Obsidian Wings

Signal boost: Cat with broken leg, Brooklyn: UPDATE

by Doctor Science

A black cat with a broken leg is at Patrick and Theresa Nielsen Haydens' back door.

They have no cat carrier, serious cat allergies, and no car to transport the cat to the Brooklyn Animal Control shelter. If any of you can help, contact them. If not, pass it on.

UPDATE:
Patrick reports that "A lovely volunteer from the Mayor's Office for NYC Animals has just come by and TAKEN THE CAT AWAY. ... Thanks to the excellent Steve Gruber at the Mayor's Alliance and his volunteer coordinator Valerie."

Business kleptocracy

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, without (much) regard for the stockholders or other owners, the employees, or the customers?

I'm asking because I think this is characteristic of large corporations (and often non-profits) these days, and I don't know what to call it.

The Thief, by Jamie Wyeth.

buying stuff off of the internet open thread

by liberal japonicus

For a number of reasons, I tend not to buy stuff off of the internet, so I'm curious what the commentariat has bought off the internet and why. I did recently buy something and I'll put that in the comments later so as to avoid giving the imprimatur of Obsidian Wings (at least not before negotiating some deal) Have at it.

When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.

by liberal japonicus

The title is from Hunter Thompson, chosen because Dr. Science's recent post struck me in a bit of an oblique way, in that temps were raised because the doctor made the argument that some might summarize (mistakenly, I think) as "editors are no longer professional". The title is not to suggest that professional editors are weird, but to suggest that one of the flash points here is a notion of professionalism, a notion that seems to have gotten a bit, well, weird. 

It wasn't that long ago that society looked disdainfully on 'professionals'. The NCAA is still trying to keep that boat afloat. Busloads of armchair philologists have pointed out the origin of the word 'amateur' as someone doing something for love rather than money and wondering why the word has such a disdainful, not ready for prime-time connotation. Still, you don't want to tell someone the DIY work they did looks 'amateur', or some painting at a friend's house really looks like it was done by an amateur.

And professionalism is now a word, and a quality, that seems to brook no notion that anything its opposite is worthwhile, except in matters of the heart, which is why one doesn't hear how someone's lovemaking was quite professional. But the discussion here so far has me wondering about changes in our notions of professionalism.

In a comment to one of the doctor's post, I drew the parallel between editors, who are having to do a lot more work with fewer people and a lot less support, with teachers, who are having to do a lot more work with fewer people and a lot less support. Another example might be the military, such that people on the left have to figure out a way to criticize our conflict du jour, but not express any disdain for the 'professionalism' of our military and I am hard pressed to think of a field where the goal is to provide more and better services for less money. This is not to say that individual practitioners in various fields aren't, but that is my impression of the overall trends.

Part of Dr. Science's posts, though not explicitly stated, is that changes in technology and society are creating changes in the publishing industry. But thinking about professionalism, it seems that a push for the best possible bottom line are creating a situation where being a professional is not really worth the effort in any field where there is money to be made. If your middle of the line publisher lets go 90% of the proofreading and editing staff and then sticks it to the 10% to make up the difference, being a professional editor might, under some circumstances, demand that you join the rest leaving the building, but I can easily see that some (especially in upper management) would argue that a professional attitude dictates that you do your best to get the job finished, and quit yer whining. I'm wondering how a campaign premised on the phrase "I wanted to be a professional, so I joined the union" would go over. For an old fogey lefty like me, it might be 'damn right, being a professional means getting a living wage for what you do!" But I have a sinking suspicion it would backfire and people will be complaining about people joining the union because they want their wage for the purpose of getting granite countertops.  

All this seems to translate out to a society wide phenomenon where professionalism, while based on the fact that someone gets paid for doing something, now demands that you are not getting paid too much. Put in a different way, when you don't want as much money as you can possibly get for doing the minimum amount of work to get it, you are professional. When you want to do more work than your bosses actually require, you are being professional. And when you care about the product you produce more than your bosses care about the bottom line, you are being professional. 

In the near future, it seems that professional will be reserved for those who undertake some work on the condition that they receive only enough payment to keep body and soul together and not a penny more. 'That one is a true professional', they will sniff, because they will worry about it's versus its, or feel it is important to have all the words in a book spelled correctly, or have an index that refers to the correct pages and will work to overtime to make sure it is right. Welcome to the future.

Parentcam

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:

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

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

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.

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

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 by commenter Professor Fate, who says ze worked in trade publishing from 1986 to 1998:

publishing was historically a business with a low return - (5% was a figure banded about) which was unacceptable in an era when 20% returns were becoming the norm (I blame wall street's inflated return levels for this but that's another essay). This led to pressure to publish sure things either new books by already established authors or series (you'll notice Robert Ludlum is apparently still writing some years after his death).

Editorial decay wasn't due just (or even mostly) to increased costs, but to increased demands for profits from higher-ups in GargantuMaw-type conglomerates.

Socialist Space Workers by Gennady Golobokov (1973). Found when I went looking for pictures of "workers".

Mark Liberman at Language Log has come across a heinous example:

John Barth is visiting Penn, and so I took the opportunity to catch up on his most recent meta-fictions, specifically The Development and Every Third Thought. ...

