Liminal states

From Moderator’s closing statement in The Economist’s debate on social networking technologies in education:

I also admired the interventions from JON PINCUS, who pointed out that supporters of the motion underestimated “the risks that the new technologies will in practice reinforce (rather than counter) existing negative biases and trends in the educational system”. He also thought that opponents of the motion were “generalising from very limited experience with social networking technologies—and don’t seem to view this as a problem.”

Both of these points strike me as useful, and true. I would only add that I suspect many supporters of the motion have been generalising from limited experience, too.

I don’t have a lot of experience with the Oxford Debate 2.0 format they’re using. Does this mean I get to say “hi mom”?

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After taking a couple of months fairly completely off (sleeping, doing some writing, and plenty of hanging out with Deborah), as January gets going I’m starting to re-engage, so I figured it’s about time for another “what’s up” post….

The biggest news is that I’m going to be starting a consulting gig in early February. Before we get to that, though, I want to put it in context: my top priorities for 2008 are working on Tales from the Net — we want to get a solid draft done and a contract in place by the end of the year — and training to to climb Mount Kilamanjaro in early 2009. Yes, really.

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All the Democratic candidates have shown a willingness to discuss LBGTIQ issues, and there are some very clear litmus tests. The Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy mandating discrimination against gays in the military and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) restricting marriage to heterosexual couples are great lenses for discovering the candidates’ views on LGB issues, and last fall’s craven decision by Democratic leadership (endorsed by the Human Rights Campaign) to advance a non-inclusive version of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act [ENDA] has added an equally good one on the trans front. So it’s unusually clear where they stand — and there are some significant differences.

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On the heels of posts by Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein yesterday, Kos has an excellent short post highlighting how Bill Clinton and Edwards both completely distorted Obama’s quote about Reagan as a transformative politician.

Huh. I didn’t see the part where Obama said the GOP’s ideas were “all the good” ones.

In fact, Obama isn’t saying anything that couldn’t come straight out of Crashing the Gate — that the GOP build a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy that used its think tanks to create ideas, a media machine to sell those ideas, and a modernized campaign operation to win elections on those ideas. Yes, the GOP was the party of ideas. They were crappy ideas. But they were “ideas”.

I can see why people such as Melissa McEwan at Shakesville are offended that Obama would refer to Reagan without explicitly criticizing his ideas (although as Greg Sargent points out on TPM, he has been a lot clearer in the past); and of course I can see why Clinton wouldn’t much care for the notion that Reagan was more transformational president than he was (although for what it’s worth, I agree 100%). However, that doesn’t give license to distort his statements — and this mischaracterization has been floating around both the progressive blogosphere and the mainstream media. Good on Kos for calling it out so clearly.

I summarized the Economist’s debate on social networks in education on the Tales from the Net blog, but I wanted to focus more on the race and gender aspects here on Liminal States. To start with, check out the participants and their roles. Superficially (and to the extent we can tell from the pictures and pronouns people use), it seems gender balanced: three male, four female. Look a little more closely though:

1. the “speakers”, presenting the arguments for and against, are both male.
2. the “moderator” (who frames the issue, provides commentary on both speakers’ arguments, and “will peruse all correspondence from the floor and raise points that are of particular interest or merit with the two speakers”) is also male.
3. the women are all “guest participants”

Marginalized much?

Things are even more extreme in the “age” dimension — in a comment in the debate, I asked whether there were plans to involve any current or recent students as guest participants. And although it’s much harder to infer reliably from photos and language, there appears to be even more extreme marginalization in the race dimension … it’s a mighty white-looking bunch of folks they’ve got.

One of the thing that makes this lack of diversity more acute is the Economist’s “Oxford 2.0” debate rules:

In our reconception, the proposition and the opposition are each represented by individual speakers—experts in their fields chosen by The Economist‘s staff to match the proposition at hand.

Because, after all, we wouldn’t want those (nudge-nudge) other perspectives to get equal standings with the guys hand-picked by The Economist’s staff.

WASHINGTON—In a stunning reversal of more than 200 years of conventional wisdom, failure—traditionally believed to be an unacceptable outcome for a wide range of tasks and goals—is now increasingly seen as a viable alternative to success, sources confirmed Tuesday.

