A cowardly excuse from one of Dick Cheney's willing executioners

Philip Mudd, a former deputy director of the CIA’s counterterrorism center, defended the use of torture on both MSNBC's show Morning Joe and CNN's New Day show with Chris Cuomo as co-host. Much like the incorrigible Dick Cheney, he defended torture, but then added a twist by blaming the American people.

"Excuse me, common sense? You have the majority of the American people still saying this is okay. We went to the people who determined what U.S. statutes say. They were clear. I personally spoke to members on both sides of the aisle in the Congress. They told me either ‘okay,’ or ‘is this it?’ — in other words, ‘aren’t you doing more?’ The mood of the population is reflected by the American security service. The mood of the population is, ‘this is okay, this is more than okay. And, by the way, if we see ever see another jumper from the 100th floor of a building in New York, it’s on you.’ You want to know what that’s like, Chris? We were dealt a hand of deuces, and we ran the table in the casino. I thought it was great work." (Quote from the blog Mediaite, December 16, 2014.) 

With the same logic, most tyrants could defend any terror and abuse by claiming that they just did what the people wanted them to do. A new Pew Research Center poll (December 16, 2014) found that 51 percent of Americans believe that CIA's torture was justified. And much like most American's believed in Dick Cheney's lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in the year that lead up to the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, 58 percent now believe that the torture was effective, despite the fact that the senate report based on CIA's internal documents showed that it did not.

Mudd's defense is nothing but a version of "the Devil made me do it," or as Eve told God according to the Old Testament: "The serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13).

Note: For a background on the "willing executioners" debate, check out this Wikipedia  article.

Roubini on the Rise of the Machines and the Future of the Economy

The financial and economic guru Nouriel Roubini gave a speech on December 4th at the Bloomberg BusinessWeek 85^th Anniversary Dinner, which was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The title of his "official toast" was “Rise of the Machines: Downfall of the Economy?”

To be a toast for Manhattan socialites, it was probably great, but when you read the published version on Roubini's Edge it fizzles somewhat. To begin with, his understanding of the birth of the computer is flawed. 

"This wave of technological innovation began in 1947 with the invention of the transistor. A little over 10 years later, the microchip appeared; and, soon after that, computers followed. From these basic roots, the rate of innovation simply exploded."

Well, no. The first electronic computers were created around 1940 and used vacuum tubes rather than the microchips he mentions, which later made microcomputers and PCs possible. (He may be forgiven for this transgression as he after all is an economist and not a techie.)

Roubini said that ”technologists claim that the world is on the cusp of a series of major technical breakthroughs” and that this is not just about IT, but a much broader third industrial revolution.

Yes, it is plausible that the IT-revolution of the past 30 years will be followed by an industrial and economic revolution due to broad technological progress, but let’s pause for a moment and remember that the technological and industrial revolutions of the late 19th and early 20th century contributed to the economic and political shifts in "plate tectonics" that resulted in two world wars. 

The destabilizing impact of new technology and globalization is truly global, and the world's political systems (including and maybe especially in democratic political systems) are at loss for how to respond. Technology opens possibilities, but it is a double edged sword, and where it cuts depends on who wields it and for what purpose. 

The best part of Roubini's speech was his reflection on job destruction and whether new jobs can make up for lost ones. The picture Dr. Doom painted here is dark, and he includes education in his scenario (maybe somewhat unfairly as teachers are not as easily replaced by algorithms as it at first may seem.)

He does criticize the "winner-takes-all capitalism" and increasing inequality, and reminds us of John Maynard Keynes's optimistic prognosis from 1930 that we soon would need to work no more than 15 hours a week, but contrasts it with another possibility in "the Brave New World" of labor-saving technology – “20% of the labor force will work 120 hours a week while the other 80% will have no jobs and no income.”

After that dystopic scenario (we can ignore his reference to "the Singularity" and Steven Hawking’s silly provocation that mankind should get think of leaving Earth in fear of artificial intelligence), one might have expected more in terms of a remedy than the whimper of an ending that we are served up: a longing for an enlightened despot/leader (Otto von Bismarck, Teddy Roosevelt or William Gladstone) and giving workers “skills” needed “to participate in the wealth that capitalism generates.”

