erhebung

To Bangalore

The extremely great Jon Madison is going to Ban­galore to take pho­to­graphs. He already has a fair few, but if, like me, you want to see what happens when a master of mad light and mad colour is let loose in India, take a look at his project on Kick­starter and throw him some cash. If they accept PayPal, I’ll be donating immin­ently. Def­in­itely a project worthy of your con­sid­er­a­tion. (Have a safe trip, Jon!)

New Jersey Sleepers

Fant­astic story:

[…] In what law enforce­ments offi­cials por­trayed as an extraordinary takedown of a Russian espi­onage network, the Justice Depart­ment on Monday announced charges against 11 people accused of living for years in the United States as part of a deep-​cover program by S.V.R. — one of the suc­cessors to the Soviet-​era K.G.B.

[…]

According the the charges, the agents would com­mu­nicate back to Moscow using such tech­niques as stegano­graphy — including secret encrypted data in an image that could be posted on a publicly avail­able website but would appear unre­mark­able to the naked eye; radio­grams — coded bursts of data sent by a short-​wave radio trans­mitter; and setting up wireless laptop computer networks in public places.

Amus­ingly, I had listened to the BBC’s recent radio adapt­a­tion of John Le Carre’s The Secret Pilgrim just before reading that article. It’s hard to imagine that the spycraft John le Carré describes so vividly might still be in use today: the facts that con­tribute to the ver­is­mil­itude of his fic­tional worlds have become so tied up with the fictions that contain them, with their nar­rat­ives, char­ac­ters, and plot twists, as to seem, in some strange way, inap­pro­priate within “our” world. (Seeing “Moscow Centre” men­tioned in the NYT piece produced in me what could be called — and I’m striving for the right word here — a phe­nomen­o­lo­gical jolt.) Pic­turing them being bundled into cars, perhaps a little like Bill Haydn is bundled into a van at the end of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, is possible, but somehow makes it all seem less real. I do wonder, though, quite why the Russians are still going to such lengths to spy on Amer­icans; and also, more wor­ry­ingly, if the Russians are going to such lengths, what might other coun­tries, coun­tries with more pressing reasons to know what is hap­pening in America, be doing in America, or Europe?

UPDATE: There are a couple of articles (one here, one here) on the BBC News that provides more inform­a­tion about the spycraft employed by the sus­pected Russian agents.

We’re Not Plebs

I highly recom­mend reading this post about World Cup football com­ment­ators in the UK. It’s from Enemies of Reason, a great blog that somehow (really not sure how) ended up in my Google Reader. Here’s a para­graph from the piece:

Here are people who should know more than we do, but they don’t. In a lot of ways, you’re already ahead of them if you’ve bought a few packets of Panini stickers for the kids’ album because you know who the players are. It shouldn’t be that way. These people are being paid to be experts, yet they’re sitting back and approaching every game like a pleb. They talk only about the players they’ve heard of — Argen­tina is Messi and Tevez, for example; South Korea is Ji-​Sung Park — from the Premi­er­ship or the Cham­pions League, and that’s that. No both­ering to look any further. There is no world of football outside of England, or the top teams in Europe — everyone else is just ballast. Just spin out some old flannel about shocking defending and put some whizzy circles around players in the replays at half-​time, and that’s job done. It’s crass, inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous of the vast majority of foot­ballers and teams at the World Cup.

I was struck most by “inef­fective, tedious, lacking in insight, and down­right con­temp­tuous [of the audience]” and it got me thinking about a doc­u­mentary the BBC had put out about Atlantis (yes, really). When I watched a bit of the doc­u­mentary, it intrigued me, and I was quite enter­tained by it (good pro­duc­tion values, engaging host, etc.), but I dis­covered, after a series of short Google searches, that dozens of little details that were stated as “fact” (or not qual­i­fied in any way) were either largely dis­cred­ited theories or incred­ibly tenuous extra­pol­a­tions. And yes, of course: it’s tele­vi­sion, it’s not a history book; but why shouldn’t it at least try to be a bit more rigorous? Telling us some­thing is a theory (albeit a largely dis­cred­ited one) doesn’t diminish its value as an inter­esting anecdote (I’m thinking of the small segment about “evidence” of human sac­ri­fice at a Minoan site); but it does, perhaps, make everything less black and white, and the “plebs” who watch tele­vi­sion need things to be simple. Or so the argument goes. But it’s not really an argument, just an excuse for lazy programmme-​making.

