I am intrigued that so many of the high-profile geekocracy (who ought to know better but are apparently dim-brained slaves to digital fashion) seem now to be using Google+ as their preferred blogging platform. Why would anyone do that? Apart from the antiseptic anti-design imposed on everyone, there is no guarantee that Google+ will be any longer-lived than Buzz or Wave, or that it won’t suffer outages or catastrophic data wipes. I prefer to publish under my own domain names, with software I manage and control: I own the database (and local backups of it). I rent the infrastructure and can move my data wherever I like in 24 hours or so.Of course, my way costs some money (but not much), and some technical know-how (rapidly acquired), while Google+ is “free” and easy. It depends on how much you value your own data. Is it less valuable to you than $10 or $20 a month and a few hours learning ftp chops? Okay then, carry on as you were! Me, I also happen to be a paying user of Gmail (through Google Apps), because that gives me more storage and a service-level agreement. (Because I’m an “enterprise” customer, I can complain when things go wrong.) Even then, I do as I would do if I were using the free version of Gmail: I back it up to local storage (over IMAP).
Terremark’s building in Miami is the physical meeting point for more than 160 networks from around the world. They meet there because of the building’s excellent security, its redundant power systems, and its thick concrete walls, designed to survive a category 5 hurricane. But above all, they meet there because the building is “carrier-neutral.” It’s a Switzerland of the Internet, an unallied territory where competing networks can connect to each other. Terremark doesn’t have a dog in the fight. Or at least it didn’t. Verizon insists there’s nothing to worry about. Terremark will be set up as a wholly owned subsidiary. Its carrier-neutral status will remain. “We’re not going to try to cramp their style at all,” said Lowell McAdam, President and COO of Verizon. “There will be no moves to take certain customers out of play.”I can’t help but think of it in the context of another recent purchase. Earlier this month, Google bought its New York office building, 111 8th Avenue, for a reported $1.9 billion. As the Wall Street Journal described, “about one third of the space is occupied by telecommunications companies.” But that’s severely understating the situation: 111 8th is another of the most important buildings on the Internet, on a short list of fewer than a dozen worldwide. Like the NAP of the Americas, it houses hundreds of independent networks, scattered across the office spaces of multiple independently owned sub-landlords. And now Google owns the whole thing. One assumes that they’re not going to cramp their style either.
“It’s not about the ‘carrier hotel’ space,” said Google Senior Vice President Jonathan Rosenberg. “We have 2,000 employees on site. It’s a big sales center, but also a big engineering center. With the pace at which we’re growing, it’s very difficult to find space in New York. There are very few buildings in New York that can accommodate our needs. This gives us a lot of control over growing into the space.”
But on a day when the government to 80 million people managed to throw the Internet’s “kill switch,” it’s worth remembering that the Internet is a physical network. It matters who controls the nodes. With these two deals, Google and Verizon may have chipped away at the foundation walls of an open, competitive–and therefore free – Internet.
Strangely enough, another misrepresentation, made passingly, stuck worse in my craw. Wood complained of the book’s protagonist: “We never see him thinking an abstract thought, or reading a book … or thinking about God and the meaning of life, or growing up in any of the conventional mental ways of the teenage Bildungsroman.” Now this, friends, is how you send an author scurrying back to his own pages, to be certain he isn’t going mad. I wasn’t. My huffy, bruised, two-page letter to Wood detailed the fifteen or twenty most obvious, most unmissable instances of my primary character’s reading: Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Lewis Carroll, Tolkien, Robert Heinlein, Mad magazine, as well as endless scenes of looking at comic books. Never mind the obsessive parsing of LP liner notes, or first-person narration which included moments like: “I read Peter Guralnick and Charlie Gillett and Greg Shaw…” That my novel took as one of its key subjects the seduction, and risk, of reading the lives around you as if they were an epic cartoon or frieze, not something in which you were yourself implicated, I couldn’t demand Wood observe. But not reading? This enraged me.Jonathan Lethem on being reviewed by James Wood. Lethem is going to get hammered for writing this — He’s showing his insecurities, he’s indulging his petty resentments, doesn’t he know that this only makes the critics want to trash him? — but I think he’s doing the right thing. Wood is a tremendously insightful critic, and a major stylist, but here is a case in which he says things that are manifestly not true in an attempt to discredit someone’s book. Those of us who write reviews are not obliged to like anything, and we can be as fiercely critical as we believe necessary, but we have an obligation to get our facts right. Wood really should apologize to Lethem and issue a correction, but that obviously isn’t going to happen.
