But this means that I run into the problem of some students dominating discussion, with others hanging waaaayy back. And as anyone who has been in the Q&A of any sociology talk on any level, an often-talker is not necessarily a thinking-talker. So how to get lots of high quality discussion across the board. This semester, instead of the normal guesstimating points for participation, I’m going with the League of Discussion Awesomeness. Being in the LoDA guarantees you full marks for participation. And so much more!

Initially, getting into the LoDA for a class means just speaking up in class. But then, a couple weeks in, I’m going to make getting into the LoDA something that requires nomination from your fellow students. When someone makes a ‘LoDA worthy’ comment, students can respond by putting their finger up against their nose. A floor of 3 votes (or something, I’ll calibrate as we go) to start, maybe with the number of votes going up as the semester progresses.

This (hopefully) will have three effects. One, it will create a positive incentive for participation – LoDA gets grades, accolades, maybe even a cash prize or something. Two, it will allow fellow students to have a hand in shaping participation. A big complaint at places like Barnard/Columbia is that everyone thinks they are smart and everyone else talks about trivial, personal, or not-on-point stuff. The voting for high quality discussion – a ‘smart’ comment – allows students to vote for quality over quantity. And three, it will send a signal to the high-quantity, low-quality discussants that their comments are not being received as godly wisdom. Hopefully, this will encourage students to participate more, and participate smarter.

I’m still working out the details, but does this sound like a viable plan? Am I missing something gigantic?

If you let me know, and I refer you, they give me more space (yay!), which would be nice. But I don’t even care if you are referred or not, just go try it.

And if that isn’t bad enough, I made the mistake of going to the Washington Post to see if I could, you know, find out what the substance was. Here is a screen cap of their current political page:

Good lord, what happened to the Washington Post? Tracking Palin’s mama grizzlies, indeed. Virtually nothing on this entire page is substantive. At the very bottom, EJ Donne asks ‘Can a nation remain a superpower if its internal politics are incorrigibly stupid?’ Can newspapers stay alive if this is the best they can do?

• A good story, well told. You should read Patrick Rothfuss’ The Name of the Wind. And read Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games series. Oh, and the first 20 minutes of Up. Boy, every time I see that I laugh, and cry.
• Anachronistic hobbies. Mine include writing letters (and sometimes writing them on my Hermes Featherweight typewriter!), baking bread, and listening to big band music (and sometimes even dancing a little Lindy Hop). But by all means, cultivate some orchids, do jigsaw puzzles (and if you love, love, love me, buy me a Stave puzzle), paint model airplanes, build a Wimshurst Machine.
• Stevie Wonder’s I Believe (When I Fall in Love).
• That moment when you realize that your friends are doing something specifically because they want to help you. And accepting that help in the spirit in which it is given.
• Unbridled enthusiasm. Find something at which you can direct some non-ironic, genuine passion. With full-on gusto.
• Singing out loud, preferably with a group.
• My wife. Never thought I would be in a long-term relationship, much less married. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the experience (see Enthusiasm, unbridled).
• Mondays. I love Mondays, with its whiff of blank page and anticipation. I know, I know, Fridays (Eddie from Ohio’s Blue Jeans makes the case). But I still love me some Mondays.
• Structure. Agency is for psychologists, economists, and suckers. Give me structure any day.

What do you love?

Oh, and explaining to a financial planner that you don’t really want or need insurance, for instance, feels about the same as explaining to your dentist that flossing is for suckers. You may be able to assert yourself, you may be better off for taking your own advice, but you’re certainly going to feel like a moron.

I look forward to writing more letters, writing more everything really, reading more, less TV, and more free stuff in Brooklyn.

Which leads me to Pepsi, Scienceblogs, John Gruber, and Apple’s iPhone 4.