It didn’t used to be like this: Kenneth’s Clarke’s Civil­isa­tion and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man are two examples of engaging, enter­taining programme-​making that doesn’t skimp on its research or dumb-​down its subject-​matter. And there are still good programme’s being made, so mainly I’m just ranting.

Tele­vi­sion has always been getting dumber, though, so none of this is espe­cially rev­el­atory. The frus­trating thing when it comes to inform­a­tion and research, whether about foot­ballers or Atlantis, is that here and now in 2010 inform­a­tion is incred­ibly easy to access, anywhere, and at any time. People, well-​paid BBC pundits and doc­u­mentary pro­du­cers in par­tic­ular, have iPads and netbooks, 3G and wireless, Google and Twitter. With the power of all that at our disposal, it shouldn’t be dif­fi­cult to find out some anec­dotes about the Serbian football squad, or to see what current thinking is on human sac­ri­fice in Minoan civil­isa­tion. And if we really can’t utilise all this tech­no­logy at our disposal, for simple tasks or for complex problems like fixing a broken oil well, then we’re probably doomed.

New WordPress

So, there’s a new release of Word­Press, and so if you’ve got a Word­Press blog, it might be a good idea to upgrade. Not sure what it does that is special or new, but I can tell you the default Dash­board skin is a lighter shade of grey.

Walls Suck

UPDATE: It seems I can access the article, but I’ve got to go through Google; it is here. I don’t know what this means, but it’s cer­tainly an indic­a­tion that the internet doesn’t like walls, fences, or anything similar. (At the top of the page is a small banner that reads: “Archive Article — Please enjoy this article from The Times & The Sunday Times. For full access to our content, please sub­scribe here.” So, some (most?) content will be duplic­ated in a public “archive”, perhaps for SEO-​related reasons?)

Well, there I was thinking I could read an article about Edward Heath, when I get stopped (somewhat slug­g­lishly — lots of javas­cript seemed to be in play) by an invit­a­tion from The Times to sign up and “preview” their “new sites”. But I didn’t — still don’t — want to preview their site “for a limited period”, or learn about what makes them worth­while, or become a member; I just wanted — still want — to read the article. I have been fenced out. If I was in the UK, I could go to the library and read the piece. And if the article was in today’s edition of the news­paper, I might even be able to buy a copy. But I’m not in the UK, so neither of those options are viable (and both are silly: I learned about the piece online, so I should be able to read it online). If I want to get through the fence, I must pay.

If I were to pay, what then? Would I sub­sequently pay for eye-​catching, highly recom­mended articles from The New York Times and The Wash­ington Post, The London Review of Books and The New Yorker? If I wanted to read a selec­tion of, say, 6 – 12 articles (a not unreas­on­able number) during one 24 hour period, would I need accounts with each and every pub­lic­a­tion? Or would I “micro” pay, a dollar an article, perhaps? (I’m being delib­er­ately dif­fi­cult here, but it’s not a stretch.) If I did pay, could I share the link with others, or would they too hit a wall they’d have to pay to get through? It all seems immensely com­plic­ated, expensive, and unsatisfying.

The internet allows people to pick and choose from far more sources of content than ever before. This is not news, but it’s worth thinking about what things were like before the internet, RSS feeds, and the myriad delivery systems. We are no longer in a world of just news­pa­pers, radio, and tele­vi­sion. You don’t need to choose between The Guardian and The Tele­graph: you can have both, in small doses. It’s up to you. You like the Sudoku at The Tele­graph? Help yourself. But you think their edit­or­ials are a bit, how to say, con­ser­vative? No problem: switch tab to The Guardian. Neither of them have good book reviews these days? That’s fine, just head over to The Times Literary Sup­ple­ment and see what essays they have on offer. This is the internet I know.

I’ve seen my first pay wall (see the image below) and I’m worried: it seems like the internet just got one site smaller; it feels like a step back­wards; and what happens next? My students, many of whom fre­quently find them­selves at sites like The Times, will find this sort of stuff limiting. Will they open accounts? Or will they just turn and go some­where else? Some will try, but most won’t be able to pay, if it comes down to that: no credit cards, no elec­tronic currency. Their curi­osity will hope­fully lead them to ingenious ways around the problem. But sites asking for money (micro or oth­er­wise) will put off a great many of my students.

