Month: April 2012

Business kleptocracy

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by Doctor Science A kleptocracy is when the government is run for the personal gain of the ruling class, without regard to what is good for the governed or the state as a whole. What do you call it when a business or other corporation is run for the personal gain of the high-level managers, … Read more

Parentcam

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by Doctor Science

Spring is here, and that means it’s time to watch birds. The clearest view of any nestcam I know is Cornell’s Red-Tailed Hawk cam. Mom “Big Red” and dad “Ezra” have three eggs this year. One got out of the egg yesterday:

Cornell-RTH-fuzzface

Who could resist that *faaaaaaaaaace*?!?! Screencapture from gumbercules.

despite the fact that this is what the nest looked like Sunday night:

RTHinsnow

Screencap by Veronica Knapp

— yes, there’s a hawk there.

I’ve embedded the hawkcam feed under the cut. Today already when Big Red was off the nest for a few minutes (getting some more nesting material, she’s been acting as though the spruce needles were poking her) I saw the hatched chick and got a good look at the second egg, which has a gap big enough so you can see the chick (technically, the eyas) inside, chipping away. The third egg has a few chips out of it, but it takes over 48 hours for an eyas to get itself out — the parents don’t help.

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Ebooks and professionalism in the publishing industry: The Case of John Barth on Kindle. UPDATED

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by Doctor Science I see in the comments to the previous post that I really poked some nerves by saying “the profession of editing had become distinctly unprofessional.” Perhaps I should have said, “people with pro editing jobs were no longer able to consistently edit in a professional manner.” The root cause was succinctly stated … Read more

50 Shades of Fandom: Writing. Part IIa

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by Doctor Science

The copyright page for Fifty Shades of Grey says:

The author published an earlier serialized version of this story online with different characters as “Master of the Universe” under the pseudonym Snowqueen’s Icedragon.

I’m pretty sure this is the first time a best-selling work of fiction has explicitly acknowledged that it’s derived from a fanfic; at least I’ve never seen anything like this statement before.

In itself, the fact that FSoG started as Twilight fanfic isn’t any kind of publishing revolution: derivative, imitative, and parodic stories have piggybacked their way to success for hundreds if not thousands of years. What makes FSoG revolutionary, IMHO, is how fandom worked to perform most of the traditional functions of the publishing industry, functions which — as we saw in Part I — the pros have let fall by the wayside.

I’ve passed 1500 words again, so I’m splitting Part II into halves: IIA, this one, is about how fandom functioned to help James with writing the book, IIB will be about how fandom helped her with publishing it.

Constable-EdgeofHeath

The edge of a heath by moonlight, by John Constable. A very simple oil sketch. I guess it was a quick, preparatory work, Constable working out forms and basic light, but the result is that it looks very much like Impressionism, half a century early.

I chose the pictures for this post by search Wikipaintings for “twilight”.

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50 Shades of Publishing, Part I

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by Doctor Science

By now you’ve probably heard of Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James. To recap: independently e-published romance featuring explicit BDSM comes out of nowhere to massive e-sales, mainstream publishers fight for hard-copy rights to the tune of 7 figures, movie rights start bidding up, everyone and her supposedly-staid mother is talking about it.

Even before I finish reading, I can tell you this: Fifty Shades of Grey is the end of the publishing industry as we know it. The fat lady is singing, the tipping point is in the rear-view mirror.

Cut for length —

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A saturday morning fusion thread

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by liberal japonicus As is usual, the perfect open thread topic appears after I post an open thread. Looked in my google news and there this was, and because Gary Farber is in my Google + circle, it's got his seal of approval. A short one or two sentence summary can't do this article justice, … Read more

a restarting friday open thread

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by liberal japonicus I recently restarted doing Tai Chi. I only started doing it because a colleague was teaching it, and a schedule conflict made it impossible for me to join the group, but that conflict has disappeared, so I'm at it again. Quite amazing what a workout it is. So have you restarted anything … Read more

Homicide statistics, wtf?

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by Doctor Science I got statistics for the previous post on Intimate Partner Homicide (IPH) from the Bureau of Justice Statistics Homicide Trends Report. I see that report comes from Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data Series, which I don’t know how to massage. But I wonder how reliable that data really is. In our discussion, … Read more

Murder mystery

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by Doctor Science

I was working on a post (about school and other shootings) and wanted to check one fact. Result: a couple days of work later, I have found out something really odd about murder in America. I’m nothing of an expert in the field, so I’m hoping that someone who *does* know about it can come along and say what the experts think is going on — or if I’ve noticed something that the experts haven’t.

I’m talking about two things, possibly related, concerning intimate partner homicide (IPH):

1. 30-40 years ago (and possibly earlier), it was almost as common for American men to be killed by their partners as for women. This is extremely unusual: in other countries and cultures, the rate of IPH for women is two to four times that for men.
a. Since then, the US pattern has changed, so that nowadays many more women are victims of IPH than men are.

Note on the charts: All data in this post are taken from Homicide Trends in the U.S. from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, especially the section on Intimate homicide. Charts with a gray background and yellow margin are taken directly from the BJS report, while those with a white background were created by me based on BJS data. Let me know if I need to show my work in GoogleDocs.

Intimates

The fall in the number of Intimate Partner Homicides, by gender of victim.

b. This is almost entirely due to a change in IPH among black Americans. The high American rate of husband-and-boyfriend killing was largely a black phenomenon. Since the 70s, the death rate for black men due to IPH has plummeted, faster than the drop in IPH for black women.

Intgrel

Rate of Intimate Partner Homicide, by race and relationship type. Earlier, I had summed the spouse + x-friend rates for each gender, having overlooked that the rates were calculated using different base populations.

Cut for length and images —

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Universal values?

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by liberal japonicus A few folks have lamented the absence of foreign policy posts, so I thought that some of you may be interested in discussing this article about the problems of US NGO's in other countries. A few grafs: The Times reports that the United Arab Emirates has shut down the offices of the National … Read more

The Mind-Killer

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by Doctor Science

danah boyd just put up for comment the text of a presentation she did at SXSW on “The Power of Fear in Networked Publics”. She argues that because the limiting resource on the Internet is attention, people online are ever-more-inclined to monger fear, that great attention-grabber. I disagree: it seems to me that, compared to old media (especially TV) the Internet is *less* fear-saturated and fear-prone. I think a lot of this has to do with the nature of authority.

Goya-the-madness-of-fear

The Folly of Fear, by Francisco Goya. Part of his series Los Disparates [Spanish], “Nonsense” or “Folly”. It’s always amazing to look at Goya etchings, because they seem so anachronistically *modern*. I find The Disasters of War pretty much unbearable, but they should be a required study for military officers — and for Presidential candidates.

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Emperor for the day

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by liberal japonicus McT, who along with dr ngo, is poised to join the expanding granddaddy demographic here, suggested that a more general thread on the Trayvon Martin shooting about the issues raised by bobbyp and russell. This is not exactly that thread, but I've just landed at Haneda and have a bit of time to … Read more