We Have Moved

Zeal and Activity is moving across the street to a new WordPress.com URL:

http://zealandactivityblog.wordpress.com

If you were so kind as to blogroll us, please update your links, and pardon our dust as we get everything settled.

UPDATE: Commenting is now turned off for this blog.  Please find the corresponding post at the new URL to leave a comment.

Thank you.

Why Don’t Libraries Exhibit Long Tail?

In today’s Wall Street Journal, citing a January 2 story in the Washington Post, John Miller notes a trend in the library business: removing books that aren’t checked out often. It seems that no one has checked out For Whom the Bell Tolls in 24 months, and the Fairfax County Public Library may purge its copy.

In the retail industry, one would say that Hemingway has “low velocity” and replace him with something that “turns faster:” a best-seller. Libraries are stocking more new releases and cutting low velocity items to make space. For example, my local library stocks extra copies of popular new titles for 7-day checkout, no renewals. They used to charge a fee for these high-demand books, which I refused on principle. The extra books are later sold for a few dollars.

Why doesn’t Fairfax County library usage exhibit a Long Tail? Is its population of 1 million too small (68% are cardholders)? Search costs at a library are very low and, for residents, transportation cost isn’t a problem either (population density in Fairfax is 2,455 per square mile). The library has 8 locations and 12 community branches, which recieved 5.2 million visits in 2006 and loaned 11.3 million items. The collection is “nearly 3 million books… and other items.”

Are library users changing? Mr. Miller suggests that the Fairfax library is responding to customer needs: library users want to read new releases without spending $20 or $30.

If public libraries attempt to compete in this [increasingly competitive and diverse publishing and retail] environment , they will increasingly be seen for what Fairfax County apparently envisions them to be: welfare programs for middle-class readers who would rather borrow Nelson DeMille’s newest potboiler than spend a few dollars for it at their local Wal-Mart.

(I’m certainly guilty of this. I try not to buy books I haven’t already read. The public library spreads the cost of bad books over many readers, a valuable service. At the same time, I’m nonplussed by a library that doesn’t want to stock American classics - but I also like public institutions to save tax dollars by applying private-sector performance metrics like inventory turns and GMROI. I don’t know why Mr. Miller thinks that retail is a poor model for libraries; retail is one of the most innovative industries of the past 30 years.)

Finally, why are all the titles and authors in the Washington Post list so familiar? It’s implied that this list is complete and exhaustive:

The following books have been weeded from the shelves of various branches of the Fairfax County Public Library system or haven’t been checked out in 24 months and could be discarded.

But the 22 at-risk titles read like a who’s who: Hemingway, Stein, Proust, Faulkner, Hardy, Kerouac, Pasternak, Angelou, Williams, Bronte, Solzhenitsyn, Marlowe, Fitzgerald, Eliot - even To Kill a Mockingbird. This can’t be the whole story. After all, these titles aren’t being eliminated from the entire system - only from specific regional branches.

RELATED: Patience and Fortitude: Wherein a Colorful Cast of Determined Book Collectors, Dealers, and Librarians Go About the Quixotic Task of Preserving a Legacy, by Nicholas A. Basbanes

Is News Puzzling or Mysterious?

In this week’s New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point, has a piece about the distinction between “puzzles” and “mysteries.” Puzzles have objective answers and are solved when all necessary information is assembled. Mysteries are “answered” in probablistic language and are solved by aggregating and interpreting as much data as possible; mysterious data is subjective and never complete.

Diagnosing prostate cancer used to be a puzzle, for example: the doctor would do a rectal exam and feel for a lumpy tumor on the surface of the patient’s prostate. These days, though, we don’t wait for patients to develop the symptoms of prostate cancer. … The urologist is now charged with the task of making sense of a maze of unreliable and conflicting claims. He is no longer confirming the presence of a malignancy. He’s predicting it, and the certainties of his predecessors have been replaced with outcomes that can only be said to be “highly probable” or “tentatively estimated.” What medical progress has meant for prostate cancer… is the transformation of diagnosis from a puzzle to a mystery.

This is a useful distinction with applications in the rapidly ongoing evolution of media and reporting. Mainstream media organizations like The New York Times, CNN, or The Economist appear to be designed for “puzzle-solving:” they assemble facts and a putative subject expert writes a definative account or analysis of events.

The blogosphere and “distributed” or “radically transparent” or “citizens’” media treat news as a mystery. Loosely coordinated writers collect and subjectively interpret data - much of it publicly available - aided by the ethic of links and updates. This approach can be seen most recently in the Jamail Hussein investigation.