Anyway, enough hastily written venting.

“No, you can’t read the article.”

A Spy Like Manning

And fairly pre­dict­ably, the Wikileaks vs Wired.com saga con­tinues (Kevin Poulsen and Kim Zetter share the byline again). The comments beneath the article make for amusing reading. Here’s a snippet from the piece (but you really need to see the whole thing):

“No, I’m not going to give the logs to someone who suggests that I might have been drug-​addled when I decided to turn in a spy,” says Lamo […]

In his chats with Lamo, copies of which were provided to Wired.com by the ex-​hacker, Manning described a crisis of con­science that led him to leak a headline-​making video of a deadly 2007 U.S. heli­copter air strike in Baghdad that claimed the lives of several innocent civilians.

A spy? Perhaps. But to be honest, if I were asked to choose between a spy like Manning and a journ­alist like Poulsen, I’d take the spook, every time.

More on the wider story here, here, here, here, and here.

Soh-​Kah

Whether or not you believe that inform­a­tion wants to be free (and why, really, would it want to be com­mod­i­fied?), it seems that this year World Cup coverage, at least, really does want be free: ESPN has a flashy (lit­er­ally) site with Gamecasts (not sure if I’ll be able to handle US-​accented “soccer”, but we’ll see) and the BBC website lets you listen live (on Radio 5 Live) to all the world cup matches and watch live the fixtures that aren’t over on ITV (ITV is a com­pet­itor channel which has his­tor­ic­ally always shared World Cup broad­casting rights with the BBC to ensure there is no monopoly; but I think the final is shown on both). I like the sim­plicty of the schedule on the BBC site: very easy to see what is what. I missed the first two games (too tired: crashed), but will try to keep up. More inform­a­tion on where to watch over on Life­hacker (and I read some­where else that UnivisionFutbol.com is streaming, too, and their site is very pretty; what I really want, though, is to somehow be able to watch while listening to com­mentary in Italian — few things beat the excite­ment of Italian football com­mentary, and even if you don’t under­stand, you understand).

A screen grab of the BBC’s pleas­ingly straight­for­ward World Cup schedule.

A Beehive Around My Head

The Browser (one of the most useful sites on the internet) pointed me towards a fas­cin­ating inter­view with Michael Sil­verblatt, an inter­viewer (some­thing to look for later: inter­views of inter­viewers), over on The Believer. Here’s a chunky excerpt:

BLVR: So how do you read? Do you read as a writer, an academic, or a fan?

MS: No one ever gave me any flash­cards telling me the dif­fer­ence between those things. I read like someone who has been sub­jected at one point or another to vir­tu­ally every stimulus that is appro­priate to lit­er­ature. Let me give you some examples. When I was in junior high, Stephen Sondheim started pub­lishing what were called “Cryptic Cross­words” in New York magazine. They are aston­ishing, extraordinary cross­word puzzles, nothing like American cross­word puzzles in that they have puns and anagrams. Some­times they’re three-​dimensional. Some­times you enter the words as a knight would move across a chess­board. Some­times you take the cross­word and cut it up into pieces as indic­ated and reshape it so it forms a quo­ta­tion or a syl­lo­gism. A typical clue goes like this: “Broken har­mon­icas floating in Man­hattan, for example.” Now that is a very clear clue to someone who does this kind of puzzle. You take har­mon­icas and you break it, rearrange the letters, broken har­mon­icas, and if you have the patience you discover that har­mon­icas rearranges to Maras­chino and you would find a maras­chino floating in a Man­hattan, for example. This led me to read funny.

BLVR: Wow — and this trained you as a reader?

MS: It’s just the way I re-​punctuate things. I’m altern­at­ively shaping sen­tences as I’m reading coher­ently for sense. Words jump off the page, and I rearrange them in my head. I remember a poem by Edward Albee in the New Yorker. Albee didn’t write many poems, but there was one and it had the line “rain turns to snow and calls for a cigar­ette.” And I thought, Hey, snow! You have a cigar­ette? The rain is lit­er­ally speaking.

BLVR: Do you do this with everything you read?