Scienceblogs is a community of science blogs (duh), hosted by what was once Seed Magazine (and what is now Seed Media Group). In early July, 2010, Scienceblogs began hosting a new blog, called Food Frontiers:

As part of this partnership, we’ll hear from a wide range of experts on how the company is developing products rooted in rigorous, science-based nutrition standards to offer consumers more wholesome and enjoyable foods and beverages. The focus will be on innovations in science, nutrition and health policy. In addition to learning more about the transformation of PepsiCo’s product portfolio, we’ll be seeing some of the innovative ways it is planning to reduce its use of energy, water and packaging

(this quote comes from an article by Curtis Brainard at Columbia Journalism Review, the original announcement having been taken down at Scienceblogs and replaced with an apologetic note). But yes, the Scienceblog in question was not just sponsored by PepsiCo, but actually would be a science-based nutrition blog written by PepsiCo. You can catch up at Bora Zivkovic’s (who as a result of this actually left Scienceblogs) massive linkdump.

As a result of this move, in fact, Scienceblogs seems to be falling apart. I would like to take this opportunity to look at the practice of corporate blogging, corporate-sponsored blogging, and well, corporate blog-whoring, all with a jaundiced eye. Seed Media Group’s CEO Adam Bly wrote a confidential letter to contributors (helpfully posted by the Guardian):

We have also hosted blogs on SB from research-based companies like Shell, Dow, Schering-Plough, GE, Invitrogen, L’Oreal (in Germany), and now PepsiCo. I want to address the logic and strategy behind this.

ScienceBlogs has consistently maintained editorial excellence. We syndicate content to the New York Times, National Geographic, and are indexed by Google News. So respected is our platform that the US State Department recently published a post on 3.14. We should all be very proud of what we have achieved in four short years. We have ensured editorial excellence not by editing your posts or telling you what to write – a first principle unique to SB that we will never change – but by learning over four years how to create an environment that encourages your best. We believe that one vital aspect of this SB environment is its intentional diversity. You are all expert at different things, care passionately about other things, and come from different backgrounds and countries. We think this is a good thing and we think it help makes SB tick for our readers. We also think that you cannot have a real conversation about science and its place and role in society unless you pursue and protect this diversity. It’s why we believe that all serious voices in science should have a seat at the table (and we’ve been consistent about what’s serious and what’s fringe or worse).

We think the conversation should include scientists from academia and government; we also think it should include scientists from industry. Because industry is increasingly the interface between science and society. It is our hope that the Xeroxes and Bell Labs of the future will have a real presence on SB – that they will learn from our readers and we will learn from them. That they will break stories on SB and engage our readers in the issues that concern them. The bloggers who blog on ‘corporate blogs’ on SB are necessarily credentialed scientists (we make sure of that), in some cases highly credentialed scientists who have published extensively in peer-reviewed journals. The fact that they work at a profit-making company does not automatically disqualify their science in our mind. And frankly, nor does it disqualify them in the eyes of the Nobel Prize Committee either.

Let me address PepsiCo in particular. Of course we recognize – and of course so does PepsiCo! – that they’ve made a lot of money selling soft drinks and chips. But they also recognize that their future will be troublesome and time-limited without addressing the real and connected issues of obesity and under-nutrition in the world. PepsiCo employs thousands of scientists working on these problems and they are led by some very serious scientists – eg. their chief scientist worked at the Mayo Clinic and serves on the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences. (PepsiCo is the same place that makes Tropicana and Quaker Oatmeal.)

PepsiCo comes off like Nick Naylor in Thank you for Smoking: Though these lobbyists would like to see Cancer Boy die to prove their point, it is in Tobacco’s best interests that he LIVES, to continue using our product!

Seriously, read that whole memo. Basically the CEO says that 1) there are scientists at for-profit companies; 2) lots of places including the New Yorker and Atlantic give prime access to companies who pay for it; and 3) we need the money.

Now, there is a relatively interesting discussion here to be made about the ways that capitalism intersects with opinion, and the long, historic dependency of news media on paid advertisement. But I would also strongly suggest that for-profit actors are now (and perhaps have always) mobilized the form of more ‘objective’ outlets in order make more credible claims. For me, at its most base level, it comes down to this:

People are more inclined to believe you if they see you as an impartial observer than if they see you as a partial advocate. If you are on the corporate (or political) payroll, you can not be trusted and your opinion is suspect. Impartiality doesn’t even quite get at this, though. Maybe transparent. But not quite, since transparent can be easily dismissed as obviously unable to form a helpful opinion. Fair-minded. That’s more what I am talking about.

