This session wasn’t as I expected. I suspended the liveblog early, after slinging a mild amount of snark. Replay at your own peril.

Richard Curtis compares the ABC/Cablevision Oscars near-blackout to Kindle owners’ protests over the windowed release of Game Change:

The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that make sense to customers.

Likewise, Nat Torkington sees a similar squeeze in Amazon’s recent decision to discontinue its Associates program in Colorado, in response to the new sales-tax-for-online-retailers law there:

So let me get this straight: I’ve done nothing, and Amazon just fired me? Now, I haven’t used referrals a whole lot so it doesn’t hit me in the pocketbook but this should send chills down the spine of anyone who thought they were building a business, or at least an income, around Amazon services. It’s one thing to be fired for something you did (hey doofus, don’t cause a heap of MPAA infringement notices to land on Amazon’s desk because you were running the new Pirate Bay on EC2) but it’s entirely another to be fired for something outside your control.

A farmer friend told me that the goats to keep are female goats: when one doe headbutts another, the recipient then turns to the next in the hierarchy and headbutts them. With male goats, though, you get prolonged headbutt battles that are loud, intimidating, and potentially damaging. Amazon is obviously hoping the female goat scenario plays out: Amazon headbutts me, so I’ll go headbutt my representative— punish Amazon’s associates and hope they’ll pass the pain on. I wonder whether any of Amazon’s (former) Colorado associates will turn out to be male goats who, grumpy at being set upon, retaliate….

I guess I might contend that what’s new about this, if anything, is that 1) disputes between corporations and governments are playing themselves out in consumers’ living rooms and 2) consumers are newly empowered to wreak havoc on… somebody (and it’s not always clear whom). I think Curtis’s take on this is basically right, because in the Kindle windowing cases, we’ve already seen Amazon’s customer base retaliate for this kind of e-gamesmanship — and that was without anyone moving to cut off their income stream. There is no clear hierarchical logic to follow. Just more heads to butt.

This comic (by Apostolos Doxiadis, Alecos Papadatos and Annie Di Donnais) is the best graphic treatment you will read that summarizes and explains both the life and ideas of Claude Lévi-Strauss and the great Aeschylus trilogy The Oresteia. It is also probably the only comic strip you’ll read that talks about topological transformations, and the “algebra of action.” I think I can say that with some certainty.

The nerd/insidery factor is high here, but speaking as a quasi-expert who’s always looking for ways to make obscure lit/theory intelligible, I think it actually really does a good job of clarifying some of this stuff. And it actually works as a little three-page comic, too.

Dan Cohen writes a nice post on the same theme I wrote about a few days ago — roughly, what is a book, and why do certain communities hold it sacred?:

When Roy Rosenzweig and I finished writing a full draft of our book Digital History, we sat down at a table and looked at the stack of printouts.

“So, what now?” I said to Roy naively. “Couldn’t we just publish what we have on the web with the click of a button? What value does the gap between this stack and the finished product have? Isn’t it 95% done? What’s the last five percent for?”

We stared at the stack some more.

Roy finally broke the silence, explaining the magic of the last stage of scholarly production between the final draft and the published book: “What happens now is the creation of the social contract between the authors and the readers. We agree to spend considerable time ridding the manuscript of minor errors, and the press spends additional time on other corrections and layout, and readers respond to these signals—a lack of typos, nicely formatted footnotes, a bibliography, specialized fonts, and a high-quality physical presentation—by agreeing to give the book a serious read.”

It’s all the better because, having formulated this powerful defense of the book as contract, the book as a signal of value, Cohen moves past it to ask how we can continue to work to create and recognize similar signals of value in work done outside the book, especially online.

It’s got a nice sweep, and it seems like a place to begin — especially insofar as community seems to be the one common value that defenders of print and defenders of the digital both want to recognize.

Some blogs written for university presses have gotten really good, featuring excerpts worth reading even if (especially if) you have no particular interest in plunking down beaucoup bucks for a hardcover scholarly book. For instance, here’s a choice bit from classics/philosophy prof Paul Woodruff’s The Necessity of Theater, featured at the website for Oxford University Press, which looks closely at both drama and sports (those two forms of theater both American and Athenian):

Why does theater need a measured space? In order to practice the art of theater successfully, some people must be watching the actions of others. Whether your job tonight is to watch or be watched, you need to know which job is yours; the watcher-watched distinction is essential to theater. We shall see that even this can break down at the end of a theater piece, with marvelous consequences. But one of those consequences is that the event is no longer theatrical. When no one is watching, it’s not theater; it has grown into something else. Marking off space in theater is a device for meeting the need to distinguish the watcher from the watched. In most traditions there is a circle or a stage or sanctuary or a playing field…