MS: I have an exper­i­ence of the book, and it’s as if I have not a flat surface in front of me but rather a beehive around my head. It’s very strange.

BLVR: Who else taught you to do this?

MS: I’ve been taught by some of the most extraordinary writers and teachers who’ve ever walked the planet, so I have nothing but rev­er­ence for a good teacher, for a great teacher. Among my teachers and the people from whom I’ve taken example: Hugh Kenner, a sublime literary critic who had the best ear that I’ve ever encountered for poetry, prose, and nuances, for hidden tickles inside a sentence; John Barth; Donald Barthelme; the journ­alist and essayist Dwight Mac­donald. As a friend I’ve had Pauline Kael. I was priv­ileged to be able to sit in on classes taught by Michel Foucault the first time he taught in America. I’m leaving out many who might be offended by my neglect, but I had such remark­able teachers and there’s nothing like having a teacher that you adore and going home and reading their book and hearing how their casual speech mutates into their prose.

Genuinely Dangerous

There’s a story I found on Foucault blog that is playing on my mind as I can’t quite decide how I feel about the situ­ation. Ini­tially it is straightforward:

The person who leaked the so-​called “Col­lat­eral Murder” video of the US Apache heli­copter attack on unarmed civil­ians in Baghdad, res­ulting in their deaths (including two Reuters journ­al­ists) has been arrested, according to a report in Wired.

The Wired report, which contains lots of details and inform­a­tion from friends of the man arrested, SPC Bradley Manning, says that Manning was arrested after he told a former hacker of his leaks. It also contains the news that Manning leaked other material, including 260,000 dip­lo­matic cables from the US which has not been pre­vi­ously reported, as far as I know.

But then things get quirky:

Wikileaks has denounced the news in its Twitter feed this morning, saying about the Wired reporters:

“Adrian Lamo&Kevin Poulson are notorious felons,informers&manipulators. Journ­al­ists should take care.

“State­ment: Wash­ington Post had Col­lat­eral murder video for over a year but DID NOT RELEASE IT it to the public.

“Alleg­a­tions in Wired that we have been sent 260,000 clas­si­fied US embassy cables are, as far as we can tell, incorrect.”

However, they have not yet denied the story, and claim in fact that their security pro­to­cols prevent them from even knowing the source of their leakers.

The “former hacker” men­tioned is Adrian Lamo, an intriguing char­acter. And one of the article’s writers, Kevin Poulsen (slammed by Wikileaks along with Lamo), isn’t exactly dull: he’s a “former” hacker himself and has had a book written about his exploits. So, Wikileaks is angry about the ethics of the piece, but both Lamo and Paulson (they’re acquaint­ances, probably close friends, as far as I can tell), seem to be standing by the line that the FBI were informed about the source of the leak because of the huge risk to national security:

Lamo has con­trib­uted funds to Wikileaks in the past, and says he agonized over the decision to expose Manning — he says he’s fre­quently con­tacted by hackers who want to talk about their adven­tures, and he has never con­sidered reporting anyone before. The supposed dip­lo­matic cable leak, however, made him believe Manning’s actions were genu­inely dan­gerous to U.S. national security.

Poulsen has responded to Wikileaks response to his article:

@wikileaks I’m going to “hell” for reporting on the arrest of an alleged source of yours? So military deten­tions should be kept secret?

As replies go, that one seems a little oblique. Delib­erate evasion, or is he missing what Wikileaks seem (to me) to actually be saying (very indir­ectly): that Lamo and Poulsen were com­plicit in alerting the author­ities and that it was less a case of reporting on news than of blogging about what they’d done (albeit blogging in a manner that appeared to be journ­alism). And more fun­da­ment­ally, Wikileaks are really saying it was unprin­cipled and wrong. But that might be reading too much into things. It might be as simple as one former hacker deciding to protect the interests of his country by getting in touch with the FBI and another former hacker then writing an article about what the informant did and the after­math. Whatever really is going on, I’ll be watching for developments.

