Yak shaving etymology
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January 24th, 2005 by Alex
I’ve finally done something to earn true geek credentials. No, not writing my own applescript (not that hard, actually). Not installing and terminating my own in-wall ethernet network (with brilliant foresight, just 6 months before wireless went consumer-grade). Not even enabling Linux-based printing on my Mac (printing to a Windows printer at 300dpi. Big whup.)
This time I’ve made the pros — or the geek equivalent thereof. A few months ago my husband and fellow blogger Rob Cottingham came across the neologism that had been missing from our lives: yak shaving. As defined by the Jargon Dictionary, yak shaving refers to
Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you’re working on.
The Jargon Dictionary credits the term to the MIT AI Lab by way of Ren & Stimpy.
Well anyone who’s every spent a week figuring out Linux-based printing rather than buying a $75 printer can tell you that yak shaving is a term whose time has come. The only problem with the term, as I wrote to yak shaving-promulgator Jeremy Brown, was that it lacked a decent etymology And I offered a fix.
Fast forward…and today’s e-mail from Jeremy letting me know that my yak shaving etymology was recently circulated to the social e-mail list of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. These are the folks who in another ten years are going to be sticking chips in your brain to replace that lousy cell phone headset. Arguably, the epicentre of true geek culture. And here’s what was deemed fit for their consumption:
What this term lacks is a compelling etymological pedigree. I figured it might work much better if the term was grounded in an historical/sociological description of the practice of yak shaving, as practiced by Tibetan villagers who mostly find that yaks function reasonably well in their unshaven state. But a diligent researcher observed a not-uncommon practice among these villagers, who, while harvesting their rice, would become frustrated with the all-too-commonly degraded property of their paddy-bridges. Paddy-bridge construction thus occurs most frequently during rice harvesting season, even though the exigencies of the market should actually deter harvest-season bridge building, since it results in delays in reaching the market that depress the price of the harvested grain. Nonetheless, construction proceeds apace…until the moment when the villagers finally bring their teams of yaks to cross the bridges, and retrieve the harvested rice bushels. Inevitably, this is the moment when the villagers suddenly remember the lesson of the year before — forgotten anew each season — and realize that the new bridge, not yet subject to the decaying properties of the humid paddy, is slightly narrower than its predecessor. The yaks will therefore not be able to fit across the bridge, and retrieve the rice, unless their thick coats are shaved. In a communal ritual that is far more time-consuming than its alternative (manually transporting the rice), the village shaves its entire population of yaks. This event is now celebrated with a series of yak-shaving songs, culminating in a hymn that serenades the yaks as they are led across the new bridges towards the freshly harvested rice.
I suppose I could do the research needed to generate that kind of etymology, but that would be yak shaving, wouldn’t it?
Conference on Online Deliberation: Stanford, May 2005
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January 23rd, 2005 by Alex
The 2nd Conference on Online Deliberation: Design, Research, and Practice
will be held May 20-2005 at Stanford University. (Full disclosure: I’m on the organizing committee).
The call for proposals asks for abstracts by March 15. A peek at some of the details:
We welcome proposals for presentations and workshops from both within and
outside academia. An edited volume of abstracts and selected full papers
from the conference is planned for publication afterward through CSLI
Publications, a division of the University of Chicago Press. Topics of
interest include:
* Online deliberation and groupware design
* Computer-supported cooperative work
* Uses and implications of the Internet for democratic participation
* E-consultation and E-rulemaking
* Online facilitation and community-building
* Research on virtual communities
* Uses of groupware in organizations
* Online learning communities
* Social decision procedures for online environments
* Analyzing online dialogue
* Email and listservs
* Chatrooms and instant messaging
* Message boards and blogs
* Collaborative editing and wikis
* Online organizing and petitions
* Teleconferencing
* Mobile communication and “smart mobs”
* Smart rooms and iRooms
* Immersive virtual environments
* Multilingual online communities and machine translation
* Secure communication and voting
* Information systems support for deliberation
* Lessons from “offline” deliberation and democracy
* Distributed design
* IP, ownership and “copyleft”
* Digital divides, usability, and accessibility
* Free speech and censorship online
* Communication across platforms
All of the above topics bear on whether Internet tools for deliberation
can truly deepen democracy — in groups, communities, and societies –and,
if so, how. But work on these topics is spread over many and diverse
disciplines: computer science, the social sciences, education, law, public
policy, philosophy, social work, and information science, just to name a
few. It involves scholars, designers, and practitioners from all over the
world. This conference, like the one at CMU in 2003, is an attempt to
bring these perspectives together so that we can all widen our horizons.
The focus of the conference is not the Internet, society, and politics
generally, but rather work that is especially related to online
deliberation tools and their use. “Deliberation” denotes “thoughtful,
careful, or lengthy consideration” by individuals, and “formal discussion
and debate” in groups (Collins English Dictionary, 1979). We are therefore
primarily interested in online communication that is reasoned, purposeful,
and interactive, but the power and predominance of other influences on
political decisions (e.g. mass media, appeals to emotion and authority,
and snap judgements) obviously make them relevant to the prospects for
deliberative e-democracy. Topics such as technology policy and social
networks are of interest, but proposals around such topics for this
conference should relate them to online deliberation.
