Monthly Archives: June 2007

More on Rorty.

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We noted in these pages the death of Richard Rorty a couple of weeks ago, and provided some links (well, actually, the guys at Arts and Letters Daily did all the work and we just linked to them, just giving credit and all). Today’s contrbutions to the same site contain some more material on Rorty, including a long appreciation by one of his former students, Carlin Romano writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education and some links to political essays Rorty composed for Dissent magazine. You can find them both at the top of today’s issue of
Arts

Einstein, again.

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Of the making of books (about Einstein) there is no end. And that doesn’t consider the numerous, or even numberless, articles, editorials, blog posts and all manner of other writings that seek to explain his ideas, say where and why they may have fallen short, or invoke his name in support of some particular cause or position. Despite all theis elucidation, the real Einstein remains, somehow, “elusive”, it is claimed. Lee Smolin reviews and recaps the contents of several books, not all of them recent, in an effort to show that the great physicist adapted a couple of public personae, such as the Genial Eccentric, or the Reclusive Sage, mainly to get rid of people who were boring and distracting him from his main pursuit, which was physics, and more precisely, an attempt to get past the quantum mechanical explanations that seemed to have triumphed, but which he regarded as seriously wrong, and at best a way station on the road to a fuller understanding. The accepted postion is that Einstein’s career falls into two parts: the period of brilliant insight and discovery ( the Relativity Years, if you will) and the period of Decline (the Princeton years), in which he didn’t do much but brood over the to him incomprehensible success of quantum explanantions. There is a fair amount of tongue-clucking over the guy’s failure to accept the new methods…you know how it is, once you’re passed your prime, etc. Smolin says that’s all baloney. Einstein’s objections to quantum theory are very well thought out and serious ones, and that physicists should start listening to him again. Then too, some of the books covered by Smolin detail aspects of Einstein’s private life and character that don’t fil well with the public personae. There is also some suggestion about the destruction of documents that would prove embarassing to the later totemic image, deletions made not by Einstein himself, but by others. I guess we have been creating our Einsteins as we created our own Lincolns,and Kennedys and Martin Luther Kings, and the product may have had only occasional relation to the original. It’s a long piece in the The New York Review of Books, but it’s a good read.
Lee Smolin

A Repository Success Story.

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Digital repositories were seen by some as the natural next stage in academic publishing on the Internet. They would gather, edit, index, disseminate and preserve research contributions submitted by investigators, and electronic dissemination would obviate the traditional journal system, and about time too, since it has been around since the time of Newton. The first flush of enthusiasm for the repository concept centered on “discipline-focused” resources. But thinkers wondered whether it wouldn’t be easier to let individual scientist archive their own materials or contribute them to a campus-based archive supported by the institution at large. So the digital repository morphed into the institutional repository. The worthy folk at SPARC ( Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition) have recently announced an agreement to cooperate with a very successful academic repository, which seems to be pretty much structured along the lines of the original digital archive concept, in that it is discipline-based.
AgEcon Search: Research in Agricultural and Applied Economics is supported by agencies of the University of Minnesota, and it has been in existence for some ten years now. So the Blogging Grouch is inclined to think that the obsequies announced for the discipline-based repository may have been a little premature. Internet enthusiasts seem an impatient lot. When academics did not desert the journal model and demand, at once, its replacement by the repository, the enthusiasts gave up after, oh, fifteen minutes, and started pushing something else. But, maybe the transformation of academic, and other, publication patterns will be more “geologic” than “electronic”, and will just take longer. AgEcon Search seems to be doing things their way and doing very well. Good on ‘em.
AgEcon Search

Biography, What is it Good For?

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Elaine’s question on a Seinfeld episode has been recycled and repurposed many times, and the BG is in both good and bad company in trotting it out again. But, in this instance, it happens to cover very nicely the topic of these musings. Why do people read biographies? Why do other people write them? Where does ‘biography’ come from anyway? How did it all get started? One of the craft’s practitioners has turned his attention to these loose ends and devoted a whole book to it. BIOGRAPHY; a brief history, by Nigel Hamilton, Harvard University Press 345 pp. $21.95, explores the origins and development of this astonishingly popular genre, and tries to come up with some answers that will explain how it all got that way. One view is that we read biographies to catch people out in less than noble behavior, to comfort ourselves by finding out the Great had faults and flaws, often quite serious ones, just as we do. Another says that biography is just a higher form of gossip, a standpoint that varies only a little from the first one. OK, maybe, some. But when you think about some of the recently published, bestselling biographies of say, Alexander Hamilton, or Robert Moses, or Lyndon Johnson, it’s hard to believe people are shelling out that kind of coin for such low motives. In Antiquity, it was thought that reading the lives of the famous would inspire the reader to emulate their virtues and deeds of valor. But, without dismissing an admixture of any or all of these other motives, I think the mainspring is simply curiosity. What was it like to BE Rembrandt, or Hamilton, or Stalin for that matter? What was it like to be AROUND them? We hear their music, read their books, suffer from their misdeeds and errors and wonder, what kind of dude could come up with something like that? Simple, really.

