The federal government is on a “burning platform,” and the status quo way of doing business is unacceptable ...

Current Fiscal Policy Is Unsustainable: we cannot simply grow our way out of this problem. Tough choices will be required.

So much for the robots ...

DoD Transformation: Challenges and Opportunities

Opinion polls coming out of Iraq are only useful so long as it is remembered how difficult they are to conduct.

In Iraq, poorly phrased questions make it especially easy for politicians to cherry-pick results.

Iraqis' Opinions Are Known Unkowns

Midgets everywhere. Rappers, starlets, shrinks, scolds, facilitators, litigators, hustlers, hucksters, victims, vegans. Ours is the age of the shallow, the small, the squalid. Where are the great?

"There were giants in the earth in those days," says Genesis. Granted, every era magnifies the memory of bygone times. But what now passes for excellence in manhood and womanhood, thought and expression, moral and civic life, would make our grandparents shake their heads.

Where are the great?

American reading habits have turned south. Only 30 percent of 13-year-olds read almost every day, according a recent NEA study. The number of 17-year-olds who never read for pleasure increased from 9 percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004. Almost half of Americans between ages 18 and 24 never read books for pleasure, which may explain why one out of three does not make it to high school graduation.

As teachers cite the lack of parents’ involvement as a primary cause of faltering of education, parents blame that lack of discipline as the major cause. Both camps, however, can agree on one thing: lack of funding is the second biggest problem.

Indeed, even if nobility is still associated with the profession, the economy is far from showing its appreciation. Many young people who would have gone into teaching have told me they were deterred by financial insecurity. “I would consider teaching seriously but if I ever want to own a house in the Bay Area, I might as well forget that profession,” a graduate from Berkeley recently told me. In Silicon Valley, in order to keep talented teachers, there are now housing units being built for many who couldn’t afford a home, as the average salary for a beginning high school teacher is $44,000 in a county where the median income is around $85,000.

Something about our fast-paced, super consumerist society seems to have robbed the teaching vocation the respect it deserves, disposing that once concrete and tender human relationship to a matter of mere transaction. "You’re a paying customer!” said the yoga student. If in my mother’s world of North Vietnam, the word “teacher” is still interchangeable with the word “father,” in the world I live in now, I fear teaching as a profession is in danger of being reduced to "humble scutwork."

Hot for Teacher

Suppose that the film you're watching is a very minimal and abstract show. It doesn't fill the whole of the screen's rectangle with colourful business. What you see is only a single thin line of bright white, with darkness all around. The light beam that projects this line will not have the form of a pyramid. It will be a mere plane, triangular in shape, with its apex at the projector, its base on the screen.

Introduce some smoke, and you'll see it – a thin, flat, sharp-edged dart of light, hovering in space, cutting through the dark. And if the bright line on screen should move or bend or grow, the projected sheet of light will evolve accordingly. Cinema can generate a form of immaterial, kinetic sculpture. These are the basics of the art of Anthony McCall.

British artist Anthony McCall (born 1946) has a cross-disciplinary practice in which film, sculpture, installation, drawing and performance overlap. McCall was a key figure in the avant-garde London Film-makers Co-operative in the 1970s and his earliest films are documents of outdoor performances that were notable for their minimal use of the elements, most notably fire.

After moving to New York in 1973, McCall continued his fire performances and developed his ‘solid light’ film series, conceiving the now-legendary Line Describing a Cone, in 1973. These works are simple projections that strikingly emphasise the sculptural qualities of a beam of light. In darkened, haze-filled rooms, the projections create an illusion of three-dimensional shapes, ellipses, waves and flat planes that gradually expand, contract or sweep through space. In these works, the artist sought to deconstruct cinema by reducing film to its principle components of time and light and removing the screen entirely as the prescribed surface for projection. The works also shift the relationship of the audience to film, as viewers become participants, their bodies intersecting and modifying the transitory forms.

Read a review in The Independent. (Excerpt above)

Serpentine Gallery: Anthony McCall

Frog, water, heat, etc., etc.

The fight is long over here for authority over the security services, the oil business, mass media and pretty much all the levers of government. But now there is concern that the Kremlin is setting its sights on Russian culture.

