Warning for sensitive souls: contains rude words.
It prompted me to download the 8mm home movie app for the iPhone. Another lovely example of using sophisticated computing to produce primitive retro effects. No wonder normal people think that geeks are nuts!
Thanks to Andrew Ingram for spotting it.
This morning’s Observer column.
While all this was going on, Apple and Microsoft were squabbling about capital letters. A while back, Apple attempted to trademark the phrase “App Store” – the name of its online store of downloadable programs. Microsoft objected, arguing that the term was too “generic”. (This from the company whose main products are Windows, Word, Office and Excel.) On Monday last, Apple struck back. “Having itself faced a decades-long genericness [sic] challenge to its claimed Windows mark,” it sniffed in a court filing, “Microsoft should be well aware that the focus in evaluating genericness is on the mark as a whole and requires a fact-intensive assessment of the primary significance of the term to a substantial majority of the relevant public.
“Yet, Microsoft, missing the forest for the trees, does not base its motion on a comprehensive evaluation of how the relevant public understands the term App Store as a whole. What it offers instead are out-of-context and misleading snippets of material printed by its outside counsel from the internet and allegations regarding how the public allegedly interprets the constituent parts of the term App Store, ie, ‘app’ and ‘store’.”
Hmmm… I was searching the LSE online catalogue for the entry for Saif Gaddafi’s legendary Ph.D dissertation. But it doesn’t appear to be listed.
Curious. Maybe the LSE doesn’t catalogue dissertations.
LATER: As usual, the cock-up theory is the best explainer: I was searching under the wrong name.
Many thanks to Lawrence Osborn for his tactful hint about search technique.
Peter Spiro at opiniojuris.org reveals that Oxford University Press had plans to publish the dissertation, and wonders if they will persevere with that plan. He also provides a link to the downloadable pdf of the dissertation on the Mother Jones site. “Leaving aside the dubious provenance”, he writes, “from a quick scan it looks pretty interesting.”
It does. One of the most interesting sidelights is that Gaddafi expresses fulsome thanks to the celebrated Harvard scholar, Joseph Nye, who is credited as being one of “a number of experts with whom I met and who consented to read portions of the manuscript and provide advice and direction.”
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of Footnote #259:
Excellent summary by Paul Ragers on opendemocracy.net. Makes gloomy reading.
Once upon a time, when Apple was mainly a computer manufacturer, people used to liken it to BMW. That was because it made expensive, nicely designed products for a niche market made up of affluent, design-conscious customers who also served as enthusiastic – nay fanatical – evangelists for the brand. It was seen as innovative and quirky but not part of the industry's mainstream, which was dominated by Microsoft and the companies making the PCs that ran Windows software. This view of Apple was summed up by Jack Tramiel, the boss of Commodore, when Steve Jobs first showed him the Macintosh computer. “Very nice, Steve,” growled Tramiel. “I guess you’ll sell it in boutiques.”
That was a long time ago…
Thus begins my Observer ‘Comment is Free’ piece on Apple’s transformation into the behemoth it has become. Towards the end of the piece, I mentioned Umberto Eco’s famous essay arguing that the Apple Mac was a Catholic device, while the IBM PC was a Protestant one. His reasoning was that, like the Roman church, Apple offered a guaranteed route to salvation – the Apple Way – provided one stuck to it. PC users, on the other hand, had to take personal responsibility for working out their own routes to heaven.
I’ve always thought that Eco’s essay was just a lovely literary conceit. But now, courtesy of Evegny Morozov, I find that there is even a scholarly literature on the subject. Or, at any rate, one learned article. It appeared in 2001 in the Oxford University Press journal Sociology of Religion: a quarterly review under the title “May the Force of the Operating System be with You: Macintosh Devotion as Implicit Religion” and the Abstract reads:
The purpose of this study is to consider the devotion of Macintosh computer enthusiasts as a case of implicit religion. Data was collected from two primary sources: twelve in-depth face-to-face interviews, and letters to the editor from MacAddict magazine. In addition, supplementary information was obtained from pro-Macintosh Web sites and magazines. Following Nesti (1997), Macintosh devotion was analyzed along four lines: (1) the search for meaning, (2) social forms, (3) the hidden message of the metaphor, and (4) the case of the voyage. I found that Mac devotees used the Macintosh as a “reflective medium” to discover meanings in the midst of changing computer technology. As an implicit religion, Macintosh devotion is based on the sacralization of the bond between people and computers. Its followers envision an utopian future in which humans and technology work together in harmony. Furthermore, the Mac enthusiasts adopted from both Eastern and Western religions a social form that emphasized personal spirituality as well as communal experience. The faith of Mac devotees is reflected and strengthened by their efforts in promoting their computer of choice.
Paul Hontz nails it.
