could use Nils' same logic to argue that outlawing homicide professionalizes the “hit man” economy, with all of the same unforeseen negative externalities of other deviant economies. Even if that were so, it is not an adequate argument to decriminalize. Other examples that anyone with a grounding in Judeo-Christian ethics and liberal democracy would surely include are: selling organs, human trafficking, malicious software development etc.
  
• Given that, are there examples of regulatory and policing actions that do work? Examples of cross-border state cooperation that are effectively retarding the development of deviant economic flows? Are there ways to use the same principles of globalization to effectively align incentives against these deviant economies?

The second argument – that deviant economies create “tribal leaders” or "business groups" which threaten to supersede the functional role of sovereign states – also has much to react to:

• Nils' implicit assumptions about the role of sovereign states seems pretty expansive in the first place. I’m not sure I have a problem with non-state actors (e.g., churches are a specific example Nils mentions) providing social welfare and education. With the proper checks and balances, a lot of security and infrastructure development could be effectively subcontracted out to corporations as well. The point here is that Nils has created a bit of a straw man for the de facto functional role of sovereign states that “giving up” might not be a bad thing.
• Second, before deviant actors and tribal leaders take on too powerful a role in global life, I presume an equally strong reaction to strengthen governments (even at the expense of individual liberties) would take place. This is analogous to the world Hobbes was living in when he wrote the Leviathan (warring, tribal factions, little security, continual threat of upheaval etc.). While we might drift back towards a nastier, shorter, more brutish existence, the Leviathan (e.g., strong government) would presumably push back. Again, we see this today when we look at the response of the Bush administration to global terror – increased wire tapping, less civil liberties etc.

GM needs a bailout...

I just noticed a posting on one of the China blogs I read infrequently, linking to an article about how GM is opening a new plant in Shanghai in a joint venture with SAIC (whose building I see frequently when cabbing around the city). I'm sure this has really nothing to do with the financial fortunes of the US-based version of GM, but I sure was interested to read about it.

Irony of ironies: GM opening new plants to make cars in China while American GM tries to get taxpayers (I'm still one of said taxpayers, even living in China) to fund continued job benefits for all those under-employed auto workers in the US. Then again, I don't feel too sorry for them, considering the fact that it seemed to me like they could've had some help last week from the Senate, except the UAW scuttled the negotiations, holding out for a sweeter deal from the White House!

Let the car companies go into bankruptcy, I say! They (and America) will be better off for it, MUCH better off than if we subsidize a dying industry (and make it worse by trying to force them to make green cars that the market may not be willing to pay for right now). And, I'm not the only one who thinks so!

Dead Aid: Destroying the Biggest Global Myth of Our Time

Via Africa Unchained, notice of an upcoming book by Dambisa Moyo:

"Dead Aid analyses the history of economic development over the last fifty years and shows how Aid crowds out financial and social capital and directly causes corruption; the countries that have caught up did so despite rather than because of Aid. There is, however, an alternative. Extreme poverty is not inevitable. Dambisa Moyo also shows how, with improved access to capital and markets and with the right policies, even the poorest nations could be allowed to prosper...[continue reading]-Global Investor Bookshop"

While I'll wait for the book's evidence to agree or disagree on the failure of Aid, Moyo's push for access to capital and markets as the best sustainable solution to poverty lines up directly with personal observations from a brief stint in the Aid industry and research since.