Sometimes I think of the political blogosphere as a huge commons. An individual blogger can gain in readership or influence by attacking or ridiculing some enemy, but at the cost of making that enemy stronger in the world as a whole.
I also believe that every time the words “stimulus” or “fiscal policy” are blogged it helps the electoral prospects of the Republican Party, no matter what the content of the blog post.
Tyler Cowen, “Department of Unintended Consequences”, Marginal Revolution, 2010-09-28
September 30, 2010
QotD: Unintended consequences
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It’s Banned Books week
Patricia Wrede had some disturbing discoveries when she tried to look up book banning incidents for a panel discussion:
[. . .] I told them about the teacher who almost got fired when a parent objected to her reading Calling on Dragons in her classroom, because “it taught witchcraft!” I mentioned the fellow YA author who was disinvited from a school visit (these are day-long programs where an author talks to several classes worth of kids and usually has lunch with the teachers, and for some YA authors, they contribute a goodly chunk to their income) because a parent noticed a title on her extensive bibliography that “sounded occult” (it was a mystery, with not a whiff of the supernatural anywhere in the text). I pointed out the well-publicized attempts to suppress the Harry Potter books (the series is #1 on the ALA’s top ten most challenged books of the decade for 2000-2009), and a few less-well-publicized attempts to remove from school shelves things like The Wizard of Oz (because Dorothy is too independent and solves her own problems), The Lord of the Rings (because it is “Satanic”), and Grimm’s Fairy Tales (because the stories are “too violent”).
None of this was, I thought, stop-the-presses news — certainly not to anyone who writes fantasy. But the other writers at the table were shocked all over again. One of them happened to be on the program committee for the regional conference, and she went home and put the panel together.
When she asked me to be on the panel, I immediately said yes, and then I went off to the internet to do some research. I wanted some examples that would hit closer to home. I found quite a lot, but as I looked through the web sites, I noticed something interesting. I live in Minnesota. All of the descriptions of book-banning incidents in Minnesota were from the websites of organizations based in distant states: Florida, Texas, Washington D.C., Georgia.
So I poked a little more. There were quite a few local web sites publicizing Banned Books Week, and all of them did indeed have descriptions of surprising book-banning incidents. Incidents that took place in other states, like Texas, Georgia, and California.
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Even rustlers are going vegetarian
The scourge of the old west (at least in TV and movie representations) were cattle rustlers. Their modern counterparts are apparently grape rustlers:
Thieves in France have broken into a vineyard and stolen an entire crop of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, say police.
They struck in Villeneuve-les-Beziers on Sunday night, taking advantage of a full moon and using a harvesting machine to seize 30 tonnes of the crop.
Farmer Roland Cavaille said similar crimes had taken place before in the Languedoc-Roussillon, one of France’s best-known wine growing regions.
He said the theft amounted to a year’s work and about 15,000 euro (£12,900).
“They used a harvesting machine to gather grapes. This means there was no need to have lots of people, two people would have been enough,” Mr Cavaille told Le Parisien newspaper.
“The area was quite isolated, it is a a few kilometres from the village and near a river. So the thieves were able to work safely.”
I’m sure there’s a joke in there about sour grapes, but I’m not clever enough to put it together.
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Inter-service rivalry now compromising SAS training
Of all the various famous units the British have to boast of, surely the Special Air Service (SAS) is the top of the list. That status still doesn’t exempt the SAS from being a pawn in the ongoing battle between the Army and the RAF:
For five years now, the Royal Air Force (RAF), and the British Army have been feuding over the lack of aircraft for parachute training. The latest row involves Britain’s SAS (Special Air Service) commandos, who have been unable to train all their operators in complex parachuting techniques, because the RAF has been unable to provide transports to carry the SAS personnel into the air. This is considered a more serious matter than previous problems with not having enough transports to train members of the Parachute Regiment. The SAS threatens to send their operators to the United States for training, relying on long standing ties with their American counterparts (the U.S. Army Special Forces and SOCOM). This would be embarrassing for the RAF, and that would be the point.