What struck me about The Development was the transformation of every single instance of the singular inanimate possessive pronoun "its" into (the orthographically regular but culturally deprecated form) "it's". Here are some examples from the first couple of pages, starting with the book's second sentence (emphasis added, here and throughout):

My projected history of our Oyster Cove community, and specifically the season of it's Peeping Tom, is barely past the note-gathering stage, …

… HBE's golf course, whose Ecological Sensitivity consists of using recycled "gray water" on it's greens and fairways …

Liberman was reading the Kindle edition of The Development -- you can see the full grammatical horror for yourself by using the "Look Inside" function there. The print edition's Look Inside reveals no such problems, so the typos must have been added during ebook-ification. I don't see the typos in the preview offered for the Barnes&Noble Nook version: it's Kindle-ification, specifically, that is borked.

SF writer Charles Stross points out that :

Amazon don't proofread kindle ebooks -- they're notorious for running a 100% automatic file conversion pipeline. Anything remotely non-standard in the input file causes it to break, entertainingly -- and no human eyeball checks the output until it goes on sale.

Stross is worried about Amazon's monopoly and monopsony powers, but curiously doesn't list their willingness to sell needlessly inferior products as a point of great concern.

If I were Barnes&Noble or Sony, I'd be playing this up to the skies -- make an official guarantee-or-your-money-back that the text of *their* e-books will be identical to the hard copy's. Contra Stross' worries, Tom Simon points out that:

[Amazon's] share of the ebook market peaked a year or so back, at about 90 percent, and has been shrinking ever since. It was not because of monopoly power that they acquired such a large market share, but simply because they were the first major player to take ebooks seriously and make an effort to earn that business. First-mover advantage does not equal monopoly. Based on information from various sources, I gather that Amazon's share of the ebook market has declined to about 70 percent.

Now, you may say that Kindle mangling the text of a prestigious literary writer has nothing to do with the publishing industry, it's completely the fault of Amazon.

Bollocks, says I. Publishing companies that actually cared about the quality of the work being sold under their names would have written quality-control clauses into their contracts with Amazon as a matter of course. They'd also monitor the finished e-books, to make sure that Amazon wasn't making unauthorized changes. In Barth's case, he might actually be able to sue for copyright violation or other infringement, because Amazon (and the publisher) are selling, under his name, a text that makes him look bad, reducing the value of his "brand". He could even argue that he didn't write the text they're selling, because the pervasive mutilation changes the delivery and perception of the story.

People who are in publishing and who still have professional standards need to notice that the industry they're working in does not: its only standard is (apparently) profit. I don't see how imprints that are part of a GargantuMaw can hope to keep their professional standards, given that their corporate masters very clearly don't have any.

Baker Oostwaert and His Wife by Jan Steen (c.1658). I guess that bakers of this period are pictured with blowing horns because it was their custom to do so when a fresh batch of bread was out of the oven and ready for sale. I'm using the picture of a baker because adulteration of bread was a long-standing problem in European society.

---

UPDATE:

Mark Liberman reports that the same typo is visible in the Free Sample offered by B&N, so the problem does *not* come from Amazon, but (almost certainly) from the publisher's end. You can see the full effect by searching for "it's" in the Google e-Books version, which also includes the typo.

The evidence for this book, at least, is that publishers are converting text files to e-book formats without having a competent human so much as glance at the result before sending them to the e-book companies. What can I call this besides flagrantly unprofessional?

50 Shades of Fandom: Writing. Part IIa

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.

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".

A 'they really do that at schools over there' Friday open post

 by liberal japonicus

Though every week is education week at the lj household, this week has a bit of an edge to it. Yesterday, we experienced katei homon, where the teacher of my youngest (2nd grade elementary) comes by to visit the home, talk to a parent (almost always the mother) and see how the child interacts. My daughter has been practicing making coffee for the teacher, and got to show off her barista skills. The visit usually lasts about 30 minutes and happens every year of compusory education (elementary and JHS)

Saturday is our oldest's sankanbi, or demonstration lesson, where the parents are invited to the school to watch a lesson. Because my schedule is a lot more relaxed that the average father's, I've been able to attend more of these, though I'm not the only father in the room, thank god.

Both of these events underline how serious Japanese take education and also hint at a dark side in that they can enforce a conformity that is difficult to escape. For example, the katei homon for a first year elementary student has the teacher come and look at where the child studies and gives the teacher a chance to make suggestions and it is easy to see how teachers could determine how much and what kind of attention a child gets based on what is just a glimpse into his or her homelife. This also leads to things like the randoseru, a backpack that all elementary school students purchase. Theoretically, there is no requirement for the type of backpack that is purchased, in practice, everyone has the same kind of backpack. When I was working in Miyagi prefecture, boys had black and girls had red, but in the past ten years, not only has the price been driven down by online sales, a variety of colors are now available as well as a variety of prices.

I'll try to add some other things that might strike folks as strange in the education system here in the comments, but y'all are a pretty varied crowd, so I'm sure everyone has something that will surprise and amaze me. Have at it.

50 Shades of Publishing, Part I

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 --

Being *that* dad

by Doctor Science

The other day KJ Dell'Antonia of the NY Times' Motherlode parenting blog wrote about a Parental Quandary: When Young Boys Joke About Rape, about two recent emails she received:

WARNING: cut for potentially triggery talk about rape, realistic and "joking"; also for images of canonical artistic nudity.