Online booksellers

Here's a drawback with online booksellers: flawed databases. Case in point: According to Barnes and Noble's website, I'm co-author of "Current Perspectives on Sex Crimes", which I'm sure is a top notch volume in its field, but not my area of expertise and not a publication of mine. Note the fact that my name is not on the cover of the book, which is displayed on the page. Have I sent a correction in to Barnes and Noble? Twice (following proper channels as well; there's an author's feedback section), and have been told it will be fixed. Third time's the charm? Sigh.

Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide

Published by Blackwell. Should be out in April.
Links to Amazon and Barnes and Noble. These sites only list the hardback, but it will be in paperback as well. Note the link to Blackwell.

By the way, the cover photograph is one I took in Guangzhou back in January, 2001. I'm very pleased they used it.

Dad & I

Leading Surveillance Societies

Privacy International has just released its rankings of surveillance societies around the world, based on issues of privacy. The link is here. The opening map is interesting and useful. The US, UK, Russia, and China are all in Black, indicating "Endemic Surveillance Societies."

I was to teach a class in International Communication this Spring, but not enough enrolled, so we pulled the plug on it and I'm running my surveillance, film, and culture class again. Wanted to teach so many different films, but no time. Wanted to teach Cache, for example. But at least will teach Lives of Others.

Been through Sky Harbor airport three times in the last couple of months and haven't been backscattered yet.

And speaking of leading surveillance societies, it looks like they're really planning on enforcing the REAL ID Act and beefing up requirements for US driver's licenses, to the point where if a state doesn't comply that those licenses will not be adequate for citizens to pass security at airports, government buildings, etc. (or at least, not without additional scrutiny). Link to Arizona Republic article here.

John MacDonald Wise

JOHN MACDONALD WISE

April 24, 1935—December 26, 2007



John MacDonald Wise passed away peacefully on December 26, 2007, at the age of 72, after a mercifully brief struggle with ALS. The youngest son of George and Ruby Wise, he was born on April 24, 1935, in Pasadena, California. He graduated from Pasadena College in 1957. As a Danforth Scholar, he attended the University of Chicago, receiving his M.A. in Sociology. John and his wife Donna served as volunteers in Bangladesh with the American Friends Service Committee. John joined the humanitarian aid organization CARE in 1963, serving in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Turkey, Jordan, India, and Korea. He spent the final years of his career working for Krause Milling Company (in the Philippines and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and then ADM (in Overland Park, Kansas) in food production and distribution. Upon retirement, he relocated to Woodland, California.



John was a man of compassion and humor. He was a talented artist and photographer, a scholar, an avid reader, a dedicated gardener, and--according to his many friends--the world’s best listener. He was endlessly interested in people, their ways of life, and their work. A highpoint of his career was accompanying Senator Edward Kennedy as a representative of the U.S. food industry on a fact-finding mission to famine-stricken Ethiopia and the Sudan in 1984.



He is survived by wife of 47 years, Donna; daughter Tracy of Appleton, Wisconsin; son and daughter-in-law Greg and Elise and their two children, Brennen and Catherine of Phoenix, Arizona; best friends Bob Salley and Warren Wells; older siblings Celia Teerink, Bill Wise, George Wise, and Harriet Meredith; and many nephews and nieces. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, January 5, 2:00 p.m. at Woodland United Methodist Church (212 Second Street, Woodland, CA, 530/662-6274). In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to ALS research at: UCSF Foundation, c/o Eden Jacoby, Dept. of Neurology, 44 Montgomery Street, Suite 2200, San Francisco, CA 94104.

Cultural Globalization: A User's Guide

...is off to the press (Blackwell). Proofs and index done.

And now, to that stack of grading I've been putting off.

New books

All from Peter Lang, publishers:

Adrian Mackenzie, Cutting Code: Software and Sociality. (Adrian was one of the other lecturers at the Deleuze seminar in Copenhagen last May--see previous posts--and I'm really looking forward to reading this)

Michele A. Willson, Technically Together: Rethinking Community within Techno-Society. (within all this recent talk of social networks, it was intriguing that someone's still talking about community)

Sharon Kleinman (ed) Displacing Place: Mobile Communication in the Twenty-First Century. (another in the rapidly proliferating genre of mobile phone collections--see earlier posts on books).

Apologies for lack of links to either the publisher's website or previous posts. But it's late.

Room 8

Was told of this video up on YouTube depicting the horrors of Room 8, the basement suite of offices in Lincoln Hall at the University of Illinois where the Speech Communication grad students are given offices (and have been since at least the 1970s if not earlier). Spent 6 years down there myself. You don't get an establishing shot of the waiting TA's office, but from my recollection and the orientation of the desk and its background, I'd swear that was my desk and office space (in 8F I think). I remember dragging that desk in from another office one weekend when no one was around (after the semester had ended). Either the desk was originally John Erni's, or that spot in the office had been John's, I don't quite recall. Anyway.

