I’ve only just got round to reading Julie Myerson’s book about everyone who ever lived in her house, and I recognise a lot about the process, which was essentially about cold-calling, not relatives as I did, but former occupants and their descendants. (A particular thing I have in common is that I was looking for descendants and not ancestors.) It is such a simple and brilliant idea, and the only thing I’m a little less sure of is the way she weaves in another narrative about going back to her own former homes. It’s a clever device, but she pulls it off less well than her search for the people who actually inhabited her space. And of course, in reading all about her children, one of whom she has written about very explicitly and controversially this year, it is impossible to shake off the shadow of that row (she refused to let her son back into her home because of his involvement with drugs, and both she and her husband wrote openly about this).

What is clever about the idea is simply that it will make any reader start to wonder who has inhabited their own space over the last few (or more) decades. I am not sure how old this house is, only that it is half of what used to be a whole house. The oldest house I’ve lived in was built in the 1820s, and, I think, it remains my favourite. It was in Exeter in a tiny, hidden line of artisans’ houses, and it was in the mid-1980s. It was one of those lines of houses that you wouldn’t come across under nornal circumstances, because it was hidden away – it was one of four survivors of what had been a row of sixteen (there was a fifth house, but it had been tacked on much later). Bombs had knocked out the first ten; and Sanderson’s, who owned the six- or seven-storey block close by, had knocked down two more to build a car park. The five left over were threatened with demolition, but reprieved in the mid-1960s.

About the time I was living there, the law changed about the importance of the house’s deeds. They switched from being important legal documents to being interesting curios that the owner could keep, and I suspect this change, nationally, intended to streamline the process of exchanging property, led to a very large number of very interesting bundles of documents being lost. In this particular set of deeds (which I passed to the next owner), there were notes on the lease of the land to grow crops, going back to the late seventeenth century. They were fascinating. But I think they should have been handed in to an archive.

That phrase ‘I think’ is my default setting when it comes to archiving. On the one hand, I think it is sentimental; on the other, I think it is part of human nature to hang on to what shreds of evidence we have of our former selves, or rather those of our forebears.

Still, this week’s New Scientist has an article which claims that, if you were to show children the last common ancestor of humans and animals, they would immediately recognise it.

As a bathroom sponge.

You can read about it here.

Marielle Frostrup, a childhood idol, wrote this for the Guardian comment yesterday:(http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/media-privacy-mccann-mosley) Recently, it does seem that the boundaries of personal and private lives have been crossed. The most salient example of this, of course, is Jade Goody. I wholeheartedly support her in what she is trying to do for her sons, yet the whole affair smacks of publicity. Even Max Clifford can’t deny it. What once would have been a sacred affair is now out in the open for all and sundry to see. When seeing Jade’s bald head on the cover of some gossip magazine, I was shocked. Despite this ‘mediatisation’ of life, the amount of women going for smear tests has increased threefold, which can only be a good thing, right?

Second example are the Myersons. Jonathon’s article in G2 earlier this week struck a chord with me: my parents sent my brother away to ‘rehab’ (read, holiday in South Africa) when he was 16 due to cannabis use. At the time I was outraged, but looking back it was the best thing for him. He returned a brighter, kinder person. The Myersons have come under fire for using their son’s name in their book, which I can see may be contentious: but with Goody, if their actions will spur somebody to stop smoking cannabis, then again that can only be a good thing. My housemate and I stand on different ends of the spectrum: I (not wholly) condone the Myersons’ actions, whereas she finds it unbelievable to use the child’s name in the book. Whatever you believe, the personal and private will continue to merge as the media look for more and more sensational secrets of private lives.

Is it ever okay to write about your friends at family? The Julie Myerson debacle of the last week has reignited this debate with ferocity. The nationals pounced on the story, with most criticising Myerson for writing about her teenage son’s drug usage in her latest novel. While a minority did come to her defense, the consensus was a resounding “no” to a dilemma that faces journalists every day. 

