This is a programmatic paper, marking out two directions in which the study of social media can contribute to broader problems of social science: understanding cultural evolution and understanding collective cognition. Under the first heading, I discuss some difficulties with the usual, adaptationist explanations of cultural phenomena, alternative explanations involving network diffusion effects, and some ways these could be tested using social-media data. Under the second I describe some of the ways in which social media could be used to study how the social organization of an epistemic community supports its collective cognitive performance.

Social Media as Windows on the Social Life of the Mind

As if on cue, Bob Herbert's latest column picks up on the topic which I attributed to the Automatic Bob Herbert only a week ago. (Have you seen Eastern Promises yet?)

In prior eras, the slave trade was conducted openly, with ads prominently posted and the slaves paraded and inspected like animals, often at public auctions. Today’s sex traffickers, the heirs to that tradition, try to keep their activities hidden, although the rest of the sex trade, the sale of the women’s services, is advertised on a scale that can only be characterized as colossal.

As a society, we’re repelled by the slavery of old. But the wholesale transport of women and girls across international borders and around the U.S. — to serve as prostitutes under conditions that in most cases are coercive at best — stirs very little outrage.

Perhaps Bob Herbert reads MemeStreams ... ?

Today’s Hidden Slave Trade

From the Automatic Bob Herbert Department:

What is clear is that the conditions surrounding trafficked women and children include all the classic elements traditionally associated with slavery: abduction, false promises, transportation to a strange place, loss of freedom, abuse, violence, and deprivation. Those involved are isolated, controlled by various emotional and physical techniques, made dependent on drugs and alcohol, duped and terrorized into submission. Smuggling of migrants, with which trafficking is too often confused, is fundamentally different: smuggled people have consented to travel, and when they reach their destinations they expect to be free; the trafficked, even if they have initially consented, remain victims of continuing exploitation at the hands of their traffickers. Sold on from owner to owner in a long cycle of abuse, women make excellent commodities: the profits are immense, the chances of being caught small, the penalties derisory, and the women can also be forced to pay back the costs incurred in their purchase and transport, their supposed "debt" a further device to enslave them. A CIA report has estimated that traffickers earn an average of $250,000 for each trafficked woman. But there is no reliable information about how much is paid out at each stage on the long road from enticement to prostitution, who gets what cut, and how much is paid to the men and women who act as "chaperones" and "couriers" along the way.

Have you seen Eastern Promises? How about Season 2 of The Wire?

Women and Children for Sale

What the Beats were about. By Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America.

Nostalgia is part of the appeal of “On the Road” today, but it was also part of its appeal in 1957. For it is not a book about the nineteen-fifties. It’s a book about the nineteen-forties. In 1947, when Kerouac began his travels, there were three million miles of intercity roads in the United States and thirty-eight million registered vehicles. When “On the Road” came out, there was roughly the same amount of highway, but there were thirty million more cars and trucks. And the construction of the federal highway system, which had been planned since 1944, was under way. The interstates changed the phenomenology of driving. Kerouac’s original plan, in 1947, was to hitchhike across the country on Route 6, which begins at the tip of Cape Cod. Today, although there is a sign in Provincetown that reads “Bishop, CA., 3205 miles,” few people would dream of taking that road even as far as Rhode Island. They would get on the inter-state. And they wouldn’t think of getting there fast, either. For although there are about a million more miles of road in the United States today than there were in 1947 (there are also two more states), two hundred million more vehicles are registered to drive on them. There is little romance left in long car rides.

In fact, the characters in “On the Road” spend as short a time on the road as they can. They’re not interested in exploring rural or small-town America. Speed is essential. The men rarely even have time to chase after the women they run into, because they’re always in a hurry to get to a city ...

The bits and pieces of America that the book captures, therefore, are snapshots taken on the run, glimpses from the window of a speeding car. And they are carefully selected to represent a way of life that is coming to an end in the postwar boom, a way of life before televisions and washing machines and fast food, when millions of people lived patched-together existences and men wandered the country —— “ramblin’ round,” in the Guthrie song —— following the seasons in search of work. Robert Frank’s photographs in “The Americans,” taken between 1955 and 1956 and published in Paris in 1958 and in the United States a year later, with an introduction by Kerouac, held the same interest: they are pictures of a world not yet made plump and uniform by postwar affluence and consumerism.

Menand is awesome. It's one golden paragraph after another. As Jeff Williams said recently in the Chronicle, "one can't expect everyone to write as well as Louis Menand."

Drive, He Wrote

Through the Looking Glass:

Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. eBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. eBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

"For the Love of God":

It's said that the only thing an auction record proves is the existence of two dumb rich guys, competing to pay more for something than anyone else on the planet has ever thought it was worth.