In this way, the blogosphere resembles the World War II British team that bested traditional intelligence agencies by analyzing German propaganda. Indeed, Clive Thompson drew this parallel in the New York Times last month (via Chris Anderson). Much current media innovation attempts to embed the mystery-solving aspects of the blogosphere within mainstream media business models (e.g. NewsTrust.net, wiki editorials, commenting and digg enabled at BusinessWeek, etc.).

PREVIOUSLY: Eason Jordan for Transparent Media

UPDATE: The WWII V-1 rocket analysis mentioned above is parelled exactly by Iran’s mysterious nuclear weapons program. From Mr. Gladwell’s article:

The German secret weapon was a puzzle, and the Allies didn’t have enough information to solve it. There was another way to think about the problem, though, which ultimately proved far more useful: treat the German secret weapon as a mystery. … Goebbels had never lied to his own people about that sort of news. So if he said that Germany had a devastating secret weapon it meant, in all likelihood, that Germany had a devastating secret weapon.

Bloomberg News (via Hugh Hewitt):

Iran will start producing nuclear fuel on an industrial scale soon, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said… Iran is determined to “achieve peaks of success and defend its interests powerfully,” the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Ahmadinejad as telling supporters in Khuzestan province [on January 3]…

Review: Dangerous Nation

According to Robert Kagan’s new book Dangerous Nation, American isolationist and aloof in foreign affairs is a myth, a seductive component of America’s self-image that creates a potentially dangerous “gap between Americans’ self-perception and the perceptions of others.” Dangerous Nation was 10 years in the writing, but its subject couldn’t be more timely.

Mr. Kagan argues that in fact American is the opposite of isolationist: it has been restlessly engaged beyond its borders since before 1776.

To support his thesis, Mr. Kagan has assembled a history of American foreign policy from the mid-eighteenth century to the Spanish-American War. He includes a variety of matters that historians may not always have considered “foreign policy,” such as American demands for British intervention against the French in the Ohio Valley, policy of the new United States toward Indian nations and the colonies of Spain, and the decades of North-South maneuvering on slavery. Familiar episodes like Washington’s Farewell Address are subjected to new, persuasive analysis.

A few themes emerge: American foreign policy is informed by its nature as a liberal republic and its philosophical roots in the Enlightenment - “a universalist ideology… articulated in the Declaration of Independence.” In addition to powerful commercial and territorial interests, American foreign policy, including war-making, is therefore driven by moral and humanitarian concerns. America reacts sharply to incompatible “systems” such as French revolutionary tyranny and Southern slavery (and communism), in each case adopting a strategy of containment.

The reader will recognize the America of the 1930s oil and iron embargo on Japan, Lend-Lease, the West Berlin airlift, Vietnam, Grenada, and NAFTA - not to mention Desert Storm, September 11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Dangerous Nation is essential and fascinating reading.

MORE: An NPR interview with Mr. Kagan.

The End of an Era

Today is the final broadcast (in reruns) of George Jellinek’s radio program The Vocal Scene, through which he “shared his knowledge and love of singing” for 40 years. Here is a New Yorker appreciation of Mr. Jellinek’s career from 2004, when he recorded his last episode. His memoir, My Road to Radio and “The Vocal Scene”, is available here.

* * *

Posting resumes after a needed break. Happy New Year.

Friday Mystery Author: Dec. 22, 2006

No mystery this week. Our passage is from the second chapter of the Gospel according to St. Luke:

In those days Caesar Augustus issued a decree that a census should be taken of the entire Roman world. (This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.) And everyone went to his own town to register.

So Joseph also went up from the town of Nazareth in Galilee to Judea, to Bethlehem the town of David, because he belonged to the house and line of David. He went there to register with Mary, who was pledged to be married to him and was expecting a child. While they were there, the time came for the baby to be born, and she gave birth to her firstborn, a son. She wrapped him in cloths and placed him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

And there were shepherds living out in the fields nearby, keeping watch over their flocks at night. An angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. But the angel said to them, “Do not be afraid. I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.” Suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appeared with the angel, praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace to men on whom his favor rests.”

When the angels had left them and gone into heaven, the shepherds said to one another, “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about.”

So they hurried off and found Mary and Joseph, and the baby, who was lying in the manger. When they had seen him, they spread the word concerning what had been told them about this child, and all who heard it were amazed at what the shepherds said to them. But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart. The shepherds returned, glorifying and praising God for all the things they had heard and seen, which were just as they had been told.

From the New International Version, via Bible Gateway. Merry Christmas.

Friday Mystery Author: Charles Dickens

This week’s Friday Mystery Author passage was from Charles Dickens’s lovely fable A Christmas Carol, which begins with these inimitable lines:

Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ‘Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dogdays; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”

But what did Scrooge care? It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.