I’m not going to attempt to go wading to the Myerson saga, but it did make me think about my own moral boundaries as a journalist. 

In my days writing for my university student newspaper it was fine to call up my friends for quotes for a news story. After all, they were legitimate sources. They were students with an opinion on student matters. Now it’s got slightly more serious and more ethically dubious. When I’m stuck for case studies, I’ll wrack my brains for friends to call on, or friends of friends. On work experience sitting in editorial meeting desperate to make a good impression, I’ll end up saying, “I know someone who..” Then when it comes to picking up the phone I’ll wish I’d never opened my mouth.

 I knew I’d gone too far recently when I sent one of my best friends a Facebook message asking to interview her boyfriend -who’d recently had a serious operation- about his health problems. As it turns out, he agreed to it and it would have been a great story. My conscience got the better of me and I found another case study.

 Myerson’s husband claims that she wrote her book to raise awareness about the dangers of skunk. Essentially, because she cares and wants to warn others. I too can claim that I want to write about a friend’s situation because I really care and want my writing to make a difference.

My problem is, a lot of the time I do really care, but perhaps only up until the deadline. Then it’s byline achieved and on to the next story. By this time, despite all good intentions, I care a little less. At the moment it’s about getting the assignment in. Soon it will be about getting my copy in to make money or achieve acclaim- as it  partly was for Myerson.

 A fellow journalism student told me about a particularly sensitive interview she recently did. It was for a short feature for our student publication. Yet to that one woman who bared her soul and was telling her story for the first time, it was everything. To my friend who had already started on her next piece, that woman, who badgered her with emails and calls, became a mild annoyance

 This dichotomy bothers me because I know it’s something I’ll have to accept. If I reject it, I’m not sure where that will leave my career…

RENOWNED activist investor Brian Myerson is gearing up for another boardroom battle – but this time he will be the one facing a group of disgruntled investors.

Shareholders in Myerson’s Principle Capital Investment Trust are seeking to remove him along with three other board directors, sell the company’s assets and return capital to shareholders.

This is the first time South African Myerson – who helped to establish shareholder activism in Britain at the jewellery group Signet and department store Liberty – has become the target of a shareholder revolt.

The activist group, which is being driven by the American hedge fund QVT, is furious about the firm’s poor investment track record – it holds stakes in stock-market laggards Blacks Leisure, Photo-Me and Aga among others.

Related Links Private equity under fire as Candover losses soar

The group is also incensed by the fund’s decision to purchase £2.2m of shares in Principle’s management company last August – the shares have since lost 75% of their value.

The activists are supported by most leading shareholders, including Arki Busson’s investment fund EIM and Invesco. They are seeking to replace the outgoing directors with John Chapman and Patrick McCann at an extraordinary meeting on March 26.

At the meeting they will also propose the appointment of the independent investment group Crystal Amber Management to sell the group’s stakes over two years.

However, sources close to the company said Myerson and his support party would block the activists’ plans.

They said the proposal to return capital seeks a special resolution to be passed that requires 75% shareholder approval, and Myerson has enough support to stop it.

“You’d be very unwise to count him out in a situation like this,” said a spokesman. “This deal is tantamount to a sale at any price – it looks like it’s shaping up into a good old dingdong.”

A source close to the activists said: “The first task is to convert the assets into cash, then it will be up to the owners to decide the nature of the return of capital.”

reading notes from Joel Myerson, “‘Not Instruction, but Provoocation’: Emerson as Teacher” [Emerson at 200: Proceedings of the International Bicentennial Conference. Rome, Arcane Editrice, 2004.]

Myerson takes up Emerson’s “thoughts on the process of teaching” and asserts that “Education was central to Emerson’s mission. Teaching, as the means of implementing education, was equally important.” Refers to “his Emersonian school without walls.” (23)

As a dean of Emerson studies, this essay goes as far as I have seen any Emersonian take up the idea of teaching in Emerson, beyond the metaphor (as I have framed it) of Emerson the teacher. Myerson cites Sealts (Emerson on the Scholar) though implies that his work is not focused on the process of teaching.

