Monthly Archives: April 2006

This is Pretty Funny

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

From Brian Leiter’s Law School Reports: World’s Fastest Article Rejection by a Law Review (25 minutes). It’s worth clicking through to the article that got rejected, by the way.

Posted in Law School | 3 Comments

Introducing “Blog Swag”

Posted on April 13, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Either I have the most wonderful and eclectic set of readers in the blogsophere, or authors and marketers are strange and desperate people. Or maybe both. How else to explain the odd and wonderful variety of things that people have started sending me out of the blue ever since this blog achieved its firm status somewhere between obscure and wildly popular?

As a law teacher one becomes accustomed to the piles of casebooks, hornbooks, teaching aids, and sundry possible optional readings that publishers send out twice a year in the usually vain hope that it will be adopted as class reading. But in the past year or so, the mix has been sweetened. Two PR people volunteered to send me DVDs of forthcoming movies if I would promise to review them in my blog. I declined. But several book authors have sent me books without extracting any promises whatsoever. And so far I have disappointed them all.

The reasons are various, but they almost all boil down to my not having ever had the time and energy to read the book from beginning to end. Some of the books were too serious, but not related to current work. One seemed too crazy. A couple looked like great thrillers, and are piled up with the other great thrillers I plan to read Real Soon Now. If I read the poetry book at my usual pace for poetry, I should be done well before the end of the decade. The books on torture make me too angry to keep reading. And then there is K. Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism, which I did read, like very much, recommend, planned to write about at some length…and then misplaced.

But the era of disappointment is over. As of today, I have this new blog category, to cover my comments on non-work-related (i.e. other than primarily law or Internet tech) things that people send me — and that I decide I have something to say about. By posting in this category, I acknowledge that I received a bribe in the form of blog swag: a free copy of the book or (one can hope) CD or DVD. I also represent to you that the I made no promises to get the swag, not of a mention, and certainly not of a favorable one, and that I certainly will not feel obligated to post about something just because someone sends me one.

Unless of course it's very very expensive.1

Why do this now now? Well, this weekend I not only finished reading a blog swag book, but then manged not to lose it. Expect a review soon. Real Soon. Yah, real real soon….

1 This is almost certainly a joke

Posted in Blog Swag | 2 Comments

My Brother’s Cyberstalker

Posted on April 12, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

A blog named Rosetta complains that my brother takes too many vacations.

Look, he’s here in Miami and showing off the baby, OK?

Posted in Dan Froomkin | 2 Comments

Declining Returns Seen in Academic Sector

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

In the course of justly reaming Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat for the Journal of Economic Literature, Edward Leamer delivers himself of a throwaway remark on the declining returns from the academy and what that might teach about the open source movement,

We [academics] are part of a “Self-Organizing Collaborative Community” called the research universities of the United States and increasingly the rest of the world. Unlike contributors to Wikipedia and Linux, we get paid for our work, not by those who consume the fruits of our labor, but by taxpayers and by donors and by our students, all of whom we have convinced are better off by virtue of the research that we do. When it got started fifty years ago, this system worked great, but it isn’t working as well anymore. While we are doing plenty of worthwhile research we are also doing plenty that isn’t worthwhile, and the competition for research talent defined by the fads of the moment is driving up the cost of education to unaffordable levels. Adam Smith would have understood what’s wrong here. It takes sales for the invisible hand to do its magic. Begging in your work clothes when you aren’t working isn’t enough, even though the pastime may be lucrative. On the contrary, the more lucrative is the begging, the more likely is the conclusion that the work is worthwhile. But it takes accurate market prices to tell us what’s valuable and what’s not. Of course, good will and good intentions can carry a collaborative community productively for a while, but financial rewards relentlessly bend the system to their will, slowly perhaps, but inevitably. That’s the invisible hand at work. Thus, open-sourcing has the same problems and the same probable longevity as the communes of the 1960s — they worked great for a while, but the participants chose other ways to live once they got to know the people in the community.

Uncomfortable, but with a ring of truth.

Indeed, I think I heard one of the death-knells for the modern high-priced university this week. Increasingly, even reasonably well-off parents without pensions, people planning to retire off 401(k) plans, just don’t think they can afford it any more.

Incidentally, the entire Leamer review is great stuff and I recommend it.

Posted in Econ & Money | 1 Comment

Kaimipono Wenger Says I’m Nuts

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

Kaimipono Wenger starts the DSM for bloggers.

Given the number of people who have written to my ICANNWatch persona and been amazed to get an answer from the guy who writes Discourse.net, I guess at least one of the shoes fits…

Posted in Blogs | Comments Off on Kaimipono Wenger Says I’m Nuts

No Institution Left Behind

Posted on April 11, 2006 by Michael Froomkin

It’s amazing. This administration corrupts everything it touches — even librarians. And that’s saying a lot, because librarians have been in the forefront of fighting against many of the objectionable aspects of this governments’ information control policies. That’s why it’s such a shock to learn from The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) Blog that the National Archives Agreed to Coverup Reclassification Scheme:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) secretly agreed to hide from researchers attempts by intelligence and defense agencies to reclassify thousands of documents that had already been publicly released, some for as long as 50 years. Through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the National Security Archive (the Archive) obtained a secret memorandum of understanding (MOU; pdf) between NARA, the Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency and other intelligence agencies whose existence has been covered up through redactions.

The National Security Archive site’s explanation of what it discovered says that the program started four years ago, in 2002. The deal to which the Archives agreed could hardly be more explicit in its goals, among them “to avoid the attention and researcher complaints that may arise from removing material that has already been publicly available.”

I should note that although this agreement is dated 2002, the National Security Archive’s article suggests the reclassification program may have started “at the end of the Clinton administration” although I’m unclear on what they base that. Not that it matters; it’s wrong as a general matter.

I won’t go so far as to say that there are no circumstances in which an accidentally declassified document should be pulled from the shelves; I just think at most they’re very rare. And it’s evident that this program, which swept up thousands of documents, many of no possible national security value, was nowhere near reasonable.

Posted in Politics: The Party of Sleaze | 1 Comment