Timothy Burke has posted one of the most sensible assessments I’ve seen of the problems with “effects” research, spurred on by the vastly over-reported study recently released suggesting a correlation between time spent in day care and “disruptiveness” in school.  Burke extrapolates outward to think about the persistent problem of “media effects” research, which has for decades attempted to create causal links between a series of social problems and the consumption of media texts (i.e., Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cause schoolchildren to kick one another, Marilyn Manson causes teenage suicide, violent videogames cause school shootings, and so forth).  For whatever reason, I keep expecting us all to have moved beyond such simple causalities, and am always taken by surprise when any study suggesting that mode of cultural consumption x causes social problem y seems to achieve such wide purchase in the public imagination.

But then, by and large, we all want something to blame for such social problems other than ourselves, something external to our family structures and our under-supported schools, something that we can demonize without having to ask more difficult questions about our culture and its values and inequities.  Burke concludes with a pledge that we could all bear to take:

Do not endorse research about social behavior or social psychology without first looking very carefully at the methodology and the effect size. If you would disregard the study on those grounds when it contradicts your own social views, disregard it when it endorses your views.

I’d add to this, though, that we might all bear growing a bit more skeptical about causality in general, resisting the suggestion that a correlation between phenomena can tell us anything more than that there’s a correlation between phenomena, particularly when the putative “effects” of the phenomena under study are, as Burke points out, “teeny-tiny.”

Earlier this week, I spent a couple of days on the Jersey shore with the guys from the Institute for the Future of the Book, my MediaCommons co-coordinating editor, Avi Santo, and nine-twelfths of the founding members of the editorial board. We spent all day embroiled in a series of very intense, sometimes difficult, but always exciting conversations about what the network should become and how we should take it there.

We’re of course still processing the outcomes from these conversations, but I’ve ventured a couple of posts on the MediaCommons blog that begin to capture some of the many ideas that were in circulation in New Jersey. We didn’t all agree, and so I expect that there will be more discussion in the comments; I hope you’ll pass by and join in the fray.

I should also note that MediaCommons has just published a paper of mine, drawn from a talk I’ve been giving about the background for and development of the scholarly network. This paper is meant both to be about the network and an experiment in network structure; the paper is fully commentable, at levels ranging from the paragraph to the page, by anyone with a registered MediaCommons account. We hope that this instantiation of some of our guiding principles for the network might help spread the word about what we’re up to (and why) as well as suggest some of the exciting possibilities for networked scholarly publishing into the future.

Please come by and join in the various conversations; we want your input. (One caveat, however: if you’re planning on being in Lander Auditorium at the University of Rochester this afternoon at 1 pm, you might want to hold off on reading that paper, so as to avoid a fairly intensive experience of déjà lu.)

I cannot stop looking at this.  There’s something about the flatness of the subjects’ affect (apparently a learned pose, which sinks in sometime around age 4) and something about the monumental changes in the kids and the ever-so-gradual changes in the parents that I find absolutely haunting.

There’s been a lot of talk about the need for an Air Traveler’s Bill of Rights of late, particularly since February’s JetBlue fiasco.  I’m all for pressuring the airlines to be more proactive in its approach to customer service, as goodness knows I’ve experienced my fair share of delays and aggravations.

More than anything, though, I think that the airlines need to focus on treating all passengers like they treat their elite frequent flyers.  Here’s the kind of thing I’m talking about:  I flew yesterday to New York, but got delayed in Houston.  Not for a long time—we were about an hour and a half late departing, first because of an air traffic control delay, and then because of a mechanical issue.  Continental delayed boarding until we were actually ready to go, so we weren’t trapped on the plane all that time.  It just wasn’t that big a deal.

However, this morning, I got this email message:

Dear Ms. Kathleen Fitzpatrick:

You are a valued Platinum Elite member of our OnePass program and we strive to meet your travel needs at all times. When we don’t succeed we take it very seriously. Our records show that you experienced an inconvenience while traveling with us between Houston/ George Bush, TX (IAH) and New York/ LaGuardia, NY (LGA) on 03/23/2007.

We work hard every day to ensure that all Continental Airlines flights operate safely and on time. There are times when even our best efforts cannot prevent a flight disruption. We are sorry if this experience was inconvenient for you.

So as a goodwill gesture, 500 OnePass bonus miles have been deposited into your account. Continental Airlines employees are committed to providing you an excellent and safe travel experience. We appreciate your business and look forward to serving you in the future.

The miles, while a nice touch, are more gestural than anything.  What actually meant something to me was the apology—and even more than that, that the apology appeared without my demanding it.  I hadn’t complained, and didn’t intend to.  So what’s amazing here is that the airline noticed that I might have been inconvenienced, and acknowledged their responsibility.

Granted, there are many more passengers than there are Platinum Elite frequent flyers.  But how hard would it be for the airlines to issue such an apology to every passenger so inconvenienced?

Or, Threatening Other States Not to Follow Our Lead:

I’ve long been aggravated by gas prices in California, prices that, where I live, average about 30 cents a gallon more than prices for comparable fuel in Louisiana. But I’ve always known better than to complain much—after all, prices here are still pretty tiny compared with prices in other countries. And even within the US, there are worse places; after all, prices in Hawaii are inevitably 25 to 30 cents a gallon higher than in Los Angeles. Which only stands to reason; every drop of gasoline that arrives in Honolulu must go through some system of trucks, ships, and more trucks before hitting the pump.