Much of the essay provides useful but somewhat familiar background to the context of thinking Emerson as an educator–specifically, the family obligation to teach (which I think he like every other biographical view, leaves too quickly); and thinking of his lecturing as his teaching. Where the essay offers new insight in analysis is when, toward the end, Myerson contrasts a “traditional linear view of education” with “Emerson’s more multi-dimensional and dynamic perspective” (34). But he then adds to this (which could be left at the level of ideal; tied back to Circles) in taking up a particular question: “What is the proper method of instruction? to begin with, teachers need to learn that they exist for the students, not for themselves.” But notice how Myerson goes furhter in contextualizing this in Emerson’s writing, not leaving it at the epigrammatic level of “Respect the child.”

Nor can the teacher attemtp to wihhold knowledge from students: Emerson warns that if ‘a teacher have any opinions which he wishes to conceal, his pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into taht, as into any that he publishes’ (EL 2: 148; also JMN 3:284, 308). The good teacher needs to know that learning is multi-directional, that those behind the desk can learn from those in front of the desk. Emerson praises a Pestalozzian school ‘where the tutors quitted their chair at the end of an hour to go and become with their scholars a class to receive instruction of another teacher[,] each being thus in turn teacher and pupil’ (JMN 5:408). This type of school Emerson feels is a good model for society as a whole, a world in which all ‘are equally served by receiving and by imparting’ (CW 4:18). [35]

Myserson thus ties his assertion of Emerson’s “process philosophy” of education to a concrete vision (and condition) of a school: where students learn from the teacher as learner, where learning is in process for both student and teacher. The Deweyan echoes forward can be grounded, we see, in Emerson’s interest in Pestalozzi. Worth noting that this name comes up at the end of American Scholar–we forget that this figure is on his mind. I would also suggest that this understanding that the student learns from the teacher’s process (I return to the image of pulling back the curtain on the wizardry) is key to his later regret (visiting his former students) that he did not connect their lives to his own writing and learning.

So, again, more concrete a view of how this process philosophy might be enacted–at least as Emerson further thought it. It remains to be seen how we, in English say, might enact it. For one implication that Myerson identifies is certainly a shift away from locating instruction in books, in canons. But we hear nothing from Myerson (a book-lover and book-scholar, if ever there was one) about how he as an educator has taken up, or would have us take up, not just this kind of tricky ‘anti-mentoring’ (he cites Buell favorably) but what an anti-book curriculum or pedagogy in English today, in his very university, would look like. Perhaps that is not the point of this particular essay; but I would like to hear more.

I suspect; or I speculate, that we can take this process philosophy and pedagogy further, regarding books and the objects of our study, by focusing on a place where process is (as Lanham argues) most illuminated in communication and information today: the electronic word. So, connect Myerson’s views to Poirier (and Emersonian writing as process, not product; an essa earlier in this same collection) by way of the wire.

____

Later in the same collection is the essay by John Bryant, “‘Self-Reliance’ and ‘The Poet’: Teaching transcendentalism Transcendentally, and Critically”

asserts that to teach Emreson effectively professor need to help students ‘confront their relation to his thinking.’ Goes on to discuss not Emerson’s interest in education but his own experiment in helping students experience and perform Emersonian thinking. Refers to this as a learning game: ‘the game of ‘inhabiting’ Emersonian thinking” (223). He goes on to describe a series of paraphrase and revision assignments that are in line with his theory of ‘fluid text’. It seems to me that what is being experience and inhabited (without having yet read his fuller discussion of The Fluid Text) is Emersonian metonymy. Needing to experience and inhabit, hands-on, the thinking within the writing: partical extract stading for the whole. (237). He doesn’t name this metonymy; nor does he take this here, this sense of playing a game with the text, to the level of the digital tools that might enhance this. But can we?

