A couple of hundred years ago our dear forebears of English went ice cold thick banana-whips (to quote Douglas Adams) when Parliament forgot to renew the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and people were able to print whatever they [...]]]> It’s all around us this market changing world of ours.  Or is it?

A couple of hundred years ago our dear forebears of English went ice cold thick banana-whips (to quote Douglas Adams) when Parliament forgot to renew the monopoly of the Stationer’s Company and people were able to print whatever they jolly well liked.  We imagine our own times are unique for upturns in publishing output, but that’s misleading.  Instead, we keep recycling the same business models — it’s only the tactics and technologies that change.(...)

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Post tags: Adam Robinson, e-Readers, Paul Constant, publishing, Raph Koster

© Adam MacDonald, [...]]]> Yesterday the Guardian reprinted from its archives an original note from 1958 about Pasternak’s refusal to leave the Soviet Union to receive his Nobel Prize.  It’s terrific newspapers take the time to sometimes show their historicity (even if a lot of it is pre-conceived).(...)

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Post tags: Boris Pasternak, Nobel, Russia, Soviet Union

© Adam MacDonald, 2009. | Permalink [...]]]> Historical note today with the passing of Claude Lévi-Strauss (1909-2009).  A detailed obit in the NYT helps summarize his impact on Western culture as an academic.  Le Fig has a better review en francais with some video interviews.  The SLOG is more succint.(...)

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Post tags: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structuralism

Munro must have spent some time obsessing over those films. I wonder which axis gave him the most trouble. Maybe choosing the legend, and thus the vocabulary, was the hardest exercise.  Another famous height creation [...]]]> Today’s XKCD reminds us all of the legacy of scientific interpretation.  Hermeneutics has finally come full circle into everydayness.

Munro must have spent some time obsessing over those films. I wonder which axis gave him the most trouble. Maybe choosing the legend, and thus the vocabulary, was the hardest exercise.  Another famous height creation of his and a well made depth episode. The Enlightenment progression has the stick figures mounted the same way as Attic vases.

In the same plane, at an other extreme, artist Stephen Wiltshire draws by hand the skyline of Manhattan and New Jersey from memory.

the hand moves while the memory rests (Stephen Wiltshire)

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Post tags: narrative theory, Stephen Wiltshire, XKCD

Sam Jordison in the Guardian [...]]]> A recent error in copyright has had an unfortunate impact on a few of Amazon Kindle’s customers. Without more detail I think it’s safe to say this won’t be the norm, and particularly where the text in question was 1984… well, I expect this wasn’t planned.

Sam Jordison in the Guardian the other day has put up his hand to ask questions about what this means for eBook readers in general. If the trend in publishing is to move to the Web, with or without DRM (queue Cory Doctorow) then how can customers be assured that their purchases are safe? Or more importantly, how will they know their privacy will be respected, their habits protected (e.g. lending books to family and friends), and most importantly, that their texts will not be censored or interfered with in any way (e.g. abridged and edited versions, and preferred translations over others)? These in my mind are some of the vital questions for the future of publishing.

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Post tags: cory doctorow, e-Readers, eBook, Kindle, publishing

Claiming that privacy is about transactions and that being private is the recess of information is not immediately clear. Yet, the common logic that something is private so long as it is not published means that what we value and retain [...]]]> Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Claiming that privacy is about transactions and that being private is the recess of information is not immediately clear. Yet, the common logic that something is private so long as it is not published means that what we value and retain as confidential must concern what we can potentially divulge and obtain. The right to privacy and its conflicts are within this order. But to encourage another view – where being private is not tied to any one thing — allows us to consider another way of conceiving how privacy should be respected.(...)

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Post tags: canada, legal rights, privacy

Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and [...]]]> Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2), (part 3)

Outside of the important work to legally refine privacy and our freedoms for information, it is important to improve the sense of what privacy is in itself. If we have a good working notion of what is private and whose expectations are the most important in protecting and sharing private information, we should be able to rehabilitate privacy from its confrontational sense. Legal work needs this domain of privacy-as-discord to develop the concept publicly, but we can also improve the private sense of privacy. If what we regard as fundamentally private is information on our states of being, then describing it outside of any conflict is worthwhile pursuing.(...)