"They're creating, quickly, a kind of Iran situation, a new-old civilization, an Orthodox civilization," Viktor Yerofeyev, a prominent Russian author, said at his apartment the other evening, from inside the classic thick plume of cigarette smoke that still seems to engulf every Russian intellectual. “The climate has totally changed. What was allowed the day before yesterday now is dangerous. They don’t repress like the Soviets yet, but give them two years, they will find the way."

See also, A Tsar Is Born, featured in the December issue of Harper's, from Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953, published in September by Yale University Press.

Joseph Stalin, to Sergei Eisenstein: You need to depict historical figures correctly. For instance, it's wrong that Ivan the Terrible kisses his wife for so long. In those days, that wasn't allowed. And Ivan the Terrible was very cruel -- you can show that -- but you have to show why it was essential. One of Ivan's mistakes was that he didn't finish off the five major feudal families. If he had wiped them out, there would never have been a Time of Troubles. But he would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying. God hindered him in this matter. He should have been more decisive.

YUP also offers another excerpt.

Putin’s Last Realm to Conquer: Russian Culture

The essay is in a bad way.

It’s not because essayists have gotten stupider. It’s not because they’ve gotten sloppier. And it is certainly not because they’ve become less anthologized. More anthologies are published now than there have been in decades, indeed in centuries. The Best American Essays series, which began in 1986, has reached 20 volumes. The problem is that these series rot in basements -- when they make it as far as that. I’ve found the run of American Essays in the basement of my local library, where they’ll sit -- with zero date stamps -- until released gratis one fine Sunday morning to a used bookstore that, in turn, will sell them for a buck to a college student who’ll place them next to his dorm bed and dump them in an end-of-semester clean-out.

That is the fate of the essay today.

What’s Wrong With the American Essay

The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library (LTDL) contains more than 7 million documents (40 million pages) created by major tobacco companies related to their advertising, manufacturing, marketing, sales, and scientific research activities.

See also, Smoke This Book:

In 1958, the Madison Avenue adman Roy Benjamin founded the Quality Book Group, a consortium of the paperback industry heavyweights Bantam Books, Pocket Books and the New American Library. Despite the lofty name, the group’s real purpose was to sell advertisements in paperbacks, and its first target was the biggest success of them all: Dr. Benjamin Spock’s “Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care.” A 1959 Pocket Books print run of 500,000 included advertisements by Q-Tips, Carnation and Procter & Gamble. By 1963, a 26-page insert in Spock was commanding $6,500 to $7,500 per page, and ads were spreading into mysteries and other pulps as well.

It was a windfall for everyone — everyone, that is, except the authors. “Authors were horrified by these ads,” Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said in a recent interview, adding jokingly, “And doubly horrified that they weren’t paid for them.”

Legacy Tobacco Documents Library

Happy birthday!

Mr. Barzun always sought to be a teacher in the widest possible sense, and his books were directed as much to those outside the walls of academia.

In his memoir of this time, Mr. Barzun quotes Matthew Arnold: "The men of culture are the true apostles of equality. They have a passion . . . for carrying from one end of society to the other the best ideas of their time." Then Mr. Barzun adds: "It is clear in retrospect that not we alone but the mid-century as a whole, particularly in the United States, made a many-sided effort to carry out the Arnoldian mandate. The hope of a collective enjoyment of the best in thought and art was still strong."

Two other posts on Barzun's 100th:

Age of Reason, in The New Yorker
Jacques Barzun at 100 , in The New Criterion

For more, see Barzun 100, a blog dedicated to the celebration of Jacques Barzun's 100th year.

Jacques Barzun Turns 100

Tagging communities are popular instances of a broad class of online communities based on user-generated content. In these communities users introduce and tag content for later use. Although recent studies advocate and attempt to harness social knowledge generated in this context, little research has been done to quantify the current level of user collaboration in these communities. This paper introduces two metrics to quantify the level of collaboration: content reuse and shared interest. Using these two metrics, this paper shows that the current level of collaboration in CiteULike and Connotea is consistently low, which significantly limits the potential of harnessing the social knowledge in collaborative communities. This study also discusses implications of these findings in the context of recommendation and reputation systems.

Content Reuse and Interest Sharing in Tagging Communities