Johnny Cash's dream:

I'm gonna kneel and pray everyday
Lest I should become vain along the way
I'm just an old chunk of coal, now Lord
But I'm gonna be a diamond some day
...
I'm gonna be the World's best friend
I'm gonna go around shaking everybody's hand
Hey, I'm gonna be the cotton-pickin' Rage of the Age
I'm gonna be a diamond some day

The impossible dream:

Seeing my dream fade away, I did what any mature person does when faced with an uncomfortable reality: Search out someone who will tell you what you want to hear.

Math: Gift from God or Work of Man?

Consider first a Baptist school in Texas whose description of a geometry course begins:

Students will examine the nature of God as they progress in their understanding of mathematics. Students will understand the absolute consistency of mathematical principles and know that God was the inventor of that consistency. They will see God's nature revealed in the order and precision as they review foundational concepts while being able to demonstrate geometric thinking and spatial reasoning. The study of the basics of geometry through making and testing conjectures regarding mathematical and real-world patterns will allow the students to understand the absolute consistency of God as seen in the geometric principles he created.

Defender of the Faith?

About two-thirds of the way into “Moses and Monotheism”, Freud makes a point that is simple and rather profound — the sort of point that Freud at his best excels in making. Judaism’s distinction as a faith, he says, comes from its commitment to belief in an invisible God, and from this commitment, many consequential things follow. Freud argues that taking God i... [ Read More (0.6k in body) ]

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Following the thread:

The (somewhat dubious) prime symbol of academic knowledge, and more-or-less exclusively masculine educational attainments, was the Classical languages Greek and Latin, to which a great deal of time was devoted in "genteel" boys' education, but which few women studied.

The sheer amount of sewing done by gentlewomen in those days sometimes takes us moderns aback, but it would probably generally be a mistake to view it either as merely constant joyless toiling, or as young ladies turning out highly embroidered ornamental knicknacks to show off their elegant but meaningless accomplishments. Sewing was something to do (during the long hours at home) that often had great practical utility, and that wasn't greatly mentally taxing, and could be done sitting down while engaging in light conversation, or listening to a novel being read.

For women of the "genteel" classes the goal of non-domestic education was thus often the acquisition of "accomplishments", such as the ability to draw, sing, play music, or speak modern (i.e. non-Classical) languages (generally French and Italian). Though it was not usually stated with such open cynicism, the purpose of such accomplishments was often only to attract a husband; so that these skills then tended to be neglected after marriage.

Time of day calling it quits at AT&T

Acidus had a project mentioned offhandedly on the Daily Show a few months ago but Virgil has seriously raised the bar by actually getting his picture on the Colbert report! We now have a new standard for leetness around here. If you haven't been personally denounced by Steven Colbert, you just aren't that important...

WikiScanner on the Colbert Report

In every age, taboo questions raise our blood pressure and threaten moral panic. But we cannot be afraid to answer them.

In defense of dangerous ideas

This episode is awesome. Behold the power of radio.

Stories of summer camp. People who love camp say that non-camp people simply don't understand what's so amazing about camp. In this program, we attempt to bridge the gap of misunderstanding between camp people and non-camp people.

Episode 109: Notes on Camp | This American Life

Decius wrote:

These articles are short and to the point. ... Unfortunately, many require a subscription to read in full.

I was able to locate alternate sources for the full text of some articles that were walled off at the magazine's web site. Along the way I also found a few other items of potential interest.

A Patently Simple Idea By Sebastian Mallaby

Fighting Poverty: What Works?

Esther Duflo: "Sometimes ideas that become conventional wisdom are erroneous and need to be rethought."

Another day, another $1.08

According to Mr Banerjee and Ms Duflo, the typical poor household in Udaipur could spend up to 30% more on food than it does, if only it stopped devoting money to alcohol, tobacco and festivals.

Save the Russians! By Nicholas Eberstadt [alt]

Time for a Sea Change By Paul Saffo

Why We Listen By Philip Bobbitt

A president does have an obligation to assess the constitutionality of statutes, but when he secretly decides a measure is unconstitutional and neglects to say so (much less why), he undermines the very system of public consent for which we are fighting. Having said that, we also must not be so absorbed by questions of statutory construction that we ignore the revolutionary political and technological events that are transforming the world in which our laws must function.

Jeffrey D. Sachs Gives The 2007 BBC Reith Lectures: Bursting at the Seams, April 11- May 9, 2007

Jeffrey Sachs argues that the world faces challenges on an unprecedented scale - the destruction of the planet through global warming, terrorism, extreme poverty, disease and bad governance.

Excerpts from Spokesmen for the Despised; Fundamentalist Leaders of the Middle East, Edited by R. Scott Appleby

The word fundamentalism, therefore, aptly describes the basic method of the modern religious leader who reaches into the sacred past, selects and develops politically useful (if sometimes obscure) teachings or traditions, and builds around these so-called fundamentals an ideology and a program of action. What we mean by fundamentalism, in other words, is the b... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: 21 Solutions to Save the World