New Times arrests/subpoena

Ineresting news about the arrest of executive editors of the Phoenix New Times for disclosing grand jury details. What's chilling is the scope of the subpoena the editors were discussing, which seeks information on anyone who accessed the New Times online since 2004. Here's two links: New York Times and Arizona Republic. The latter has more details on the subpoena.

-------------------
UPDATE:
Charges dropped, special prosecutor fired. Here's the AZ Republic.

Backscatter begins

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/1011bodyscans.html

hmmm... pat down or intimate x-ray?

Implantable Chips

Apparently studies have shown that implantable microchips caused cancer in lab rats (according to an AP article). This doesn't mean that they cause cancer in humans, but it is, as a scientist puts it in the article, troubling. The chips are part of a fairly common vision of future interactive convenience: your ID, credit card, medical history, etc. is just carried with you under the skin: wave your arm to access, tap the card reader to pay... This does go to show how much of our interactive surveillance society is (actually or potentially) pretty toxic, and not just to privacy, dignity, and human rights, but environmentally and physically as well (see my earlier post on High Tech Trash from last year).

The article's interesting in other respects: why the FDA didn't note these studies when it approved the devices for use in humans, whether the FDA was aware of this research, why the AMA didn't mention or know of the studies before publicly supporting the technology, and the curious coincidence of Tommy Thompson, who was head of Health and Human Services (which oversees the FDA) when the chips were approved, resigned two weeks after the approval, and within six months was on the Board of VeriChip Corp. which makes the devices (he denies having any role in the approval or knowledge of the company before his resignation and the FDA confirms that he had no role in the decision process).

IKEA hacking

Saw this via an article in the NYT: IKEA hacking, re-using or repurposing IKEA items. And the article says, it's about looking at IKEA stuff as raw material rather than as a finished product.

Pronounced Eye-KEE-uh in the US, Eye-KAY-uh elsewhere, right?

Books

New books came over my threshold:

Mark Andrejevic (2007) iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era. University Press of Kansas.

and

David Lyon (2007) Surveillance Studies: An Overview. Polity.

Both of which look fantastic.

And I managed to find a used copy of the latest in this series by this Rowling person. Will get to it eventually. Right now it's sitting on top of the Pynchon book next to the bed (stacked together they nearly block out the light from the bedside lamp).

Finished The World Without Us, which I found a fascinating read. Much of the general point we've heard before in many ways: humans environmental impact, the devastation (actual and potential) of nuclear materials, petrochemicals, plastics, and so on. It just frames these matters in an intriguing way and got me thinking about things that I probably knew but was willingly ignoring, like the fact that plastic--any plastic--is not going away at all ever unless burned. That's been going through my head every time I toss a plastic yogurt cup (of a type which is nonrecyclable around here) into the trash, or a piece of cling-wrap, or get groceries in plastic bags (and today I bought a dozen free-range eggs, packaged without irony in double layers of plastic). Again, not a new issue, but the book re-presents these old issues through such an interesting question that at least it's got me thinking more. Between that and watching Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" a few months ago--I remember reading Roger Ebert's review of the film where he said that after seeing the film he went home and started turning out all his lights. I've been doing that, too. Lights off unless an area's being used, and everything unplugged unless in use.

Anyway, for the last thing: sometime over the summer I finished Horst and Miller's Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication, which I really liked. when I mentioned it in this blog last Spring I was worried about all the "impact" talk on the back cover (the impact of the cell phone on the poor in Jamaica, etc.). And it shows up in the book at the very beginning and then again at the end where they are connecting their results with the broader funded study of which they are a part, which made me think that this problematic "impact" language was an artifact of the funded project (can't get funding unless you're showing effects) and it creeps back into their language when they have to articulate it back with the broader project. But for a most part they write quite subtly about communication practices and cell phones (and certainly not treating the latter as if they just fell out of the sky). The cell phone becomes a part of a number of ongoing cultural practices (to the benefit of some and detriment of others, and benefit and detriment at the same time to some) and is taken up within the context of these practices

Antelope Canyon

Photos I took last month on a trip up to Antelope Canyon with my Dad.

August

August already?

Just finished a big manuscript so now have a brief bit of time to get caught up on some reading before the semester starts in earnest. Still creeping through Pynchon's "Against the Day" and have half an eye out for a used copy of the 7th book in a certain series.