Read the rest of On Privacy — the Concept of Privacy

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Post tags: canada, legal rights, privacy

© Adam MacDonald, 2009. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Bloomsday, James Joyce, Ulysses

It seems there are two kinds of particular private details that we value: Information on our movements and information on our states of being. Since the end game is a legal definition, there doesn’t need to be a lot of nuance as to [...]]]> Previous: Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1), (part 2)

It seems there are two kinds of particular private details that we value: Information on our movements and information on our states of being. Since the end game is a legal definition, there doesn’t need to be a lot of nuance as to how we understand the enactment of a right to privacy. But we should see that data on our public movements ought to be differentiated from how we feel, and from information that signifies our mental states and histories.(...)

Read the rest of On Privacy — the Right to Privacy (3)

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Post tags: canada, legal rights, privacy

This year’s BEA felt less like a convention and more like a funeral: Last fall’s recession triggered perhaps the most dismal year in the history of publishing in America. [...]]]> Paul Constant in this week’s The Stranger has a wonderful summary of the recent BookExpo America (BEA) he attended.  It goes a little like this:

This year’s BEA felt less like a convention and more like a funeral: Last fall’s recession triggered perhaps the most dismal year in the history of publishing in America. Book sales are down across the board, layoffs have plagued the industry like a virulent STD, and retailers—including Borders… —lost money with astonishing speed. The publishers who put any energy into BEA bought smaller booths …  Larger publishers like Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and smaller presses like McSweeney’s and Small Beer didn’t even bother to set up booths this year.¹

In short, and to be polite, publishing is an industry in transition.(...)

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Post tags: community, cory doctorow, e-Readers, Paul Constant, publishing, Ursula K. Le Guin

Confidential information can be generalized into isolated judgments or datum instead of long-term opinions or presumptions. The distinction is dependant upon how we highlight individual data points of people to be representative of themselves versus a private analysis of their behaviors or histories [...]]]> Previous:  Introduction, Right to Privacy (part 1)

Confidential information can be generalized into isolated judgments or datum instead of long-term opinions or presumptions. The distinction is dependant upon how we highlight individual data points of people to be representative of themselves versus a private analysis of their behaviors or histories to predict their future decisions. We regard specific facts as confidential information that is kept by the individual to help form and abbreviate their identity. The analysis and further generalization of these facts is most often produced by organizations, which collect and predict the reactions people will have in their efforts to affirm some self-worth. Both types of confidential information contain judgments, but the point of interest for a right to privacy is that the proprietary studies of organizations who rely on the collection of private data of individuals maintain this information only for themselves. People always share, or can share their opinions and decisions, but the forecasted trends made from the confidential information of these judgments by organizations is disturbing when they are not accessible for inspection and corroboration.(...)

Read the rest of On Privacy — the Right to Privacy (2)

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Post tags: canada, legal rights, privacy

Privacy, if it is a human right, is legally difficult to identify.  There are ongoing efforts to develop the arguments for its limits and protections, but there is a strong assumption in the U.S. and Canada that generally citizens have some right to privacy.  Neither the Canadian Bill of [...]]]> Introduction to Essay

Privacy, if it is a human right, is legally difficult to identify.  There are ongoing efforts to develop the arguments for its limits and protections, but there is a strong assumption in the U.S. and Canada that generally citizens have some right to privacy.  Neither the Canadian Bill of Rights nor the Charter of Rights and Freedoms mention privacy directly, but it may be inferred through the right to substantive liberty (charter s. 7).¹  The main legal justifications are the current privacy acts at the Federal and Provincial levels.  Where the provinces have authority over property and civil rights (s.92, constitution act (1867)) they have the central responsibility for privacy.  Yet, when the issues are national, for example, in broadcasting or security, then the Federal government can regulate privacy. (...)

Read the rest of On Privacy — the Right to Privacy

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Post tags: canada, privacy

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

– John Milton, Lycidas

I guess it [...]]]>

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of noble mind)

To scorn delights, and live laborious days.