His reference to playing a game with Emerson brought McGann and the interpretive games he discusses in Radiant Textuality. The view of playing/experiencing/inhabiting an Emerson text also brought the notion of virtual reality to mind. Is it necessary or better to experience Emerson virtually than to read him the way he tends to be read? [Bryant notes the problem of the quoted/cliched Emerson that ends up selling sneakers]

“Fundamental Theory of Institutions: A Lecture in Honor of Leonid Hurwicz” de Roger B. Myerson

Lisa and I went with Jim and Tina tonight to see the Pointer Sisters at the Myerson in Dallas.

It was an awesome night.  We started out in the West End at the original Old Spaghetti Warehouse.  We got a salad,  appetizer, main course, and dessert for just $10.99.  Pretty good stuff and we were stuffed.

Then, at the Myerson, the Dallas Symphony opened the show and my favorite music they performed was the score  from “The Ten Commandments” movie……  It was incredible.  I have seen that movie many times.  Even though we have it on tape I watch it every Easter when it comes on TV.  Great music, great memories, strong emotions.  They dedicated it to the late Charlton Heston.

Then the Pointer Sisters came out and they were awesome.  I guess there were so many old people there because of the symphony.  I kept wanting to stand up and clap but people just sat.  How do you get a bunch of old (rich) people to stand up at a concert?  You leave the stage and when they stand up to exit you hurry back out, do a fast #1 hit, and ask them to clap along.  It worked for a little while. 

The Pointer Sisters were really good.  It seems like every song they sang had been a hit.  They started in 1973 and they still seem to really enjoy performing.  When the room energy came up they even took it to another level.  The two originals are now in their sixties and they are beautiful, and in great shape, and full of energy and talent.  The third sister is actually one of their daughters and she inherited the talent.

It was a fun night….  We’ve got to do more nights like this.

This is something I ran across in my Game Theory Class today. Is there anyone out there that can give me a simple explanation as to why it is true I would be eternally greatful. THe following is an excerpt from: Roger Myerson “Game Theory – Analysis of Conflict” -Harvard University Press 1991. I know its true but I can’t figure out how to explain it to anyone else. I guess since its the first day of game theory it will probably work itself out.

“To illustrate the importance of common knowledge, I cite a well-known fable. This story concerns 100 married couples, who were all perfect logicians but had a somewhat peculiar social customs. Every evening the men of the village would have a meeting in a great circle around a campfire, and each would talk about his wife. If when the meeting began a man, had any reason to hope that his wife had always been faithful to him, then he would praise her virtue to all of the assembled men. On the other hand, if at any time before the current meeting he had ever gotten proof that his wife had ever been unfaithful, then he would moan and wail and invoke the terrible curse of the (male) gods on her. Furthermore, if a wife was ever unfaithful, then she and her lover would inform immediately all of the other man in the village, except her husband. All of these traditions were common-knowledge among the people of the village.
In fact every wife had been unfaithful to her husband. Thus every husband knew of every infidelity except that of his own wife, whom he praised every evening.
This situation endured for many years, until a traveling holy man visited the village. After sitting through a session around the campfire and hearing every man praise his wife, the holy man stood up in the center of the circle of husbands and said in a loud voice. “A wife in this village has been unfaithful.” For ninety-nine evenings thereafter the, the husbands continued to meet and praise their wives, but on the hundredth evening they all moaned and wailed and invoked the terrible curse.

Talking about images I like… you may have read here mentions to “changing the landscape” to favour a desired result by making it natural for CoP participants to behave in the way you want.

In practice, you can’t forbid things that people want to do (and still keep them happy and active), and if you do forbid it, you can’t enforce it (CoP facilitators would need to be Sysiphus fans to enjoy it). If people’s incentives head some way, they will go that way. So maybe the solution is not to plant notices trying to divert them, but to change the incentives: offer different (and non-problematic) ways in which they can get what they want. Defuse the problem. Don’t change the rules, change the landscape.