And just started Alan Weisman's very readable "The World Without Us," which I'm really looking forward to getting further in. The book is a "thought experiment" about what would happen to the planet if humans suddenly disappeared one day: how would things fall apart, what would survive, what would regrow? Parts of the book are like a disaster movie, describing how buildings, bridges, roads fall apart due to the force of water, ice, or rust. How the New York subways would flood as soon as the pumps shut off. And it follows in great detail this story of destruction down to the molecular level (how ice and rust can tear structures apart). All this has a certain fascination; if humans disappear, what that we've built lasts the longest? which is gone the quickest? [The section on New York's bridges was going through my mind when I heard about the tragic Minneapolis bridge collapse]. And what of the environment, plants, and animals? A great deal of the book is really about the relation of humans to their environment from prehistoric times to today, living in balance with some animals and wiping out herds of others (including 5 species of giant ground sloths, some the size of modern elephants, which once roamed North America). Plants and animals which depend on humans to survive (most crops, ornamental flowers, even apple trees, to dogs, rats, and roaches) don't last long post-human (he gives cats a decent chance). I've just finished the chapter on plastics, covering how and why plastics really don't break down (it just gets chopped smaller and smaller until plastic particles invade every organism) to how there's a 10 million square mile swirling swath of the Pacific that is basically covered in plastic debris. Looks like the next chapter's about oil. Sobering stuff. There's also fascinating glimpses of places where humans have vacated (like the Korean DMZ; the area around Chernobyl, and others) and how plants and animals reclaim that land (and which plants and animals do so). So it's about how humans have impacted the planet, but also about how and why plants and animals move and transform and compete. It draws on engineering, anthropology, ecology and a host of other fields. Interesting stuff.

Faye Wong

Faye Wong, in a rather goth looking video.
Gotta love YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=843cUo13nME

And now, back to writing (about Faye Wong, actually, among other things)

weather

Dang.

bit more on backscatter

A short article by Torin Monahan on a german surveillance studies blog about backscatter technologies at the Phoenix airport.

headphones

I mentioned in my post on my trip to Copenhagen (and I really should post about the rest of the trip and seminar, which was wonderful) that I had used some noise cancelling headphones (by Maxell) and they made a difference in the journey. There's a review article on them in the NY Times. The kind I have (the cheap ones, roughly equivalent of the JVC, pretty compact but comfortable) don't work as well as the Bose et al, but they certainly work better than not having noise cancelling headphones.

Requiem for a Scotty

Our 14 year-old Scottish terrier, Edmund Blackadder, passed this week. He had been struggling with a mouth tumor for the last 10 months. He had a pretty full life; born in Lincoln, Illinois, as part of a litter of 9 pups, he enjoyed chasing squirrels in Urbana, taking long walks in South Carolina and Georgia, and being taunted by neighbor cats in Phoenix. We often called him the Worlds Largest Scottish Terrier since he usually weighed in at 44 pounds (breed standard is 24): he wasn’t fat, just big. He was also prone to anxiety problems and allergy problems and spent most of his life as a vegetarian.

Toyoharu Kojima writes (in Tetsu Yamazaki’s Legacy of the Dog [1995, Chronicle Books) about Scotties that “The breed can be extremely stubborn and proud, as though it were a much larger dog. Because of this, the Scottish terrier can only live with someone who truly loves it and is tolerant of its faults.” Ain’t that the truth. They are very independent and stand-offish, only reluctantly submitting to gestures of affection (like scratches or ear rubs) and then skittering away as if embarrassed at their weakness (but glancing back in the corner of their eye, in a very characteristic look, to see what’s coming). This is not to say that they are not affectionate, just in their own Scotty way. Having a Scotty is a unique experience, much more particular and idiosyncratic than just having a dog. It’s much like having a cat, in that you get the feeling that they deign to live with you, or rather it should be more properly put that you live with them rather than them living with you; they will be affectionate, but purely on their terms. It’s a Scotty contradiction: they like to be near you, will follow you around the house, but at a distance. They can be quite playful, full of energy (they are terriers, after all), and keep that puppy energy for years. And Edmund was like that, though he also had a certain gravitas to him which always made him seem an older dog. But he loved the snow in Illinois, playing in the waters of Lake Michigan, and having a good sniff around the block.

A friend from grad school, Linda, once told me a story about the Scotty she had growing up who once ate the book, How to Train Your Scottish Terrier. That sort of sums up the breed. It also brings up the fact that, in particular, Edmund liked the taste of hardbound books and over the years made his way through volumes on Georgia O’Keefe, Artificial Life, a Jasper Fforde mystery, a volume on the DSM, and a self-help book, as well as others. They have large mouths and like to chew on things. Pet toys designed to last months if not years are demolished in minutes.

It’s hard to find an adjective which captures Edmund (feisty, ornery, goofy, psychotic, loud, loyal, determined, headstrong, demanding, playful, and sweet, all come to mind). In any case, Mr. Ed will be sorely missed; he was truly loved.