Technological leapfrogging
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January 17th, 2005 by Alex
I have a story in today’s Toronto Star on Leapfrogging the Technology Gap. The story looks at
communities or even whole countries in the developing world that are using information and communication technologies to leapfrog directly from being an agricultural to an information economy. It’s a phenomenon that combines technology high and low in innovative ways, and is generating not only economic benefits but a new world of educational, social and political opportunities.
It’s accompanied by a second story, Tsunami a setback for e-Sri Lanka, which looks at Sri Lanka’s aspirations for technological leapfrogging in light of last month’s Indian Ocean disaster.
From diatribe to dialogue
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January 14th, 2005 by Alex
It’s been an exciting 48 hours here on alexandrasamuel.com. It’s been swell hearing from all the folks who were shocked, outraged or otherwise engaged by my digressions (in November, and this week) on the subject of Condoleezza Rice’s political science career, but I think it’s time I got back to to the business at hand: thinking about the Internet’s role in public engagement.
So in the spirit of effective online dialogue, let me highlight a few points of agreement, as well as a few points of continued discord.
First and foremost, let me be clear on my true, tongue-out-of-cheek position: Neither Condoleezza Rice nor any other academic, in any field, should ever be academically sanctioned for any speech or activity that enjoys the protection of the First Amendment (or up here in Canada, of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms). I can perhaps see why people took my original post as a serious call for Dr. Rice’s removal from the halls (registry? annals?) of political science, but it was meant to be tongue-in-cheek.
And second, let me agree with all those who pointed out that political science is not a “real” science. I am always available for a long diatribe on this subject myself, and will happily sign on for a campaign to rename it political studies. My original post was aimed as much at deflating the significance of my own Ph.D. as at deflating Dr. Rice’s.
While the above amounts to significant agreement on the substantive issues, there was continued disagreement over the terms and tenor of debate. A number of frustrated would-be commenters have blasted my policy of rejecting fully anonymous, unaccountable posts. They have every right to express their views on this issue, and on my original posts, and there are plenty of places on the net where fully anonymous commentary is more than welcome. But I am under no personal obligation to provide a home for their anonymous comments, particularly in the context of a site that is dedicated to meaningful and accountable dialogue. I know their disappointment in having their comments rejected is shared by a large number of advocates for Texas hold-em poker.
Finally, let me point out the encouraging evidence that this discussion has provided for the notion of online deliberation. Even in the face of blatant partisanship, failed efforts at humour, and rhetorical excesses — mine and others’, on all three counts — this discussion managed to evoke substantive engagement with an important issue: how can we distinguish between unsanctionable errors in academic conduct, and sanctionable violations in other fields? The very effective critique posted at Kalblog included this terrific answer to that core question:
The reason why there’s nothing analogous to disbarment or being stripped of your medical license is because political scientists can’t seriously hurt anyone while practicing political science, because all they do is teach, research, and write books and papers that maybe four other people in their area of expertise will ever read. Sure, some students may sleep through their classes instead of learning something, and I’ve even heard of a few particularly bad cases of students actually coming out of a political science class knowing less than when they went in, but they’re not like doctors or lawyers who actually can make life-and-death decisions that really affect people. Sure, Condi’s impacted a lot of lives as National Security Advisor, and will affect many more at State, but she isn’t “practicing political science” in any academic sense.
This is an excellent argument against holding academics professionally accountable for their contributions to public life — and an equally good argument for holding them morally and intellectually accountable. Condoleezza Rice has almost certainly had a far more wide-reaching impact on the world through her role in the Bush Administration than she could ever hope for as a political science scholar. But precisely because of their potential impact, we should ask all political scientists engaged in public service to hold their work to some approximation of the intellectual and professional standards we demand of the colleagues who remain inside the academy.
The technologies of citizenship
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January 13th, 2005 by Alex
I had lunch today with Sanjay Khanna, a fellow Vancouverite who shares my interest in the social and political impact of information technology. We had a mind-blowing conversation that stimulated a whole bunch of new ideas about the relationship between technology and citizenship.
Sanjay noted that technology isn’t something that simply serves our goals as citizens, but also shapes our experience and notions of citizenship. He mentioned the example of the Amish, who Donald Kraybill says first ask
‘Will a certain technology help us to be a better, stronger, healthier community, or will it hurt our community, injure our families, and bring in harmful influences?’”
The problem with asking that question of the larger (non-Amish) world is that we have to grapple with the reality of a world in which most technologies are introduced based on commercial, entertainment or efficiency considerations, rather than according to social criteria. It’s only after a technology starts to have adverse effects — like TV’s impact on social capital, to use Putnam’s widely-cited example — that we start to develop social strategies for dealing with it.
