Science Wars, Part 1 Million

Here’s an article about a surprising test by sociologist of science Harry Collins. Sure enough, experts can’t tell his answers from real physicists’ on a test about gravity.

I’m not sure where this is going, but I think it proves just about as much as The Original Sokal Affair did. It proves with some skill and cunning, you can pose as an insider in a field when you’re not–or perhaps more generally that it is not that hard to hoax people, especially when they are working in an environment of trust–and that such facts really have little to do with the overall quality of knowledge in any given field.

Modernity in a List

Legend
Berlin Time/Montreal Time: Activity

List
8:45am/2:45am: Wake up. Notice new headcold.
9:30/3:30am: Eat tasty German hotel breakfast with cool people from Paris and Davis.
10:30am/4:30am: Catch a cab to the airport. Drive by funky old looking monument. Ask in (very!) broken German what it is. Turns out it was a victory monument. I thought for a moment. “In what war?” “Napoleon.” Oh.
1pm/7am: Board plane from Berlin to Munich.
11:45/5:45pm: Deplane in Montreal. The descent was painful due to aforementioned headcold.
12:30am/6:30pm: dinner at Majaraja Indian buffet on Rene Levesque. Extremely crowded. Will go back to less crowded buffet near Atwater instead.
2:30am/8:30pm: Enter Metropol for Massive Attack show with DJ Love opener.
5:30am/11:30pm: finish rocking and head home
6am/midnight: Sleep

And now, for some open access

Ted Striphas writes to say: “Kembrew McLeod and I made an agreement with Taylor & Francis, publisher of our co-edited special issue of Cultural Studies on intellectual property, to release the complete contents for free after 6 months.  Well, the 6 months has expired, and K and I now have the PDF files ready for download on our websites. ”

Which reminds me that–within limits–authors actually still do have some power in this whole mess and that some presses are better than others. Back when I published an essay in the Journal of Medical Humanities, their copyright agreement was so noxious (with rules about under which conditions I could republish the material, for instance in my book) that I kept the copyright in my own name. Whether they’d allow that now is an open question. I just signed a copyright agreement for a piece coming out in Interdisciplinary Science Reviews which allows me to post the article on my own website as long as I link to the journal’s homepage.

Ted Striphas and Kembrew McLeod announce the release of the complete contents of Cultural Studies 20(2/3) (March/May 2006), a special issue on “The Politics of Intellectual Properties.” By special agreement with the publisher, Taylor & Francis, the issue can be downloaded free of charge from http://www.indiana.edu/~bookworm and http://kembrew.com/academics/research.html.

About the issue: This special issue of Cultural Studies aims to create a genuinely interdisciplinary scholarly discussion of the politics of intellectual properties. While many areas of study pay lip service to the idea of interdisciplinary work, one remarkable thing about recent intellectual property research is the way it has produced an actual cross-pollination of scholarship. Drawing together prominent scholars from multiple disciplines, this issue of Cultural Studies speaks to many significant topical intersections–from library science, computer science, and the biological sciences to popular music, film studies, and media studies, to name a few. In addition to presenting compelling, cutting-edge research, this issue explores what cultural studies can contribute to public conversations about the politics of intellectual properties.

Issue Table of Contents:

(1) Ted Striphas & Kembrew McLeod, “Introduction–Strategic Improprieties: Cultural Studies, the Everyday, and the Politics of Intellectual Properties”
(2) Adrian Johns, “Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science”
(3) McKenzie Wark, “Information Wants to be Free (But is Everywhere in Chains)”
(4) Andrew Herman, Rosemary J. Coombe, & Lewis Kaye, “Your Second Life? Goodwill and the Performativity of Intellectual Properties in On-Line Games”
(5) Steve Jones, “Reality© and Virtual Reality©: When Virtual and Real Worlds Collide”
(6) Jane Gaines, “Early Cinema, Heyday of Copying: The Too Many Copies of L’arroseur arose”
(7) Gilbert B. Rodman & Cheyanne Vanderdonckt, “Music for Nothing or, I Want My MP3: The Regulation and Recirculation of Affect”
(8) David Sanjek, “Ridiculing the ‘White Bread Original’: The Politics of Parody and Preservation of Greatness in Luther Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc.”
(9) Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, “Out of Sight and Out of Mind: On the Cultural Hegemony of Intellectual Property (Critique)”
(10) Siva Vaidhyanathan, “Afterword–Critical Information Studies: A Bibliographic Manifesto”
(11) Patricia R. Zimmermann, “Just Say No: Negativland’s No Business”

Intelligence

I don’t write much about television here, which is silly since we sure do watch enough of it. I joke with Carrie that we are “power users of the television set” — we are all about the PVR (DVR for those of you south of the border) and during the fall have at least one show most nights — which we then watch whenever we want thanks to the digital recorder. The recorder has the added benefit of allowing fast skipping of commercials, so that an hour show gets digested in 40 minutes. When you’re relaxing for two hours at the end of the night, that’s an extra show. We also get the NFL Sunday Ticket, which allows us to follow our favorite teams. Alas, today it will mostly be background noise as I’m way behind on a number of essential things I need to do.