Are we heading towards a new 1968?

The very fabric of society is tearing.

Ferguson. This is just the beginning. What exactly happened during those 90 seconds when a white police officer killed a young unarmed black boy while fighting his inner demons may never be clear, but what is clear is that America's poor and especially its young and people of color are losing whatever faith they had left in the legal and political system.

We may be entering another 1968 -- the year when young people across the world took to the streets protesting wars and injustice. The governments had failed to deliver on hope and justice, peace and prosperity, focusing all their effort on protecting the rich and waging wars that were often ill-conceived and ill-executed.

The Great Recession (which began in 2007 and exploded in the autumn of 2008) robbed the American middle class of its security, pulled the rug under the Black and Latino population at the same time as it allowed the obscenely rich tenth of a percent to multiply their undeserved wealth.

Charles Dickens would have said that it was the best of times and the worst of times. It all depended on if you belonged to the top quintile or the bottom four quintiles. Inequality has exploded in America and the rest of the world and the "losers" -- as Mitt Romney and many conservatives -- like to call ordinary people, have lost their patience. The result is deep anger, frustration, social unrest and in some cases extreme political movements.

The very fabric of society is tearing and the economic, political and legal system is unable to address its deepest and most serious problems.

The Democratic Party is a party without ideas and only a few steps behind the Republican Party as far as corruption goes. The Republican Party is equally void of ideas (unless we call the Tea Party's hatred of the United States's first black president a set of ideas rather than an ignorant mix of populism and racism), but at least twice as corrupt as its rival.

We've had a Democratic president for six years, and although he led the country out of the recession George W. Bush and his Republicans let lose, he failed to stand up to Wall Street, and compromised away much of the support he had on the left and center-left. The Republican strategy has rested on two legs, political obstruction even when it undermined the country's economy and national security and voter suppression. They know that they the demographic changes in the U.S. work against them, so they have been working hard, and the Supreme Court have enabled them, at disenfranchising the majority of America's population.

Today they have a lock on the economic and political power. All that is left is the Presidency. But as we have seen over the past six years, they can pretty much run the country without controlling the Presidency.

Hence the disillusionment among the poor, a large part of the middle class and the minorities (despite the fact that they will soon become a majority of eligible voters.)

       

*

Morris Fiorina, a political scientist at Stanford, is similarly critical of the “upscale capture” of the Democratic Party. In an email, he wrote that in the aftermath of the financial collapse of 2008,

the country is desperate for economic relief, but as time goes on it becomes clear that the administration’s economic policy is to take care of the financial sector, where hundreds of people are clearly guilty of fraud in any layman’s view. The result is building disappointment, resentment, and rage in the public, which results in the 2010 debacle.

“Today,” Fiorina writes,

We have a situation where voters can choose between a party that openly admits to being a lap dog of Wall Street and a party that by its actions clearly is a lap dog but denies it. At least vote for the honest one.

*

Thomas B. Edsall: Who Will Save the Democratic Party From Itself? (New York Times, November 25, 2014)

The Social Impact of the Great Recession

A.D.H.D. as an adaptation for survival in a non-sedentary culture...

Richard A. Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical College, wrote a fascinating essay in today's New York Times - A Natural Fix for A.D.H.D.

"Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is now the most prevalent psychiatric illness of young people in America, affecting 11 percent of them at some point between the ages of 4 and 17. The rates of both diagnosis and treatment have increased so much in the past decade that you may wonder whether something that affects so many people can really be a disease.
And for a good reason. Recent neuroscience research shows that people with A.D.H.D. are actually hard-wired for novelty-seeking — a trait that had, until relatively recently, a distinct evolutionary advantage. Compared with the rest of us, they have sluggish and underfed brain reward circuits, so much of everyday life feels routine and understimulating.
To compensate, they are drawn to new and exciting experiences and get famously impatient and restless with the regimented structure that characterizes our modern world. In short, people with A.D.H.D. may not have a disease, so much as a set of behavioral traits that don’t match the expectations of our contemporary culture." 

I found the article educational about A.D.H.D., but it also triggered spin-off questions. In the middle of reading it, I began to look at it as a story about innovation and change, how companies and organizations can deal with innovative and creative people better. It can also be read as a story about learning, how different people learn, and the role of computers and social media in learning. Another link would be to non-cognitive skills and the role they play in education.