This is the fact on which 99% of the complaints and justifications are based. PepsiCo can not be trusted to speak on science issues because they can not be believed to be fair-minded.

And here is where John Gruber comes in. Recently, Apple has had some problems with its recently released iPhone 4. Apparently, its antenna is constructed in such a way that holding it in a particular way attenuates the signal. Consumer Reports called this a design defect in one place and an antenna problem in another. The NYT article calls it a ‘design flaw’.

Apple held a press conference to push back against these criticisms, where Steve Jobs personally spoke and answered questions about the phone’s antenna, its performance against other phones, and Apple’s remedy for the problem (giving away phone cases to physically prevent users from bridging the antenna gap and triggering the loss of signal).

Gruber runs a (wonderful) blog called Daring Fireball, where he both curates and commentates on the internet, with a strong preference for Apple products and a clearly insider-y take on all things Apple. He is not on the payroll, which he jokingly comments about. But still, he seems to have been one of a members of the press who got to tour Apple’s Antenna Testing Lab after the press conference (I don’t know him, and I don’t know this for certain. But that first ‘jokingly’ link notes at the end that some members of the press got to go, the second notes that ‘this is the lab a few of us got to tour in person’).

And here’s the thing. During the press conference, Jobs was at pains to show that other phones had a comparable flaw, and that this was a ‘weak spot’. Early on, Gruber uses quotes around “weak spot”, noting that it is Apple’s parlance, or that it is “Jobs’s term for the infamous lower-left gap in the antenna frame”.

But then a funny thing happens. After a slew of posts about other manufacturers’ phones (and running snide commentary about their lack of attention, as well as how his checks from Apple should keep rolling in), Gruber comes to some conclusions, an Antennagate Bottom Line. Here, he begins:

What is not in dispute: the iPhone 4 antenna has a weak spot in the lower-left corner of the frame, marked by the black line in the frame. When covered by your hand, this antenna suffers from attenuation. This is much like other smartphones.

After running through the evidence and opinion, including Apple’s $100 million dollar remediation effort for something Gruber himself considers a fairly minor trade-off for a great phone, he concludes:

Anyway, bottom line on the iPhone 4 antenna: it has a weak spot but there’s no evidence that it’s a significant, let alone catastrophic, problem in practice. It’s telling that the criticism surrounding this issue has shifted, quickly, from speculation about a technical defect in the iPhone 4 hardware to criticism over the tone of Apple’s response to it.

What certainly could be described as a design flaw, a design defect, or an antenna problem is magically transformed into a weak spot. A weak spot implies a small flaw in an otherwise ‘working’ device; a design flaw implies a ‘broken’ device. And the truth of it is, I do not know which of these is the case here (or both, depending on you, your network, your other options, your disposition towards Apple, etc). But I do know that Apple is deeply, deeply invested in it being the former. “Weak spot”, turns into weak spot, turns into insignificant problem.

It is equally apparent to me that by co-opting Gruber and other journalists, bloggers, and opinion makers, whose credibility precisely rests on their reputation as unbiased observers, Apple is doing just what PepsiCo was doing when it signed on to create a Scienceblog. And of course Gruber knows this. The whole sarcastic schtick about his payola checks suggests that he knows that if he really was on the Apple payroll, his opinions would simply. matter. less.

I’m not really sure what to do with this problem. But in an era of increasing information-by-the-many, it’s one that is likely to get much worse before it gets much better.

I’m also looking forward to reading Scott Turow’s follow-up(!) to Presumed Innocent, Innocent. And China Mieville’s forthcoming book, which may have already forthcome across the pond, Kraken.

And I am looking forward to getting my Western on, in Red Dead Redemption.