As I said on Friday, I thought of this week’s passage after reading a thread on lists at Edward Tufte’s website, and I see that this bit is full of lists too: “the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner;” “his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and sole mourner;” “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner!” “froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue and spoke out shrewdly;” “on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin.” This is what George Orwell called Dickens’s “fertility of invention… of turns of phrase and concrete … unecessary detail.”

Light Posting

Holiday travel for the next few weeks, much of it away from fast Internet, so posting will be a little lighter.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Friday Mystery Author: Dec 15, 2006

Welcome to this week’s edition of Friday Mystery Author. Take a shot at identifying this passage (author and title) from a well-known novel, or just say hello in the comments.

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceilings were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove, from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known… Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chesnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.

I was put in mind of this passage by this fun thread on lists and lists in literature at Edward Tufte’s website, with citations from Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, Jorge Luis Borge, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Richard Nixon.

Last week’s edition of Friday Mystery Author is here. Thank you for coming by, and have a good weekend. I’ll post this week’s title and author on Monday.

John Hinderaker’s Modest Proposal for Iran

On November 30, ABC News reported that Iran is arming Shiite militias in Iraq with “brand-new weapons fresh from Iranian factories.”

“There is no way this could be done without (Iranian) government approval,” says a senior official.

This is only the latest evidence of Iran’s involvement via proxy in Iraq. In November 2004, U.S. News and World Report published “The Iran Connection” (via Blackfive). Key excerpts:

[A] review of thousands of pages of intelligence reports by U.S. News reveals the critical role Iran has played in aiding some elements of the anti-American insurgency after Baghdad fell–and raises important questions about whether Iran will continue to try to destabilize Iraq after elections are held. …

[T]he picture that emerges from the sheer volume of the reports, and as a result of the multiplicity of sources from which they were generated, leaves little doubt about the depth of Iran’s involvement in supporting elements of the insurgency…

Iranian intelligence agents were said to have planned attacks against the U.S.-led forces and supported terrorist groups with weapons. Iranian agents smuggled weapons and ammunition across the border into Iraq and distributed them “to individuals who wanted to attack coalition forces…”

In November of last year [2003], the Iraq Survey Group received information that Iran had formed small groups of fighters to conduct attacks in cities across Iraq. “Iran had reportedly placed a bounty on U.S. forces of U.S. $2,000 for each helicopter shot down, $1,000 for each tank destroyed, and $500 for each U.S. military personnel killed,” the Iraq Survey Group reported. …

[A]s it continues its elaborate dance with the West over its ambitious nuclear program, the Islamic regime has yet to turn the heat up full blast in Iraq, evidently secure in the knowledge that it can do so when and if it sees the need to. “I would not put it past them to carry out spectacular attacks,” says David Kay, the former chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq, “to demonstrate the cost of a hostile policy. That is the policy issue–can we learn to live with Iranian nuclear capacity?”

Now John Hinderaker of Power Line says President Bush should place the new evidence before the nation, a la Cuban Missle Crisis, and threaten preemptive strikes on terrorist training camps and supply depots. Futhermore,

declare that no nation that is engaged in killing American servicemen… will be permitted to arm itself with nuclear weapons. Iran must either open all nuclear-related facilities to inspection by an international group headed by the U.S. … or those facilities, too, will be destroyed, along with the economic infrastructure that supports them.

I doubt very much that Mr. Ahmadinejad’s domestic position would permit him to back down to this kind of threat. He would stand defiant, implying an enormous bombing and cruise missile campaign; necessarily boots on the ground in Iran, to direct air strikes; and great economic and physical suffering for the Iranian people. The analogies write themselves: Cambodian Incursion and Linebacker.

The Power Line Forum commenter Bird of Paradise is correct that U.S. public opinion was entirely different during the Missile Crisis. Could the President execute Mr. Hinderaker’s plan with out asking Congress for a declaration of war or getting the approval of the Iraqi government?

Rather than such a dramatic escalation, I would submit that a show of moral and psychological “force” or resolve would have greater effect on Mr. Ahmadinejad than an overt bombing campaign. This would include signals of commitment in Iraq (increases in deployment levels and the base size of the Army), selected and deniable strikes on Iranian safe havens, some level of partnership with Iranian Kurdish insurgents, Congressional endorsement of a plan for Iraq, and so forth.

RELATED on Zeal and Activity:

• What Are They Up To in Tehran?
• Twenty Questions on Iran

UPDATE: Here is an odd report on conflict within Saudi Aribia on “Iran and how to contain Iran” (via Instapundit). More here.

UPDATE: Dean Barnett says it’s not the nukes, it’s the regime: “What makes the Iranian potential nuclear arsenal an untenable threat is the nature of the country’s leadership. In short, it’s not Iran’s nuclear weapons program that must be made to disappear. It’s the present ruling regime.”