Maybe I am an un-diagnosed case who belong on the savanna?

To Knausgaard or not to Knausgaard?

An ad for Knausgaard's My Struggle
in the New York Times Book Review, June 1, 2014.

Being a Swede living abroad, you have a soft spot for people and things Swedish. IKEA, Volvo, Saab, Ericsson, knäckebröd, Västerbottensost, lingonsylt - they all have taken on an additional meaning, and this is also true for Swedish (and Nordic too) artists, scientists, actors, and writers. When Stieg Larsson was all the rage, I felt a certain pride, but then I read his first book and was embarrassed. Not that I had expected great literature, but it was not even a great thriller. More like a Swedish Dan Brown.

Fortunately, the Larsson wave did eventually peter out, but now we have another big wave of Scandinavian origin. It's of course the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose six-volume monster of an autobiography is compared to Marcel Proust's Recherche. Could this be true? It would be fantastic, but reading the reviews I couldn't help feeling what I felt when I read all those reviews of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. There was something funny about the whole thing, as if the new literary emperor had no clothes on, but nobody dared to come out and say it.

Until now.

William Deresiewicz, an American literary critic, has written a devastating review of My Struggle for The Nation magazine, where he also asks why so many authors and critics have fallen for Knausgaard's self-obsessed naïveté, taking it for honesty.

There is also the question of what constitutes the real and how to represent it. Knausgaard is invariably praised for his realism—indeed, his “hyperrealism.” “Come with me,” Smith says his book implies, “come into this life…. It might not be pretty—but this is life.” Is it really, though? I don’t mean that other people’s lives are more interesting than Knausgaard’s. I’m willing to stipulate that most of what we do, most of the time, is pretty banal. The issue is more about realism than reality. Is an exhaustive scan of the visual surface, rendered in colorless language, really the best way to represent “life”? I happen to be reading Updike at the moment. Here is his description of a young woman in an unfamiliar surrounding: “She is serious, a serious small-faced animal sniffing out her new lair.” We don’t just see her; we see into her. Here is Knausgaard’s description of a girl he liked at age 11, his first serious crush, as emotion-saturated an experience as one can imagine: “She wasn’t very tall and she was wearing a pink jacket, a light-blue skirt, and thin, white stockings. Her nose was small, her mouth large, and she had a little cleft in her chin.” And that’s the first time that he catches sight of her, no less. I’m almost ready to fall in love myself.
Is Knausgaard’s description more realistic than Updike’s? Does it bring us closer to “life”? Or does it rather leave us on the outside of life? The term “hyperrealism” derives from the visual arts, where it refers to paintings that are designed to look like photographs. To call writing like Knausgaard’s hyperrealistic, to enthrone it as the apotheosis of realism, is to cede reality to the camera. It is to surrender everything that makes literature distinct from the photographic and the televisual: its ability to tell us what things look like, not to the eye, but to the mind, to the heart. What they feel like; what they mean. The camera believes in surfaces, but the real is more than what we can see, more than what we can hear, smell, taste and touch.
The modernists were also realists, in the truest sense of the term. They were also searching for techniques to represent the real, only their conception of that entity was somewhat more expansive. It was Virginia Woolf who said, about the realism of her own day—so complete in its detail that if all its “figures were to come to life they would find themselves dressed down to the last button of their coats in the fashion of the hour”—that the one thing that escapes is life itself. Eugenides believes that Knausgaard “broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel.” Smith has said she needs his books “like crack.” Lethem calls him “a living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint.” How sad it is to imagine that some of our most prominent novelists look at My Struggle and think, That’s the book I wish I could have written. How depressing to suppose that just as modernism culminated in Joyce, Proust and Woolf, the literature of our own time has been leading up to… Knausgaard.

And as for comparing Knausgaard to Proust, Deresiewicz emphatically says no. Rather than a deep analysis of the self and memory, it is more of a reality TV show in print.