This sort of feud has been going on for a long time. For example, four years ago it was revealed that the British Army had to decide between supplying its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, and providing aircraft for its paratroopers to complete their training. As a result of this shortage, in 2005, only about 25 percent of paratroop trainees were able to make the required jumps, to become qualified parachutists. Back in 2003, 93 percent were able to successfully make their jumps. In addition to the morale boost, being a qualified paratrooper also gets you an extra $3,000 a year in bonus pay.
The RAF, rather like the US Air Force, has different priorities than the other services, and clearly doesn’t value their inter-operational harmony as highly as controlling the equipment and doctrine to support their own mission (as defined by air force commanders). This isn’t a new thing: it’s been going on since the first world war. It also shows a failure of leadership on the civilian side — the civilian bosses should be much more insistent on getting the overall mission done properly than in allowing these turf wars (cloud wars?) to interfere.
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Censorship and blocking ineffective, says AK Zensur
Attempts to block websites showing child pornography don’t appear to be as effective as direct action, according to a press release from the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur):
Internet blocking is advocated as an allegedly effective measure against the proliferation of child abuse images. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Sweden and Denmark have been using this technology for years. But a practical test by the German Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship (AK Zensur) in cooperation with European civil rights advocacy groups has shown: Internet blocking does not fight abuse, in practice it only serves to conceal the failures of politics and police. Websites can remain on blocking lists for years even though they have either been deleted or could be deleted easily and quickly.
How is this possible, and what could be done against illegal sites? Answers are given by a new analysis of current blocking lists from Sweden and Denmark by the Working Group against Access Blocking and Censorship. The group developed software to select, categorise and geo-locate 167 blocked Internet domains as a representative sample of websites blocked in Denmark at the time of the investigation. “The result is a smack in the face of law enforcement authorities”, says Alvar Freude of the Working Group. “Of the 167 listed sites, only three contained material that could be regarded as child pornography.” Two of these three sites had been blocked in Denmark since 2008, and these are, or least were, blocked in Sweden, Norway and Finland as well. These sites were therefore known for at least two years in several countries, and apparently law enforcement authorities did nothing to try and get this illegal content removed.
This is even more disturbing because the Working Group managed to take down the remaining sites just by sending a few emails. Two of the sites were hosted in the USA, and even during the weekend (Friday, ca. 10 p.m. EDT) they were removed by the hosters within 30 minutes. On the following Tuesday, the third website was taken down by its registry in India, three hours after notification. The content was stored on a server in the Netherlands. “The removal of this dehumanising content and the pursuit of the perpetrators must have absolute priority. Internet Blocking leads to the exact opposite”, says Alvar Freude, who sent the take-down requests.
H/T to BoingBoing for the link.
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Chopping off the “long tail” of Google searches?
For your daily contrarian view of the wonderfulness of Google’s new Instant Search feature, we turn to SmoothSpan:
The Internet is a Mighty Echo Chamber, and with one fell swoop, Google Instant Search has added a big ole’ Marshall Stack to turn the Echo levels all the way up to 11.
Google reports that Instant Search will save 350 million hours of user time per year. What isn’t reported is how it will cut off the Long Tail where it starts by promoting banal sameness for searchers. This is great for Google. After all, keeping up with every last oddball search someone may want to do costs them more infrastructure money. At their scale, it is significant. So, corralling everyone into fewer more common searches is a good thing.
[. . .]
How does Google Instant Search contribute to the Echo Chamber? Well anyone who has bothered to look through keyword information on their website will see that people find sites through a bewildering array of queries. Some might even say much of it is accidental, but looking over these lists gives a wonderful window onto how your content is found and perceived by others. How often do we get to commit such telepathy with our followers? Rarely. Yet, Instant Search will substitute popular searches for those individually created. More people will be driven off the back roads search trails and onto the superhighways that lead to whomever controls the first few search results connected to the Instant Searches Google is recommending at the time.
Oddly enough, I was talking about Google searches the other day with DarkWaterMuse (whose blog is offline at the moment), but it was more in the context of “how often are the sponsored links actually useful to you?” We both agreed that the correct answer fell somewhere in the range of “rarely” to “never”.
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