And there are likely to be significant consequences:

Overturning one of America’s most cherished and oft-repeated aphorisms is expected to have far-reaching implications for the future of human ambition. Some predict that a majority of the U.S. populace will now opt out of its previous obligation to give it 110 percent, and, in the coming weeks and months, give as little as 45 percent. For underachieving Americans, that number is expected to drop to as low as 5 percent by March.

The Onion has the rest of the story.

Now that’s a story you don’t see every day!

A Texas Supreme Court justice and his wife were charged on Thursday in an arson fire that destroyed their suburban Houston home last June, the judge’s lawyer said.

But in a bizarre reversal, prosecutors plan on Friday to seek dismissal of the indictments against the justice…

It appeared, the lawyer said, that a grand jury had voted the indictments precipitously over the objection of prosecutors.

District Attorney Charles A. Rosenthal Jr., who has been fending off calls for his resignation over amorous e-mail messages to his executive secretary and other sexually explicit and racially charged messages, issued no statement.

Good thinking on the ‘no statement’ part.

Update on January 18: it’s not just any DA, it’s the guy who defended the Texas law that criminalized homosexuality in Lawrence v. Texas at the US Supreme Court!

It’s pretty much what you’d expect from the name: a blog with pictures and discussion of interesting, different, and strange maps.  As well as the Transit Maps of the World (the postcard for a new collection that was published in October by Penguin) and its peer the tree of life down the Tube, I really like combien de bises?. (appropriate number of kisses on the cheek for each French département), ancient Mississippi courses, Taiwanese-centric map of China, and  marzipan Europe. Oh, and for those who are Lost-obsessed, there’s a nice map of the island.

Boeing just announced another delay for the 787, its second or third so far depending on who you believe, so I wanted to go back to a story Kim Zetter reported a few weeks ago on the Wired Threat Level blog:

Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow passengers to access the plane’s control systems, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.

Wow. This is a really basic mistake — and a great example of the kinds of risks we discuss in the National Academies/CSTB report Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence? Of course one of the excellent things about the avionics certification process is that the FAA does an analysis of the “special conditions” for new designs and publishes its findings (in the Federal Register, no less; a good example of the transparency we call for). According to Kim’s article, they’ll deny certification to the 787 until this is fixed – and well they should.

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EFF’s 17th birthday party is tonight at 111 Minna in San Francisco.  Cleverly timed to coincide with Macworld, it features Adrian and the Mysterious D of Bootie fame, and is sponsored by Louis Rosetto’s (of Wired) new chocolate company TCHO.  And they’ll be beta-testing TCHO’s new dark chocolates!

[Hmm … DJs, mashups, chocolate.  What does this remind you of?]

A great cause, great DJs, in a great party space.  What’s not to like?

Happy birthday, EFF!

There are a couple of excellent posts up on why even though there are plausible explanations for the discrepancies in candidates’ results between hand-counted and machine-counted precincts, the recount in the New Hampshire primary is a good thing.

In Off the Bus on the Huffington Post, after giving some background on the vulnerabilities of the Diebold (now renamed Premier Election Services) voting machines used in New Hampshire, Kirsten Anderson puts things in a broader context:

The demand for a recount isn’t about the New Hampshire primary–anything short of a result showing Obama winning by more than say, 5% would still put the vote within the realm of a Clinton “comeback” from Iowa. It’s about the amount of distrust that voters have in the machine voting systems–machines which studies have shown to be not just hackable, but often poorly conceived and constructed.

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Boing Boing has stories on not one but two five-year-olds whose names are on the no-fly list and so get treated by the TSA as a security threat.  Cory Doctorow comments

You know, if you wanted to systematically discredit the idea of a Department of Homeland Security, if you wanted to make an utter mockery of aviation safety, you could not do a better job than this.

although I think that’s not giving the TSA enough credit: DHS continuing to employ the company that wrote the TSA web site filled with vulnerabilities asking for traveller’s social security numbers and other personal information is equally effective at discrediting themselves.