With its subject and size, My Struggle has invariably drawn comparisons to Proust’s Recherche, the great prose epic of the self remembered—comparisons the book itself does much to invite. But here are some things that the Recherche contains that Min Kamp does not: wit, satire, comedy, verbal and symbolic complexity, psychological penetration, sociological reach, the ability to render complicated situations, a genuine engagement with the subtleties of memory, the power to convey the slow unfolding of the self. And here is something that Proust did that Knausgaard did not: he took his time. The Recherche, only fractionally longer than Min Kamp, was labored at for thirteen years. About a page a day of finished prose appears to be the speed limit for a sustained work of competent literary fiction. You want to write shit? Write fast.
Smith sees Knausgaard’s attention to the world around him as a rebuke to today’s distractibility. But his work is all too typical of our technology-assisted culture. The novel strikes me as a giant selfie, a 3,600-page blogologue. Like mumblecore or reality television, it’s premised on the notion that all you need to do is point your camera at the world and shoot. Like all these genres and more, it tells us that breadth is preferable to depth, that art is best created in a spirit of hurried amateurism, that the only valid subject is the self. 

Having read half a dozen reviews, Deresiewicz rings true.

I suspect that if H.C. Andersen had lived, he would have seen Knausgaard as a Scandinavian househusband desperately seeking social status through self-obsessed “reality writing.”

To Knausgaard or not to Knausgaard?

I think not!  


William Deresiewicz: Why Has ‘My Struggle’ Been Anointed a Literary Masterpiece? (The Nation, June 2, 2014)
James Wood: Total Recall (The New Yorker, August 13, 2012)
Ben Lerner: Each Cornflake (The London Review of Books, May 22, 2014)
Rivka Galchen: Man With Many Qualities (New York Times, May 23, 2014)
Dwight Garner: The Bad Father, and Other Childhood Memories (New York Times, May 27, 2014)
Zadie Smith: Man vs. Corpse (New York Review of Books, December 5, 2013)

Two Englishmen Who Walked to Mughal India

June 2014

I'm reading about early travelers to India, and they were actually quite a few.
John Mildenhall (or Midnall) set out from Constantinople (Istanbul) to Aleppo in the March of 1600, and then left with an entourage of 600 people, heading for Lahore in today's Pakistan (then part of the Moghul Empire) where he arrived in 1603. He was a bit of a trickster and tried to rip off the British East India Company, which however manage to capture him and bring him to Isfahan in Iran, but let go (without his merchandise though). He returned to India, where he initially was successful.
"Mildenhall reached the court of the Mughal Emperor Akbar and held discussions with him. However, he was regarded as an outlaw by the British East India Company whose exports to the Levant he had diverted to India. Moreover, his journey was not sponsored by the Company. Hence, the British East India Company sent Sir William Hawkins to India in pursuit of Mildenhall and to declare all his dealings null and void." (Wikipedia)  He got sick and died in 1614. He was buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery in Agra, a city that is best known for the Taj Mahal.

Thomas Coryat (c. 1577 – 1617) was another long-distance walker from England. In 1608 he traveled around Europe, often by foot, and collected his experiences in a book with the ironic title Coryat's Crudities hastily gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France, Italy, &c (1611). Coryat was an educated man and managed to land a job "court jester" for Prince Henry, the oldest son of James I. The book was so well received and he wrote a second one the same year, Coryats Crambe, or his Coleworte twice Sodden.

In 1612 he walked to India by way of Greece, Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan, which in those days belonged to the Mughal Empire. He never had a chance to write a book about this his fantastic journey, because in 1617 he died of dysentery in Gujarat. His letters were however published in 1616 under the title Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul. In 1625, some more of his writings were published as part of Samuel Purchas's book Hakluytus Posthumus or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Lande Travells, by Englishmen and others.

Source: Wikipedia

Technologists Mad About the Future, or Just Mad?

Bryan Appleyard delivers a hard-hitting critique of technooptimism the New Statesman, reaching back to the 1950s and tracing the madness up through Google's Larry Page and Ray Kurzweil who Google hired as a resident futurologist of sorts.

The reality, as the revelations of the National Security Agency’s near-universal surveillance show, is that technology is just as likely to unleash hell as any other human enterprise. But the primary Ted faith is that the future is good simply because it is the future; not being the present or the past is seen as an intrinsic virtue. 