A random Saul Bass thing, since everybody’s talking about him now — and rightly so.
Ecce Homo, by Jacob Epstein; in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral
This time, Dr Pelzer took one of those plastic models you always see in medical offices and measured a length of mandible a few inches long. This, he explained, would be removed and replaced with a bone graft taken from the fibula in my calf— one of the bones we don’t need. Dr Neil Fine, an expert plastic surgeon, would do this and patch me up so that after healing there was every reason to expect I’d be back on my TV show.That’s not how it worked out. All by myself, with nobody to blame, I found out about the work in neutron radiation being done at a handful of hospitals. It was much more powerful and narrowly targeted than gamma radiation. The leading specialist was said to be Dr George Laramore at the University of Washington Medical Centre in Seattle. “My equipment is made for your tumour,” he told me. “Of course you should have surgery first.” Harold Pelzer also recommended surgery first. So did Havey. But no. I became convinced there was a shortcut that would avoid plastic surgery and a healing period and have me back on the air much more quickly. I insisted. My doctors and Chaz advised the path of caution, but I cited reams of web printouts indicating what a miracle this neutron radiation was. Eventually, it was decided to give it a go.
The internet is said to be responsible for helping patients take control of their own diseases. Few movies are ever made about sick people courageously taking doctors’ advice. No, they get bright ideas online. I believe my infatuation with neutron radiation led directly to the failure of all three of my facial surgeries, the loss of my jaw, loss of the ability to eat, drink and speak and the surgical damage to my right shoulder and back as my poor body was plundered for still more reconstructive transplants. Today, I look like an exhibit in the Texas Chainsaw museum.
Most students can’t rely on a combination of natural aptitude, writing skills and diploma prestige to land a good job. If you’re at Arizona State, majoring in Greek is probably a big mistake. Most college students should be focusing on developing marketable human capital, which means taking courses that will leave them with specific job skills. Classics doesn’t fit this bill.I also think Freddoso overstates the importance of “the classics” or Great Books for developing a sound worldview, though this is probably my bias coming through. I think Dickens (whom Freddoso includes in an expanded definition of “classics”) is dreadfully boring, and I have no use for ancient philosophy. I actually liked the courses I took in early modern philosophy, but I think my worldview would be basically the same without them. The readings I did in my high school Latin classes made ancient Rome sound like a tawdry soap opera–fun, but not really edifying.
Is Majoring in “Classical Studies” a Good Idea? - By Josh Barro
I think Barro needs to reply to the obvious objection to his argument: that if all your training is in “specific job skills,” what do you do when changes in technological and/or economic conditions eliminate that job? The primary job-oriented argument for liberal-arts education is that it produces students who are resourceful, adaptable, and wide-ranging in their thinking and skills. Now, you may not think that liberal-arts education does in fact produce such students — in which case, make that argument, please — but it would be very foolish to deny that a rapidly-changing economy needs people with the virtues I’ve just listed. Detailed training for a single job won’t cut it any more.
Specifically, Pan wanted to know how skillful young folks are at online search. His team gathered a group of college students and asked them to look up the answers to a handful of questions. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students generally relied on the web pages at the top of Google’s results list.But [Professor Bing] Pan pulled a trick: He changed the order of the results for some students. More often than not, those kids went for the bait and also used the (falsely) top-ranked pages. Pan grimly concluded that students aren’t assessing information sources on their own merit—they’re putting too much trust in the machine.
Other studies have found the same thing: High school and college students may be “digital natives,” but they’re wretched at searching. In a recent experiment at Northwestern, when 102 undergraduates were asked to do some research online, none went to the trouble of checking the authors’ credentials. In 1955, we wondered why Johnny can’t read. Today the question is, why can’t Johnny search?
Who’s to blame? Not the students. If they’re naive at Googling, it’s because the ability to judge information is almost never taught in school. Under 2001’s No Child Left Behind Act, elementary and high schools focus on prepping their pupils for reading and math exams. And by the time kids get to college, professors assume they already have this skill. The buck stops nowhere. This situation is surpassingly ironic, because not only is intelligent search a key to everyday problem-solving, it also offers a golden opportunity to train kids in critical thinking.