Starting Over with the Internet.

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Someday, maybe, cultural anthropologists will divide human history into two epochs: the time before the Internet, and the time after. Some critics sniff at such statements, saying that the Internet is a water droplet on a hot griddle when compared to the REAL dividing lines in history: writing, printing, nuclear energy, computers, and the really big one…the emergence of biology from its former place as a descriptive science into what we are experiencing today. As kids say nowadays, whatever. But the Internet we all work with has plenty of defects and deficiencies. Some of these root in the original assumptions the pioneers made about who would be using networks, and why. “Benign” uses were assumed: find valued information, share it quickly, etc. Not much thought was given to “security”. Who would abuse such a wonderful tool? Well, umpity years on we know that “malign” uses are a factor and the current Internet is not structured to deal with them There are other problems, but the point here is that some people are actually doing something about them. And, they are proceeding in an interesting way: Start Over. What we have now is too seriously deficient to preserve and patching up the current structure is too costly in time and real moola. The argument is that we have more than 2o years worth of empirical data on what we do and do not want in an Internet-like thing. So, let’s go build one, but this time do it right. Stanford has several groups working on this project and they are moving along rather smartly. A recent issue of Technology Review has an article about what’s happening out there and who is doing what. There is also an embedded link to previous stories about the problems surrounding the current version of the Net. I think the guys at Stanford are very, very smart and they will doubtless come up with something interesting. But, I wonder how the change over would take place. Maybe like the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, in which the Pope said:” OK, when you go to bed tonight, it will be today, but when you get up, it’ll be two weeks later. Do it.” Not everybody did, which was a pain. Big countries like Britain and Russia kept to the Old Style for centuries…”ain’t no Pope gonna tell US what to do”… but finally they gave in. Maybe we’ll go to bed one day and wake up the next with a brand-new, shiney, InterntII the next a.m. But, I don’t think we’ll need the Pope to tell us what to do.
Internet

A Diamond Jubillee.

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Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World turns 75 this year. Over seven decades, the book has become a classic in the subgenre of minatory prophecy of Science Gone Terribly Wrong. Caitrin Nicol is one of the editors at The New Atlantis, and has produced a very nice essay in honor of the anniversary. Nicol went to the considerable trouble of digging out and reading reviews of the novel when it appeared in 1932. Quite a few of the leading lights were disappointed or even aghast at what Huxley had come up with, and were not shy about telling him so either. Nicol also considers the future society depicted in BNW with similar works of the same era…notably H.G.Wells’ Men Like Gods and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We. It’s a longish read, but worth it.
Brave

Google Books Project Grows.

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Google’s plan to digitize the collections of major US and European libraries took a large step forward with the announcement of plans to scan the collections of more big American academic libraries. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation is a consortium of 12 research universities, mostly in the Mid-West. Google plans to work with the libraries of these institutions to digitize special collections of exceptional research importance. UMinn has a collection of materials relating to Scandinavia and forestry, UMich has agriculture,
Northwestern has Africana and so forth. There was no timeline given in the announcement the Grouch saw,
but it’s likely that startup will be slow, since there may be special problems in dealing with some of the contents of the collections chosen for the project. Once these have been worked out, things can move faster.
The Google project upset a lot of people when it was first announced, but it’s really hard for me to get upset about an effort to put books on the web. You can look at or acquire almost any imagineable thing on the web, so why not more scholarly books? Much of the inital fuss seems to have quieted down, and the critics have either been mollified or have moved on to other pastures.

Richard Rorty Dead at 75.

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One of America’s most influential and most controversial post World War II intellectuals, Richard Rorty, has died at age 75 due to complications of pancreatic cancer. Rorty was viewed in some quarters as the Archdemon of intellectual relativism, since he held some rather extreme views on whether our minds can really determine the truth about the World. I don’t want to run the risk of caricaturing subtle and nuanced philosophical positions, so read some of the obits thoughtfully gathered in one place by Arts and Letters Daily.
Rorty

UTMB Library Gets its Own PubMed Logo.

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The Moody Medical Library has its own logo, labeled FIND IT AT UTMB, on PubMed search results. The FIND IT button is a link to a page which will help users move from the “discovery” that an interesting item exists to “harvest”, that is, acutally getting the document. Once you complete your PubMed search, select the useful documents by clicking in the check boxes to the left, then change the display format to Abstract Plus. The FIND IT button should be on the upper right side of the display, a little below the line on which the publishers’ cartouches appear. FIND IT will tell you whether we have the item in print, in e format, either direct (“article”) or through scanning of a journal’s web site (“browse”). If we don’t have it at all, the screen will offer you a chance to obtain the document via our ILLIAD interlibrary loan request software, and will even populate the ILL request form for you. Can’t beat that!