Imagine my horror, then, during last week’s trip to Hawaii, when I discovered that gas in Honolulu was 30 cents a gallon cheaper than in SoCal. This is not an exaggeration; the day I flew out, gas in Clareville was going for approximately $2.97 a gallon, and when I arrived on the island, the first place I spotted was charging $2.69. And that price stayed relatively stable during the week, while gas at home was at $3.09 by the time I got home.

What gives? The story that’s been told (scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page) as long as I can remember is that because California has banned MTBE from its fuels, only a very few refineries can supply the state. But I’m deeply dubious—particularly when that gas is now 10% more expensive than it is on an island in the middle of the fucking Pacific ocean. R.’s theory is that the oil companies are both punishing California for its emissions-control regulations and threatening other states not to follow in California’s footsteps. I’m pretty convinced. After all, can the proximity of the recent spike in gas prices and last year’s passage of Proposition 87 be entirely coincidental?

Good grief, do I love these women.

What little time I’ve got these days, outside of teaching, preparing to teach, grading, feeling guilty about not grading, and going to meetings, is being spent getting ready for next week’s MediaCommons editorial board meeting. We’re attempting to set the agenda for this meeting in public, on the site, and would love the input of anyone interested in the project. Please join us there, and leave us your thoughts, suggestions, questions, and so forth.

Grrr.  I’m having an utterly infuriating time with air-l, one of the listservs that I’m subscribed to, because my subscription was apparently set up from my actual technical email address (which has a login id composed of a seemingly random collection of letters and numbers) but my email client uses one of my more sensible aliases (the eminently reasonable kfitzpatrick) in the “from” field, which makes the listserv think that there’s a message coming from someone who’s unsubscribed.  Easy-peasy, I thought; unsubscribe from the random collection of letters and numbers, resubscribe from kfitzpatrick, and resend the message!  Except: my subscription for some reason now requires moderator approval, and the moderator keeps on not approving.

What’s aggravating about this is that the conversation taking place, the one I wanted to throw my two cents into, is one that I really, really care about:  using blogs as an instructional tool.  And I’ve been feeling all squelched and stymied, and thinking, boy, I wish I had a way to get these thoughts Out There, into circulation.

Hey, wait!  I have a blog!

So here’s the thoughts.  The conversation begins with a post by a senior-type scholar of internet studies who raises the following question about class blogs:

I have Google Alert set to identify anything online that mentions my name. (I want to know who is talking about me and perhaps learn from their comments.)

Recently, I have been disturbed because Google Alert keeps popping up Blogspot entries that clearly come from class blog entries.

While I am happy that folks are reading my stuff, I am aghast that their entries are on the web for all to read.  (Altho I smile that they say nice things.)

I know that I don’t post my students’ term papers on the web [I only give ‘em to Turnitin;-)], but this strikes me as an even greater invasion of the students’ privacy. Shouldn’t such within-class stuff be password protected?

Something about this message really got under my skin; it seemed to me a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of a class blog.  There’ve been a number of good responses to this message that have come across the list (which I’ve had to go read from the air-l archives page, because I’m still not subscribed), but I really wanted my response out there.  So here it is:

While there’s definitely something here that demands to be considered, I’m not sure that it falls within the realm of ethics.  For the last several years, I’ve had almost all of my classes blogging, in public venues that are purposefully not password-protected.  I do, however, have a series of frank conversations with my students about the value and the consequences of doing intellectual work in public, and I think such conversations are necessary.

For instance, I have my students use screen names under which they blog, and we spend some time talking about why—talking about the durability of data on the internet, and the ways that Google and the Internet Archive can make things they’ve written publicly available long after they’ve forgotten them.  And I tell them that I want them to be free to take risks in my classes without having to worry that some future employer will google them in the process of a job search and discover some boneheaded thing that they wrote in my class.  For some of them, this conversation causes the light bulb to go on over their heads, and they head out and google themselves, to see what can already be found.

But we also discuss the value of doing this kind of intellectual work in public, of writing for an audience that is larger than just ourselves, of genuinely engaging with a broader field of folks working on the same issues.  And everytime something like this happens—a student posts a question about Scott Rettberg’s “Kind of Blue,” for instance, and Scott Rettberg himself pops by to respond—it absolutely electrifies the class, conveying in ways that no amount of talk from me will that they really are engaged in a conversation among scholars.

So yes, I think students’ privacy concerns need to be a subject of conversation, and I think that students need to be given some reasonable means of protecting themselves.  But I think the benefits of such public course blogs far outweigh the risks, and I think the discussions of those privacy concerns are themselves really productive for students to engage in.

I’m positively breathless about it all: we worked all morning, and then we went out to lunch today, and lunch had spices in it, and then we went shopping, and then I finished my grading, and then we went to the pool! And now we’re going to go get a drink! A fruity drink!

This message brought to you by all the exclamation points! That I haven’t gotten to use! In the last six months or so!

(The internet broke when I originally tried to post this three hours ago. The mai tais were nice, thanks.)

A quick post to say thanks to Chuck for letting me know that the New York Times has finally made its Times Select features free to students and educators with a valid university email address.

Repeat subject line here.