About a Boy by Nick Hornby. Good as usual, but it didn’t have the same impact on me as How to be Good or High Fidelity.
I’m also continuing my rereading of David Lodge’s academic comedies of manners. This week it was Small World, a satire on the international conference circuit.

Heather Cochrane at Salon surveys expired domain namese

Heath Gibson invites my comments on this interesting post about an epidemic of plagiarism among Australian university students, and of course I’m happy to oblige. It turns out that ‘plagiarism’ includes such offences as “Cited a journal article when only the abstract was consulted” As Heath says, ‘So on this definition I’m amazed that result wasn’t 100%!’
This reminds me of the claim by Jamie Kellner, Chairman and CEO of AOL/Time Warner’s Turner Broadcasting division that you are committing a breach of contract if you watch TV and leave the room during the ad break (when pressed, Kellner said you could visit the bathroom, but only if you really had to go).
More importantly, it’s bizarre that Australian universities still propound this kind of 19th century notion of honour (important note: I’m using “19th century” as a compliment here) when their managers, with a few exceptions, have abandoned all academic values in favour of market-driven competition. The vice-chancellor now driving public policy, Alan Gilbert of Melbourne, is on record as saying that 19th century texts like Newman’s Idea of a University are totally inappropriate in the modern competitive world. As Heath Gibson points out, in the world outside the university, newspapers and others recycle and plagiarise to their heart’s content, limited only by the possibility that large-scale theft will lead to action under the law of copyright. University managers have done their best to suppress the assumptions of free exchange of information in which notions like ‘plagiarism’ make sense. In the brave new world of ‘intellectual property’, you nail down what you can of your own ideas and appropriate anything from the common pool that hasn’t already been grabbed. The former vice-chancellor of Monash seemed entirely suited to the new world, and it was hypocritical to sack him.

A superb rant from John Derbyshire at the National Review Online on why conservatives should be gloomy.
Since social democrats like myself are generally supposed to have an optimistic temperament, I guess I should put up some reform proposals. I’ll start with the easiest. Derbyshire says:
The next version of MicroSoft Windows will be even buggier and more counterintuitive than the last. That one you know perfectly well, of course — I don’t know why I bothered to include it
The answer is of course “Get a Mac!”

Tim Blair left himself wide open in Thursday’s Oz, but I was busy and Tim Dunlop beat me to the punch. Well struck!

In The Poor Standard of Standard & Poor’s , Daniel Gross writes that ‘ the S&P 500’s bad bubble-stock picks have cost investors billions’. Basically, telecommunications and dotcom stocks were added to the index precisely when they were most overvalued.
The really interesting story in all of this is that the idea of passively investing an index representing ‘the stock market as a whole’ is an illusion. Ultimately, there is no way to avoid the need for judgement about the worth of individual companies. This fact subtly undermines a great volume of economic thinking about market efficiency.

Business Week reports the ‘startling’ fact that US corporate profits have been falling since 1997. This fact was evident years ago to anyone who looked past the bogus reports put out by the companies themselves, and endoresed by the likes of Arthur Andersen. Tax returns gave a much more realistic picture.

Dubya’s Double Dip?

Glassman and Hassett, the authors of Dow 36000 claim that they were right all along, and get slammed by Brad DeLong.
I reviewed this book not long after it came out, and will post a link soon.
Glassman and Hassett are clearly fudging a bit, but I think Brad is a bit hard on them. They haven’t really retreated from their claim that the risk premium for equity will disappear in the near future, even if they’ve pushed the date out a bit. And they are quite right to say that the disappearance of the risk premium would undermine the case for the government as the ultimate risk manager.
Conversely, of course, any evidence that the risk premium is alive and well strengthens the case for government intervention, a point which I’m sure Glassman and Hassett would readily concede .

Ross Anderson is campaigning against Expropriation of faculty IPR by Cambridge University. It makes an interesting contrast with MIT where Faculty members keep their own IP rights the Open Courseware initiative is making course materials freely available.