Bratton, when I spoke to him, described some of the futures on offer as “anthrocidal” – indeed, Kurzweil’s singularity is often celebrated as the start of a “post-human” future. We are the only species that actively pursues and celebrates the possibility of its own extinction.

Bratton was also very clear about the religiosity that lies behind Tedspeak. “The eschatological theme within all this is deep within the American discourse, a positive and negative eschatology,” he said. “There are a lot of right-wing Christians who are obsessed with the Mark of the Beast. It’s all about the Antichrist . . . Maybe it’s more of a California thing – this messianic articulation of the future is deep within my culture, so maybe it is not so unusual to me.”

Appleyeard's essay echoes of Evgeny Morozov's critique of irrational exuberance among the digiterati and is refreshing, even when it oversimplifies like in its critique of TED. Technology is always a two-edged sword, and so is TED. We love it for the global learning and debate it made possible, but we fear its potential to evolve into an opraesque secular mega-church.

Read the whole thing here:

Why futurologists are always wrong – and why we should be sceptical of techno-utopians
Bryan Appleyard is the author of “The Brain Is Wider Than the Sky: Why Simple Solutions Don’t Work in a Complex World”

Let There Be Hyperlinks, a World Wide Web of Hyperlinks, He Said

For my Swedish readers, here is a link to an interview I did with Tim Berners-Lee back in 1996.

Tim Berners-Lee: Webbens tillväxt var viktigare än vinsten (1996)

McCain Pops-Up and and Asks Obama to Show Putin All his Cards

Senator John McCain -- a Republican senator from Arizona, and predictable political pop-up doll that seldom misses a chance to call for our attention -- is "deeply concerned" that Putin's expansion could continue.

"President Obama said that Russia would face 'costs' if it intervened militarily in Ukraine," McCain said. "It is now essential for the President to articulate exactly what those costs will be and to take steps urgently to impose them." (CNN)

Yes, Mr. President, why didn't you put all your cards on the table immediately, and why haven't you evicted the Russian troops already?

Seriously, if Putin's aggression wasn't bad enough, now we will have to endure the Republican choir mocking the president, and we will hear calls for military mobilization and preparations for war from the neocons, who have felt rather lonely since W deflated. Not so sure though about the Tea Party. Will they embrace a new war even if it means more deficit spending (or more taxes)?

Have a Wonderful Day Writes Barnes & Noble’s Eliza, Who Is Not Quite "Her"

My wife Lisa bought me the audiobook version of Miguel de Cervantes’ wonderful novel Don Quixote for Christmas. The recording was based on Emily Grossman’s excellent translation, which I have wanted to listen to since I bought the softcover version in 2003. The price was rather steep, so I never bought it, but now I had it, and I began to listen to this wonderful story. The weeks passed and I listened to the story in the car almost every day. After about a month, something funny, or actually sad happened while listening on what turned out to be file 11 of the audio-download. The spoken book skips ahead, leaving the reader confused. At first I thought it was my mistake as a listener, but when I listened closely and compared the audio to the printed version I discovered that file 11 of the audiobook was messed up.

I wrote to Barnes & Noble and told them about the error, and a representative from Nook – the tablet area of B&N answered with an apologetic email where they explained that they would get in touch with the publisher of the audiobook and get back to me. A month later I remembered their unfulfilled promise and wrote back to Barnes & Noble. Here is a quote from my letter:

We had an exchange earlier this year, after my complaint that the file Part 11 contained an error as several pages of the book had been mixed up. The audio skips from line 11 on pg 281 in the printed book (Harper Collins,2003) to line 2 from the bottom on pg 297 and then the reading continues on line 12 on pg 281 and goes on the end of the chapter on pg 288.

On February 20, I got an email from Mark, a Customer Service Rep at B&N/NOOK support:

We understand that you are concerned about the status of fix for audio book. We are happy to help you. To protect your privacy and before we can send our answer to you, we need your order number, which you can find in the subject line of your order confirmation email or within the body of the email.

If you no longer have your order number, one of the following pieces of information will be helpful:
-The last 4 digits of the credit card used on the order, or
-Your billing address AND the title of one of your items. 

We also need the email address you used to place your order if it is different than the one you are using to respond to this email.  (If you reply to this email from another email address, please include your original inquiry.)