The work I’m now doing through Dialogue Networks is all about finding ways to use the technologies we are already living with — like TV, telephones, and especially, the Internet — in order to not only restore but actually extend our civic capacity. And when I say “civic capacity” I don’t just mean our effectiveness as citizens of government but also as citizens of business, churches, unions and all the other organizations that shape our lives.
“Citizens of business” — was that a typo? Nope, it’s another offshoot of my conversation with Sanjay. He likes using the word citizen in other contexts, because it helps to reframe our relationship to business, NGOs, etc. If we think about ourselves as “citizens” of businesses, rather than as customers or investors, how does that affect our expectations for consultation and participation in business decision-making?
Blogging initiation rites
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January 13th, 2005 by Alex
I guess I’m now a real blogger: I’ve had my first and second thrashings at the hands of fellow bloggers. My offending entry suggested that Condoleezza Rice be excommunicated from the (admittedly permeable) bounds of political science on the grounds of gross malpractice. So much for satire.
As an ardent free speecher myself, I’m not unsympathetic to their critiques (though, given the blogs in question, I wonder whether they’d have been as quick to oppose the professional excommunication of say, Noam Chomsky). The real irony is that free speech activism was a central part of the Ph.D. in question.
But now, just to be ornery, I’d like to raise a larger question: are we saying that any field in which the work product is intellectual or artistic must be free of all professional sanctions? After all, we (generally) accept the idea that doctors can lose their licenses, or that lawyers can be disbarred for violations of their professions’ core standards. But the idea of “excommunicating” a political scientist for egregious violations of even the loosest pretensions to empirical validation or the pursuit of truth somehow feels (even to me) problematic. Partly because of the practical effects — as my critics point out, it’s far more likely that junior academics will be censured than that senior celebrity academics will be — but partly because we have that well-founded, principled skepticism about anything that smells like censorship.
The difficulty is that in any field that consists of creating and promulgating words and ideas — such as academia — there is no way to hold people accountable without in some way setting parameters on what kinds of speech will be acceptable within the bounds of the field. We seem willing to live with those parameters, in some contexts: when would-be academics present dissertations that are inadequate to the intellectual standards of their field, they are denied the professional recognition of a Ph.D. And when journalists plagiarize text or falsify stories, we don’t argue for the protection of their jobs on free speech grounds.
But wait, you say, wouldn’t even tenured academics be sanctioned if they falsified information? See, now you’re catching on.
I recognize that, as a practical matter, any effort at holding current members of any academic field to the research and intellectual standards imposed on would-be Ph.D.s would inevitably and unacceptably compromise speech rights. But as an issue of principle, do we really believe that it is undesirable for our nations’ intellectuals and educators to be held to some sort of collective standard of intellectual integrity?
UPDATE: COMMENTS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
This thread has certainly brought a lot of free speech advocates out of the woodwork. I’ve had lots of comments on this post, as well as on my original entry, some of which you can read below. But it is interesting to note that many of these would-be free speech defenders have submitted their comments anonymously — which is not exactly in keeping with a committment to free and open debate. The difference between diatribe and dialogue is that in a dialogue, people both talk and listen; if you’re not available to receive responses to your comments, you’re not listening, and you’re certainly not engaging in dialogue or debate.
For that reason, I will only approve comments that have a verifiable e-mail address, and not one created for the sole purpose of commenting on this blog. That doesn’t mean you have to use your real name to post — one of the great things about the Internet is that people can build meaningful reputations and accountability using traceable or untraceable handles. (Another theme of my dissertation, by the way, for those of you who are actually interested in whether my own research meets the standards I am advocating.)
But I do expect people to take on some form of accountability for their comments. After all, I have put my name on my posts — why should my fellow defenders of free speech be shy about standing behind theirs?
UPDATE: FOR THE RECORD
What I think about what other people think about what I think. What do you think?
Impasse as opportunity: upcoming Vancouver workshop
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January 11th, 2005 by Alex
The Wosk Centre for Dialogue in Vancouver is hosting a February workshop on “Impasse as Opportunity“. The workshop addresses:
Why are some conflicts seemingly impervious to resolution? When conflicts get stuck in repeating, negative patterns, what can be done? Experienced practitioners know that impasse is a critically important topic, and that unfreezing stuck dynamics is essential to successful conflict resolution.
The workshop promises to address not only the causes of impasse, but different techniques for its resolution. It will be held February 24, 2005, from 9-4pm. The workshop’s leaders are Michelle Lebaron, a professor of law at UBC and Director of UBC’s Program on Dispute Resolution, and Mark McCrea, a mediator with the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry.
Discount dialogue
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January 9th, 2005 by Alex
It’s amazing what you can get online these days. Look what popped up when I googled “dialogue”:
I always heard talk is cheap.
How we work
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January 7th, 2005 by Alex
My find of the day is web log that keeps track of comments and quotations by artists, writers, and other accomplished folk on their work habits and style. Makes for interesting reading.