“Sacred” is a word we have almost lost in modern times, like “reverence,” to which it is related in meaning. Sacred things and places call us to reverence, as to do sacred timed like the Sabbath; perhaps in out own century we are too alert to the dangers of idolatry to recognize that we are, still, surrounded by what we wordlessly take to be sacred. And Christians have come more and more to neglect the Sabbath. Like reverence, the sacred is best known in religious contexts, but, if we are to recognize it now, we must looked for it also in the secular world, such as the football field. I will say that a place for an object or person is sacred if it is held to be untouchable except by people who are marked off, usually by ritual, so as to be allowed to touch it.

What makes theater sacred? Ritual, or a tradition based on ritual, defines the space and calls for penalties against those who violate it. All theater, football games and Antigone included, is the heir of a long line of spaces made sacred for religious ritual. Sometimes the space is permanently scared, like the adyton, the un-enterable room in an old Greek temple. Sometimes it is sacred for the time of the event, and the boundaries of time and place work together. So it is with the stage, after a performance of Hamlet, if you are invited as a sponsor to a reception with the cast on the set. Nothing wrong now with setting foot on this space (although, if the performance was good, I dare you to step on the stage afterward without a shiver.) So it is also with a trial at law. For the time of the trial the courtroom theater is sacred and may be entered only designated people and used only according to certain rules.

Which leads me to question another kind of reverence at play here: why do these wry observations need to be in a book-length work, a monograph, for them to be taken seriously?

Let me back up. Before I read Woodruff’s excerpt, I also read Rohan Amanda Maitzen’s look at academic publishing over at The Valve, which includes 1) laments that nobody buys academic monographs, and 2) wonderment that blogs don’t seem to have really affected either the purchasing or accreditation habits of academics much.

Not everything in Maitzen’s post is in her voice, but it’s a good round-up — for instance, here she quotes Cathy Davidson:

If we believe in what we do (and I happen to be a believer), we should be writing for readers, first of all, and, second, we should be reading one another’s work and, third, we should be teaching it. Right now, a sale of 300 or 400 copies of a monograph is a lot. That’s appalling. The result, materially, is that we do not pay our own way and certainly not that of junior members of our profession. Intellectually, our students never learn the value the genre of the monograph because we teach excerpts in our courses, even our graduate courses. We do not teach the kind of extended, nuanced thinking that goes into the genre that our very graduate students will have to produce for tenure. We say the scholarly monograph represents the epitome of our profession and a hurdle to “lifetime employment” at a research university. So we do not practice what we preach, adding to the crisis in scholarly publishing and the crisis in the profession of English in particular.

Now, note that slippage: the need for “extended, nuanced thinking” actually turns out to be material primarily because it’s required for tenure. Monographs remain absolutely essential to the legitimation rituals of academia (especially the PhD and tenure), even as they’ve diminished in importance for readers both in and out of the scholarly spheres. They’re only important at designating who gets to go inside the temple. They don’t do anything to maintain the relationship with the audience.

This is something I wrestle with in my mind frequently — when is a “book” necessary? particularly as a “work” is now more frequently coming to mean an ongoing project composed of many, many individual pieces of writing, which are extended and nuanced and interlinked but frequently not a single thing with a clearly defined architecture.

In short, the book is not always necessary. In fact, it sometimes isn’t even a book.

But when it is, it should be one deliberately — not merely to invoke a ritual of time or space or authorship, but to genuinely fulfill all of those demands. As Mallarmé would say, the book should attempt the impossible and abolish chance. How can we do that? Where do we begin?

The anecdote Kevin Drum excerpts in this post was the single most fascinating exchange recounted in the terrific documentary The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. This is what Ellsberg told Henry Kissinger when he was asked for advice on the Vietnam War:

“Henry, there’s something I would like to tell you, for what it’s worth, something I wish I had been told years ago. You’ve been a consultant for a long time, and you’ve dealt a great deal with top secret information. But you’re about to receive a whole slew of special clearances, maybe fifteen or twenty of them, that are higher than top secret.

“I’ve had a number of these myself, and I’ve known other people who have just acquired them, and I have a pretty good sense of what the effects of receiving these clearances are on a person who didn’t previously know they even existed. And the effects of reading the information that they will make available to you.

“First, you’ll be exhilarated by some of this new information, and by having it all — so much! incredible! — suddenly available to you. But second, almost as fast, you will feel like a fool for having studied, written, talked about these subjects, criticized and analyzed decisions made by presidents for years without having known of the existence of all this information, which presidents and others had and you didn’t, and which must have influenced their decisions in ways you couldn’t even guess. In particular, you’ll feel foolish for having literally rubbed shoulders for over a decade with some officials and consultants who did have access to all this information you didn’t know about and didn’t know they had, and you’ll be stunned that they kept that secret from you so well.