– John Milton, Lycidas

I guess it must have been my Dad who once told me that one of the problems with academics is that they have no outlets for normal, human politics — no budget, no staff, no real paths for promotion or channels for their conflict. Consequently, you see them scrap over substitute prizes: Corner offices, seminar courses, sabbaticals. The chance to introduce some celebrity at a dinner, the ability to travel in the Summer months and unwind. Too much of that seems true from my own experiences, but I sort of thought that by now — as far as I am from Undergrad as my Dad is from teaching — that things might have changed. Students, of course, get exposed to a lot of poor behaviors from people who are paid — or should be paid primarily — to teach, but again I figured with the rise of the management culture and the death of collegiality we would’ve seen a lot less of the high table chicanery. Not so. (...)

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Post tags: Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Derek Walcott, Olympics, poetry, Ruth Padel

In October of 2003, Canada had the inconvenient fun of having to compare two competing indulgences.  On the one hand, there was the right of Parliamentary committees to summon and investigate all Federal organizations, whether they reported to Parliament directly or not.  And on the other, the right of the then Privacy [...]]]>

In October of 2003, Canada had the inconvenient fun of having to compare two competing indulgences.  On the one hand, there was the right of Parliamentary committees to summon and investigate all Federal organizations, whether they reported to Parliament directly or not.  And on the other, the right of the then Privacy Commissioner to keep his discretionary spending of public funds private.  Absurdity won.  But curiously, it was the Commissioner’s perverse spending that rankled Canadians.  His chicanery to deny the public the right to review the office of their own privacy ombudsman seemed overlooked. 

This reaction nicely typifies the confusion surrounding the concept of privacy, but it also damages the case that it ought to be esteemed as a fundamental freedom.  The scandal encourages the prejudice that privacy is something more synonymous with guile than personal freedom; namely, if there’s nothing to hide, why not provide?  Unfortunately, there seems to be few alternatives, since the dominant opposing argument can be found in the rebuttal of the ersatz Commissioner to Parliament; that is, there’s nothing to provide, since it’s the individual’s right to hide. (...)

Read the rest of On Privacy — Introduction

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Post tags: canada, privacy

For those unaware, John LeCarre’s early books centred on the retiring British spy George Smiley and are essentially responsible for bringing realism into what was otherwise a rigid genre (the Mary-Sue Superspy).  Influenced by Graham Greene and a [...]]]> Auspicious news — BBC Radio 4 is producing all of John LeCarre’s Smiley books.

For those unaware, John LeCarre’s early books centred on the retiring British spy George Smiley and are essentially responsible for bringing realism into what was otherwise a rigid genre (the Mary-Sue Superspy).  Influenced by Graham Greene and a destroyed professional career as an MI6 intelligence office, LeCarre (born David John Cornwell) documented the anxiety filled world of the British intelligence services surviving a Cold War as their cultural identity imploded after the Second World War.  Personally, I think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is superb as a novel in structure and pace and character.  It ranks now as an historical novel and I think it was Martin Amis who taught LeCarre biographical novel, A Perfect Spy, somewhere for awhile.

At any rate, there’s a great list of radio plays to look forward to with the renowned Simon Russell Beale playing Smiley.  The last time the BBC produced some of LeCarre’s Smiley books it was the monumental performances by Alex Guiness.  I just hope these are available from outside the UK.

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Post tags: BBC, John LeCarre

It’s [...]]]> Your specific role and responsibility is to “raise the bar.”  It’s not sufficient to meet the goals with quality or to create sustainable results, to not leave bodies in the road and completely alienate your peers.  You are judged on exceeding all expectations all the time.  This is a performance culture.

It’s also the goal of arete.  A concept the Victorians translated and transliterated as “virtue” or “excellence.”  So often arete is indexed to morality, which for the sexuality of some Ancient Greeks was a deliberate conflation by the translators.  As arete was virtue and virtue was a moral prerogative, so too we must judge what’s best in society as moral impediments to overcome to strictures to always meet.  What happens when this is translocated to business?

“What did you do to drive this result?  What did you do to deserve this success?”  These are the kinds of questions we were getting asked in our training seminar.

One interesting item I discovered only later about Bar Raisers — people chosen and trained to scrutinize applicants during job interviews — is that they are never vetted again.  I’m curious and sceptical about how they are chosen, since they are then able to judge superior value so long as they are employed with the company.  Anyone with a veto makes me uncomfortable, particularly when it’s granted for life.

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Post tags: arete, business, general