A Voice File from the Top Deck

A few months ago New Statesman pub­lished an essay by Norman Lebrecht on the future of cri­ti­cism. Here is an excerpt:

[Kenneth] Clark made it possible for a chap in a pub to appre­ciate Francis Bacon, and Reich-​Ranicki for a hausfrau to persuade her neigh­bour in the butcher’s queue that Günter Grass was a more important writer than Hermann Hesse. Kenneth Tynan and Pauline Kael added rep­er­toire tips and quality control to their remit. Their suc­cessors attempt to mediate between a bewildered public and the debate about con­cep­tual art. The role of the critic is in constant evol­u­tion, a work in progress, a creative necessity.

Yet, in 2010, the critic is an endangered species, almost a write-​off. The onslaught of the internet on news­paper eco­nomics has ravaged arts journ­alism. Across the United States, from Miami to Seattle, news­pa­pers have slashed budgets and sacked critics, leaving the New York Times, which is sim­il­arly under siege, wielding an unhealthy near-​hegemony.

In Britain, the Tele­graph and the Times cut review fees to ￡40 and ￡60, a dis­in­centive for all but the utterly des­perate and the aca­dem­ic­ally tenured (who else would write all night for the price of a cheap pair of shoes?). The mech­anism for suc­ces­sion has gone to rust. The average age of clas­sical music reviewers on the nationals is over 55; theatre critics are not much younger. Atrophy is setting in.

After talking for a time about people laid off and dwind­ling coverage of the arts in main­stream media, Lebrecht also recom­mends a couple of inter­esting websites: theartsdesk.com (all and electricsheepmagazine.co.uk. Both are worth a visit. This seems to be the natural tra­jectory for cri­ti­cism to take, although some will ask where the money comes from, how they can remain sus­tain­able. Per­son­ally, I think they’ll all just make a salary selling t-​shirts and taking vol­un­tary dona­tions (I’m half-​joking).

Lebrecht sounds a positive note in his final paragraphs:

How can we rescue cri­ti­cism from the brink of extinc­tion? Some of the best minds in the arts are turning over that question without, at present, much by way of a solution. My feeling is that we have to start from small begin­nings, training a new gen­er­a­tion of critics in the tra­di­tional method and hoping that they will show the resource­ful­ness to achieve con­tinuity. The New Statesman’s search for a young music critic will be widely sup­ported — and not only in this country, as the arts are a global business, but one that, unlike the banks, will never be too big to fail.

The critic of tomorrow will probably tweet a first review in the interval and submit a voice file from the top deck of the homeward-​bound bus. The tempo has quickened and the tech­no­logy has got slicker, but the imper­ative of bearing inde­pendent witness to the arts is unchanged. When the last critic signs off, it will be curtains for civilisation.

Yes. (Although you can argue “tomorrow” is already here.)

Are We Watching?

SkyTruth is a website devoted to providing news on the BP oil spill (or leak, or disaster). I found it via The Browser, I think, and it is one of the first feeds I check when I open Google Reader. In an inter­esting turn of events, during their analysis of satel­lite imagery of the BP spill, SkyTruth has dis­covered another leak in the Gulf of Mexico. The story has been unfolding over the last couple of weeks, and a couple of days ago the site requested help from the public: it wanted to see the “new” spill up close. In response, a pho­to­grapher, J. Henry Flair, got in a plane and flew over the area of the sus­pected leak, sending the pho­to­graphs he took to SkyTruth, who prompty pub­lished them, with further analysis. It’s good journ­alism, and journ­alism that is using tech­no­logy well: crowd-​sourcing online, data-​mining from public satel­lite records, and working with the clear and unam­biguous aim of informing the public.

In their latest post SkyTruth ask: is anybody watching what’s going on out there? It’s a good question. Is anyone actually mon­it­oring, daily, the status of oil wells in our oceans? We have the satel­lites, but beyond sites like SkyTruth, are we actually using them? Are we doing the best we can with the tech­no­logy we have at our disposal? Isn’t this some­thing gov­ern­ments, or the oil com­panies them them­selves, should be doing publicly, transparently?

Hitchens Interviewed

I get the distinct feeling Decca Aitken­head doesn’t like Chris­topher Hitchens. Her inter­view with the writer is a won­derful read, though, and all down, amus­ingly, to Hitchens: Aitkenhead’s frequent attacks and blunt ques­tions might have seemed smart and pithy at the time, but they come over, on paper, as somewhat petty, not to mention com­pletely loaded with what seems to be a very personal agenda (i.e., bitch-​slap Hitchens in public). But def­in­itely worth a read.