Read the rest of the quote for a sort of terrifying description of the rest of the process.

Well, NPR is:

The average Farmville user is a 43-year-old woman. More women than men are “avid” users of social games like Farmville. Women are more likely to play these games online with their relatives and real-world friends than men. Two-thirds of these social gamers play at least once a day. One in four spend money playing them.

All Facebook’s Application Statistics show that Farmville will soon have more than 80 million active users on Facebook — 31 million of those will be playing Farmville daily…

This new data challenges some preconceived notions about just who is actually playing games online. The image of the nerdy, male, mid-thirties recluse, playing shooting games over the internet with fellow nerdy, male, mid-thirties recluses on the other side of the world might be forever shattered.

The craziest statistic? Of the 200 million people who log into Facebook each day, 15 percent of them are playing Farmville.

And now we know that one of them might very well be your Mom.

Via.

Every so often, Twitter feels less like a service I use than a place where I hang out — and one of the users that I feel like I would love to hang out with (in that sort of detatched, ambient way one does in, say, a college dorm or TA office) is Tom Henderson, aka @mathpunk. At some point in the not-too-distant past, I found him or he found me. Yesterday, I was delighted to be pointed (also via Twitter, but not by Tom) to an interview he gave technoccult.net where he sketches a bit of what he’s about:

Many students want teachers to “show me the steps.”

They want a sequence of steps that they can perform that will give them an answer. This is not unreasonable; they know that their performance on exams, and therefore their performance on the All-Seeing Grade Point Average, is largely determined by being able to Do The Steps.

But “The Steps” are cargo cult mathematics.

The Steps are seeing the sorts of symbols that count as “right”, and trying to replicate that dance of steps. It turns out that the easiest thing in the world is to look at a student’s work, and tell the difference between “Knows what’s going on, made mistakes and dozed off” vs. “Can memorize steps, has no idea what’s going on.”

Now, the way that I explain mathematics, it sort of looks like I’m torturing the poor bastards. I handwave. I refer to certain groupings of symbols as “Alphabet soup” and write it down as a wild scribble with one or two symbols around it.

Because I’m trying to avoid showing The Steps and instead show them enough of The Idea that they can reconstruct what the steps MUST be.

Many students want to know the formulas, so that they can float them on top of their short-term memory, ace the exam, and then skim them off. Why do they want to know that?

Probably because, for their entire mathematical careers, math has been a sequence of Steps, and if they get them wrong, they get red pen, bad grades, No No No Look What You Did. Plus, bonus, there is no apparent relevance of these algorithms other than To Get The Answer.

What’s wrong with math education in the US? What’s wrong is, Whatever it is that makes my students uninterested in learning any more math than is required to minimize feeling stupid.

So that we’re clear, lots of my students are totally awakened to the interesting weirdnesses of mathematics. But, it takes some doing, and I can’t do it by myself. Hence the podcasts and the lunatic twitter stream and the plans for TV shows and online games and godknowswhat else.

I’m trying to get across that if you are highly motivating, if you have a high degree of fire and “Fuck yeah!” and “What, that’s impossible, but true!”, you can get students to express interest in theorems named after dead Hungarians.

I also love this idea, which seems important and true (particularly re: mathematics and its models):

Let me tell you a theory about math knowledge. A mathematical concept can be expressed in symbols (algebra), in pictures (geometry and diagrams), verbally, and numerically. This is a common theory; my additional spin is that math knowledge also exists as a performative concept. Like, the way that I direct the attention of the students (“If you ignore this alphabet soup for a minute, you can see it’s really just a product of two things…”) Or, the way I will use physicality. Like, the other week, I climbed onto the chair and then onto the desk while I was trying to explain slope.

ANYway, the theory goes that you don’t understand a mathematical concept until you understand it in TWO modalities. I do very well with visual knowledge, so my notes of understanding are full of color and pictures and mindmaps and arrows linking concepts, and I highlight the holy hell out of math books. However, I don’t believe I KNOW a concept until I can explain it verbally, because I can barely understand anything if someone just talks it at me.

First swipe is through my best modality, second swipe is through my worst modality. The whole “learning style” thing may be overstated, but it remains true that getting students to understand things in a variety of modalities seems like the way to go.

Maybe they don’t get the picture. So you ask them many verbal questions. (Questions, not explanations, 99% of the time.)

Check it out.