I dream of someday making the time to write for Flow but right now I can’t even find time to go to their first-ever conference. So this entry will have to do.

Like many Canadians (I imagine), a good deal of what we watch originates from the United States, but there are a few Canadian shows that we also like.

Of particular note in the new season is Intelligence, a post-Wire cops-and-bad-guys procedural (yes Steven, you heard me right). After viewing the pilot, I’m ready to say that it promises to be one of the best shows on television this season. It is well written and performed, and has the edge of DaVinci’s City Hall (which may have been the best show on television during its very short run). As seems pretty common with CBC drama, this short reshuffles a small set of actors we’ve seen in a variety of other configurations. Most immediately recognizable to me are the people who were on DaVinci’s City Hall and Robeson Arms. But the characters are, interestingly, made to look a little older. And it’s not because I was watching reruns.

I won’t speak for all Canadian TV, but Chris Haddock’s shows definitely do things not possible on U.S. networks. Something like the Vancouver red light district in City Hall have a certain edge and lack of moralizing that one can’t escape in U.S. shows, even The Wire “hamsterdam.” For both, the district becomes an administrative nightmare, but in The Wire, it brings down careers — and we are treated to the left-over pathos at the start of this season. Haddock’s characters are slightly understated rather than “larger than life” and his shows have all taken on a sort of dark look to them that makes them immediately recognizeable. When I land in Vancouver in a little over a month, I half-expect to see it through a blue filter. I hear that Intelligence is being picked up in the U.S.

But wait, it gets better.

I opened up my email this morning to discover a letter from Sage, to which I link at the end of this post.

The gist of it is that my author’s offprints now come as an executable file. I can print forever, off this computer. I can email the file to 25 people and they can print forever off the one computer on which they receive it. I clicked the link, and the good people at Sage even had the wisdom to create a Macintosh version of the program.

Now, presumably, I also need to download the PC version in case someone to whom I’m mailing the program has a PC.

Also, it is unclear what will happen if someday I decide to use another computer as my main computer. Will I have the same permissions? Different ones?

But the punchline came when I tried to run the program. I get a dialogue box asking if I will allow it to access “Assistive Devices.” I sure as hell will not allow it to access assistive devices! For the following reasons:

–>I don’t know what “assistive devices” are on a Macintosh.

–>I suspect that the program has no intention of assisting me in any way.

–>I have no assurances from Sage that this program’s copy protection scheme–which I’ve never heard of before today–won’t bore itself into the core of my operating systems and mess up my computer in ways I cannot yet conceive. In the digital audio recording world, users have been dealing with bad and often harmful copy protection schemes for years–ironically more harmful than the kinds of bugs that would routinely come with kracked software–and so I am naturally suspicious. (See reviews of software using PACE for an example of what can and does happen when companies stop trusting their users.)

–>Not only does Sage ask me to trust them, they also ask me to send what could be very buggy software to friends and colleagues.

–>I clicked on Sage’s FAQ for authors to find out if I had any assurances from them and there is no discussion of the copy protection scheme.

So, in short, my article on the mp3 — the file format that still sits at the center of the file-sharing debate — is so thoroughly copy-protected that I am afraid to even look at it, at least in the format the press wants me to use.

Thankfully, I have another option: my university library.

The program goes in the trash, I download the regular .pdf file of the article (which I will happily email you as an offprint) and everything appears fine. I printed it out, so I can now photocopy it to my heart’s delight and send it out that way, as well.

This seems like a huge breach of trust on Sage’s part. I would like to say that I will never publish with them again. The truth is that I’ve got a piece in the works that I’d really like to send to Television and New Media. and so I may, in fact, publish again with Sage. But open access is looking better and better.

The email from Sage is reproduced in full here, as a .pdf file.

New Text

This one felt like it would take forever to come out, which isn’t fair since it didn’t take longer than other journal articles or book chapters. But it is an early statement of some of the arguments in the new book (which have evolved since then, naturally). It is also the single article for which I have received the most requests from strangers. And it wasn’t even published until today.

Jonathan Sterne, “The MP3 as Cultural Artifact,” New Media and Society 8:5 (2006): 825-842.