I searched my email folders, but couldn’t find the order number, so I provided them with the last four digits of the card they asked for, as well as the billing address and title of the book.
The next morning I received a new email from NOOK support.

Dear Hans,  

Warm greetings from Barnes & Noble!  

Thank you for writing back to us. We understand that there is a content issue with the Audio book which was sent to you as an eGift and you were informed that it would be investigated and fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience caused as this issue was not resolved upon your initial contacts with us and we will do our best to resolve this issue for you. In order for us to check your account about the Audio book we need the email address which was used to purchase the book as we did not find it in your account, or if you have the service request number of the initial interactios with us when you were informed about investigating on the issue. This would help us in checking the records and the status of the issue. Just to confirm, please visit the link below:
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/don-quixote-by-miguel-de-cervantes/1100547792?ean=2000003448296
Are you referring to the same book in the above webpage? We feel that this could be resolved best by contacting us through our phone support line or you could also write back to us with the required information.

Warm greetings ... that felt nice! But the sentence where Ethan, another Customer Service Representative, writes that “we understand that there is a content issue” reminds me of “talking” to Eliza, one of the first chatterbots, i.e. a computer program that mimics a human being. Joseph Weizenbaum's virtual psychotherapist Eliza took excerpts from a persons sentences and restated them in order to get the person to tell more. In her email, Ethan asks for my wife’s email address, and wants me to confirm if the book she provides a link to is the one I have complained despite the fact that I already told Mark that I was referring to Grossman’s translation.  I wrote back, supplied my wife’s email address, and explained the situation again. Later the same day, I got another email from NOOK support, this time from Vicky at Customer Support.

Thank you for writing back to us. We understand that you're still receiving incorrect Audio book. We apologize for the inconvenience caused. We are ready to issue a full refund for the Audio book, please get back to us with the confirmation.

By now I’m seriously suspecting that I am not communicating with persons at all, but with a sloppy chatterbot. The emails are ill written, but not the way a human errs, unless the writer behind the digital curtain is just cutting and pasting in a hurry.  “Vicky” also ignores my answer to “Ethan’s” question about the link he provided.  To be fair, I should say that I was offered to chat with "one of our Digital representatives for further assistance,” but my trust in the digital team had by now extended to “Chat Team,” so I kept writing to Mark, Ethan and Vicky, but my frustration was showing.

To: NOOK@BARNESANDNOBLE.COM
Sent:02/24/14 06:29:12 

Subject: RE: RE: RE: FW: Problem with Don Quixote audiobook

Hi Mark, Ethan and Vicky, Are you guys real or an algorithm? Or did NOOK support repurpose ELIZA for customer support?

You are rephrasing my previous emails, but it seems like you are not really reading them. I have given you the information you asked for, so you should be able to answer my question about the error in file 11 of the Don Quixote audiobook (the Emily Grossman translation). I was previously promised that you would investigate with the publisher, but you have asked about other editions and now offer a refund, something I never asked for. What’s going on?

It didn’t take long before I got an answer, this time from “Chase.”

RE: RE: RE: RE: FW: Problem with Don Quixote audiobook 

Dear Customer,  

Thank you for writing to us. We understand that there is a content issue with the Audio book which was sent to you as an eGift and you were informed that it would be investigated and fixed. We apologize for the inconvenience caused and will be glad to assist you with this issue.  

We have checked with your BN account and found that the credit card information status shows unverified. If you have further questions or inquiries, please feel free to contact us again and we would be glad to assist you.  

Wishing you a wonderful day!  

Sincerely,  

Chase  

Customer Service Representative - Digital Support  

**{SrvReqNo:[8007760501]} ** DO NOT DELETE**

To which I just answered:

Dear “Chase,” “Vicky,” “Ethan,” and “Mark,” or “Eliza” for short,

The content issue is the simple fact that you are selling a product with an error in the recording/editing that leaves the listener confused at one point. My reason for writing to you in the first place was concern that other customers may not realize that the confusion in file 11 of the audiobook is due to a production error, and that Barnes & Noble might be interested in correcting this error and provide a correction in the form of a replacement file, but I get no sense that you are interested in supporting your customers on this issue, which disappoints me as a long time B&N customer.   