In practice, that means changing the incentives and the available options. Find out what the drives are, and provide ways of satisfying them that don’t conflict with the CoP’s needs (compatible incentives). Build options that generate “convergent results”: ones that are good for the CoP and that incentivate the user.

Say that you run a set of online fora with volunteer facilitators (which means they want to dedicate as little time to chores as possible). Users will want to sell and buy things among themselves. But you want to avoid risky situations (fake sales and other creative ways of shortchange – which do crop up). Also, you don’t want merchants to set up shop in the forums for free (that’s what advertising is for). You can’t police every transaction nor mediate nor escrow (no resources). Simply forbidding trades hardly works, takes eternal explaining, and makes little sense for users.

So you change the rules. You provide a sheltered environment for trade in which only reasonably active users can enter, and erase every sale outside it (easy to set up, easy to maintain); this provides a built-in trust and reference screen, kills off web pirates who register just to trade, and gives users both a place to conduct sales among trusted people and an incentive to become active in the rest of the forums… plus, it makes it easy to screen grey merchants. Not everyone is happy – but active users and facilitators are. And the admin too, with no more frauds to worry about.

That’s a very down-to-earth example, but there’s loftier ones. This year’s Nobel Prize winner in Economics went to people (Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson) who “laid the ground work” in defining “mechanism design” and played a very serious role in establishing it as a core part of Economics and a serious tool for political economists (and P2P application designers, and…).

“Mechanism” is a name for the rules and institutions that govern our economic activities – and you already know that I view CoP participation as a productive (and hence economic) activity. They realized that the design of the game (and specifically the incentives at play) affects the outcome, and have been delving into what improvements can be made to your plain-vanilla marketplace to improve some of its qualities (efficiency, fairness, you name it). Harnessing independent actors who act toward their own good… and getting a (better) common good as a result.

OK, more specific. Hurwitz defined a mechanism as “a communication system in which participants send messages to each other and/or to a ‘message center‘, and where a pre-specified rule assigns an outcome (such as an allocation of goods and services) for every collection of received messages”. To evaluate those outcomes, you have a goal function or set of criteria, external to the participants, although one of those criteria is usually to maximize the total utility won by participants.

Not all mechanisms are created equal, and the fun of the process is finding a mechanism (a set of rules, a communication mechanism) that always produces an optimal (goal-satisfying) result, whatever the options made by the participants.

For rules, read institutions (markets, other) and the incentives they hold to participants. If “participants” hints at a game, it’s because this is a branch of game theory… which are independent agents seeking to maximize their own utility. The rest of the concepts don’t need much explanation and take a lot of shapes.

That’s essentially it, without the maths. But maths help model all those possible mechanisms and quantify the probabilities of different types of results, thereby making these concepts usable beyond seat-of-the-pants implementations.

Some say that decisions and behaviours don’t depend on a rational evaluation of incentives and costs (and I quarrel with them), some say that CoPs are not markets (and I only say that they are a very convoluted transaction). But the relationship between the broad lines of the work of this year’s prize-winners, and day-to-day community design, seems quite clear . They’ve put the maths (lots of it) and the scope to an evident (but underused) idea, and are helping to improve the world.

Hats off to them. If you want to delve deeper, try this.

From the WSJ:

Americans Leonid Hurwicz, Eric S. Maskin and Roger B. Myerson won the Nobel prize in economics on Monday for developing a theory that helps explain how incentives and private information affect the functioning of markets.

For those who want it, here is more information about the men and their work:

• Scientific Background
• Leonid Hurwicz, Wikipedia
• Roger Myerson, homepage
• Eric Maskin, Wikipedia
• The Influence of Hayek on Hurwicz (HT: The Austrian Economists)
• Thoughts from Arnold Kling, Alex Tabarrok, and Tyler Cowen.
• Readings on mechanism design.

UPDATE: Differing perspectives from our friends in the Austrian school:

• Pete Boettke on the influence of Hayek on Hurwicz.
• Thomas DiLorenzo on subjectivism and market design theory.
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