As I listened to Steve speak, one phrase kept gnawing at me. Steve said that the iPad was “a post-pc device”. As an iOS developer who makes his living building apps for iPads and iPhones, I disagree. You see iOS has this ball and chain attached to it called “iTunes” that runs on a typical PC. The first time you turn your iPad on you’re greeted with this screen on the right prompting you to plug your iPad into a computer so it can be setup. You can’t even turn your iPad on the first time without being tethered to iTunes.
Yep.
Further to my post about universities being addicted to tainted money, Stefan Collini had an interesting take on the underlying malaise:
All academics in British universities will immediately recognise that nothing they do as scholars and teachers wins anywhere near as much commendation and support from their university’s “senior management team” (older readers may still refer to them as “administrators”) as the securing of some kind of external funding. Such funding may range from a project grant from a research council or charity to the sponsorship of a post or studentship by a local business, and then on to the murkier regions of whole courses and centres being paid for by some overseas government or large corporation.
At first sight, it may seem absurd to bracket all these disparate types of funding together. The first and second kinds are not only innocent of any taint of corruption: they are the bread-and-butter of most working scientists and an increasing number of scholars in the humanities and social sciences as well. But that is precisely what is so insidious and why the LSE case raises systemic rather than merely local questions. Let me illustrate in two ways.
First, it is now axiomatic in British universities that a piece of research that was financed by any of these forms of external funding is ipso facto superior to one that is financed indirectly out of the university’s recurrent income. Such external funding is, in principle, supposed to cover the “extra” costs of doing a piece of research, but this means that in practice academics are now under instructions to incur more expense.
If a book or paper could be written either during the research time that universities still, just about, make available or during a period in which the scholar or scientist in question receives external funding for the notionally additional costs, academics are now obliged by their universities to opt for the latter. Indeed, being able to raise such outside money, from whatever source, is now being written into job advertisements as a requirement of the post.
Spot on. There is one aspect of this that Collini doesn’t discuss, which is that in many scientific and technological disciplines there isn’t any realistic prospect of universities being able to finance the research out of their own stable funding. Maybe the big American Ivy League colleges are exceptions, but even then I doubt it. But research and scholarship in the humanities does not require such lavish funding, and yet even there academics are being pressured to seek external funding and to demonstrate the “impact” of their work. Collini’s strictures apply with even greater force there.
Lovely rant by Simon Jenkins about LSE.
With felicitous timing, London's Royal Court theatre is staging Richard Bean’s hilarious if chaotic play, Heretic, about a university department eager for a grant from a multinational company and ready to suppress academic rigour to do so. It is clearly based on the University of East Anglia and climate change, but the words LSE and Gaddafi could be substituted throughout.
The global-warming sceptic, played by Juliet Stevenson, is ostracised and driven to madness by her colleagues, as her professor argues that their department is merely a unit to “service clients … a virtual budget centre providing tools to the market”. Eager for money, he quotes a Chinese proverb: “Man must stand for long time with mouth open before roast duck fly in.”
For the LSE, Gaddafi of Libya was pure roast duck. Journalists trawling through the recent jobs, contacts and pronouncements of LSE academics, including directors Lord Giddens and Sir Howard Davies – who has now resigned – have been aghast. Despite references to “the context of the times”, the story is of a respected academic institution apparently in mesmerised thrall to a dictator, and actively participating in sanitising his image.
Gaddafi was seen praised by LSE luminaries in a cringe-making video link as “the world’s longest serving leader”. His son, Saif al-Islam, settled in a north London palace to write an LSE PhD and dispense trips and contracts. He was declared as being committed to “democracy, civil society and deep liberal values” and was even invited to give the Ralph Miliband memorial lecture, an unusual honour for any student. His appreciation was swift. The university accepted a £1m contract to train 400 regime-approved “future leaders” from Libya. The mind boggles at it all.
It does indeed look as though LSE had lost its ethical bearings. But so do most universities when they get drawn into the reality distortion field that surrounds large bodies of money. The Divinity School in Cambridge was built with money from the Hinduja brothers. And Oxford’s Said Business School was built with money from a Syrian arms dealer. American universities are even worse — largely because they are better at fundraising.
I have a friend who was, for a time, deputy head of a major college and whose portfolio included fundraising. He hated it, and once said that, after a day’s schmoozing with potential donors, he felt physically dirty and had to take a shower when he got home. Another prominent academic friend resigned from the Mastership of an Oxbridge college because he couldn’t stand the social and ethical obligations of fundraising.
You don’t have to go to the extreme of believing that “behind every fortune lies a crime” to concede that truly untainted money is very rare. As state funding continues to evaporate, the pressures on universities to prostitute themselves in order to obtain donations from rich individuals will intensify. So we will see more of the ethical doublethink practised by LSE and other elite universities as they pocket the loot while claiming that research priorities and academic values are entirely untouched by theiir mendicancy. It’s nauseating but — hey — ivory towers are expensive to maintain.