As for the credit card, this is totally irrelevant as 1) I am not purchasing anything, 2) not asking for a credit, and 3) don’t store my account number in your system, but only enter it when I shop.    

Best, 

Hans    

PS. I wonder how many turns we are going to take in this waltz before a human is called in.

Addendum, February 25, 2014.

Today I got an answer from B&N that looks like it was written by a human being.

Dear Hans Sandberg,

We understand that you are concerned about the contents of the purchased NOOK book. We can see how that would annoy you and apologize for the inconvenience. As the issue is not resolved and our content management team is working to make necessary corrections on the file. We request that you wait for 2 more weeks or we would go ahead and refund for the order

It's like somebody finally took a step back, or maybe a supervisor stepped in, and said that we may need to actually read what the customer is writing. It's going to be interesting to see what will happen next. In the meantime, I have found the order number, which I will send to NOOK/B&N.

Could a Radical Surge Pull the Democrats Away from Centrism?

The political writer Michael Tomasky discusses the future of radical politics in an essay for the New York Review of Books that is nominally a review of Lane Kenworthy's book Social Democratic America (Oxford University Press), but really a discussion of the balance between centrist and radicals in the Democratic Party.

"There exists these days, among Washington policy intellectuals and advocates who tilt toward the left end of the accepted political spectrum, a certain measured optimism. It’s not about Obama, or any feeling that he might somehow, with his sagging poll numbers, be able to persuade congressional Republicans to fund, say, an infrastructure investment bank. Confidence is appropriately near zero on matters like that. Rather, it’s about the widely held perception that the Democratic Party, after years of, in the argot, “moving to the right,” is finally soft-shoeing its way leftward, away from economic centrism and toward a populism that the party as a whole has not embraced for years or even decades."

Will this leftward pressure make Hillary Clinton run as a populist (if she decides to run), rather than cozy up to her and her husband's Wall Street friends? Will she do a reverse Romney and cater to the left in the primaries to fight off Elizabeth Warren, only to turn rightwards once nominated?

Lane Kenworthy's key argument is that the move towards a more welfare oriented - social democratic if we use a more European term - society is a necessity, and he thinks that the Republican party eventually will come to there senses - somewhat. But Tomasky points out that if the Republican party nominates a more moderate candidate and he/she loses, then the extreme candidates may have a chance again.

It's Complicated, In Fact, It's so Complicated That You May Never Be Able to Understand

This essay (almost) blew my mind, and connects nicely (if nice is the word for a rather scary concept) with Samuel Arbesman's essay "It's Complicated" in Aeon Magazine. In the essay "The Algorithms of Our Lives" for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Lev Manovich raises fundamental questions about how we study (and can study) a reality that is becoming entangled in a world of dynamic and ever-changing data flows and updates. His focuses on the study of humanities, but the argument is much broader than that, and he sees implications for how research is done, what we measure or even can measure.

"We need to be able to record and analyze interactive experiences, following individual users as they navigate a website or play a video game; to study different players, as opposed to using only our own game-play as the basis for analysis; to watch visitors of an interactive installation as they explore the possibilities defined by the designer — possibilities that become actual events only when the visitors act on them. In other words, we need to figure out how to adequately represent 'software performances' as 'data.' "

Much of this kind of research is done within companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.com.

"Therefore, if you are one of the few social scientists working inside giants such as Facebook or Google, you have an amazing advantage over your colleagues in the academy. You can ask questions others can't. This could create a real divide in the future between academic and corporate researchers."

Not only that, much of this research is done by "machine-learning technology that often results in 'black box' solutions." If complexity makes understanding impossible, what does that mean for education? Could simulation games like SimCity be part of the answer? Here is a quote from the essay:

"For example, the computer game SimCity, a model of sorts, gives its users insights into how a city works. Before SimCity, few outside the realm of urban planning and civil engineering had a clear mental model of how cities worked, and none were able to twiddle the knobs of urban life to produce counterfactual outcomes. We probably still can’t do that at the level of complexity of an actual city, but those who play these types of games do have a better understanding of the general effects of their actions. We need to get better at ‘playing’ simulations of the technological world more generally. This could conceivably be geared towards the direction our educational system needs to move, teaching students how to play with something, examining its bounds and how it works, at least ‘sort of’."