And that will account for my spare time. The rest of the time, I will be working diligently on the deadlines I can not for the life of me seem to hit on time. And some changes that I hope to mondo the beyondo out of.

But this past week I went to change a delivery date, since I knew I wasn’t going to be around when the package would be delivered. And UPS now is charging $4 online (or $6 to talk to a friendly customer service person!) to have them delay delivery for one day. Apparently, this new fee kicked in sometime in July of this year.

Ticky-tack fees for your customers make money for companies, but it is the biggest for-shit customer service ploy you can pull. So today I want to officially mark the day when UPS went from being a wonderful customer experience to being one step closer to the airline industry. For $4. Kudos to you, fucking UPS. Kudos to you.

The flights. Generally ok, though we got caught by Thanksgiving rush/weather craziness over Charlotte, NC (we left on Thurs at dawn, due to insane price-gouging on Wed-Sun airline ticket pricing). Apparently, it was nice up the entire Eastern Seaboard, but fog over Charlotte shut down that airport. We diverted to Greenville/Spartenburg, SC, and sat on the runway while they refueled us. Three and a half hours later than expected, we arrived at the Levin family gathering. Completely stressed out, though in time for dinner. But just.

The airline fees. I know this has been noted many many times, but the ticky-tack price fees that airlines charge are just hard to fathom. What a short-term fix for a long-term structural problem. In the case of USAirways, $20 per bag. $25 if you don’t check it online. And on their helpful pre-check-in online, they tried to charge us $10 each to choose a seat assignment. Not a great one, mind you. Any seat assignment. When I declined at multiple points (Wanna seat? $10. What about now? $10), the system finally gave up and assigned us the exit row seat that it had tried moments earlier to sell us for $20 each. Niiice.

The food. Delicious. Nuff said, thanks mom! I contributed Grandma Sylvia’s famous Mondel bread, the Jewish biscotti. Ask me for the recipe sometime, it’s delicious.

The kin-work. For the most part good, I had an opportunity to spend quality time with two brothers and a parent (out of 3 brothers, and 2 parents). The usually drunk-at-Thanksgiving brother got drunk the night after, but didn’t get thrown out of a bar or into any fights with sister-in-law. On the other hand, the family tradition of the kids going out for a long, late drink and bonding session didn’t happen this year. Alas.

The fat. (plate of Thanksgiving dinner + matzo ball soup + salad + pumpkin pie + chocolate chip cookies) + (hotel breakfast + more cookies + soup + giant, needlessly sauced up fish + ice cream) – 5-mile run – 2 hours tennis + (hotel breakfast + more cookies + soup + fajitas + ice cream) – basketball + beer = 3-4 pounds gained.

The prison toilet. My mother, bless her soul, purchased a sleek, modern, gorgeous, stainless steel toilet for the guest bathroom at their house. Excuse the imagery here, but there is no possible way to stand up and pee in that toilet without noticeably splashing the bowl. With father + 4 male children + 3 male grandchildren, this is something that is a massively funny joke to 8 of us and completely over the head of my mother.

Back and back to work. Hope all yours were as good or better than mine.

For people who don’t live in NYC, the joke is about Alec Baldwin having bedbugs and finding himself an outcast, finally reduced to asking for help on the subway. Which was kind of funny.

But what makes it brilliant is this ending. Like almost every New Yorker not named Michael Bloomberg, I get asked for money pretty much everyday. If not everyday, every few days. I can say that in 6 years of living here, I’ve never gone a full week without someone on the subway or street, performing, begging, shouting, but somehow asking me for money. Dealing personally (do you ignore? give food? give money? get involved?) with dramatic inequality and homelessness is simply part of living in an urban environment.

And in the constellation of homeless people on the subway, these guys are absolutely perfect. They are real guys, and this is indeed the song they sing all the time. You cannot help but smile when these guys are singing, and somehow this hits the incredibly sweet spot at the intersection of parody, comedy, and reality. When Baldwin takes a swig and gets out the bag, it is just so damn funny. Thank you for this, 30 Rock writers!