Pictures: Montreal

These were taken over the October 17-19, 2008 weekend.

Rue St. Paul

Montreal Convention Centre

Laura in Montreal, Rue St. Paul

Tour Olympique

Montreal Botanical Garden

Habitat 67

Mgoblog fights the good fight

It’s a rough year for us Michigan fans, but Brian Cook’s Mgoblog remains an entertaining read, providing info and perspectives that the mainstream media just doesn’t. These picture pages are a new feature this year: Brian breaks down plays frame by frame and discusses what they are trying to do and why it does or doesn’t work. He does about one a week.

Urban fiction

The New York Times carried an interesting piece this week on the popularity of new urban fiction and the responses of libraries. Will have to check out some of this stuff.

Pictures: Ann Arbor October 2008

Here are some pictures of Ann Arbor and the U-M campus, taken October 4, 2008.

Michigan Stadium construction, looking south on Main Street

Weill Hall, Ford School of Public Policy, Hill and State

U-M Law Quad

The Diag and the Graduate Library

Hill Auditorium

Burton Tower

Michigan Stadium from South Fifth Ave.

Movie: Versus (Director’s Cut)

 

Versus

Versus is Ryuhei Kitamura’s yakuza-samurai-zombie flick released in 2000. An isolated area of Japanese forest is a portal to the “other side,” turning those killed there into zombies.

The film has some laughs (the yakuza with the green shirt) and other redeeming moments. Just about all the characters are self-consciously cool and have great hair until they’re turned into zombies. The film drags a good deal more than it has to, denying it upper-echelon cult status. 

Rating: 3 of 5 stars (worth a Netflix rental)

Economics: Immigration and regional innovation

A recent paper by Jennifer Hunt of McGill University/NBER and Marjolaine Gauthier-Loiselle of Princeton examines the relationship between skilled immigration and innovation at the regional level. Using patents as the output measure, the paper finds that a higher proportion of skilled immigrants in a population leads to a larger increase in patenting than would be expected from the fact that immigrants are more likely to hold science and engineering degrees. This implies that the innovative activities of skilled immigrants have positive spill-over effects.

Economics: Inequality and tax progressivity

Greater progressivity in the tax system (i.e. tax rates increase at higher levels of income) is widely assumed to reduce income inequality. In a recent paper, Denvil Duncan and Klara Sabirianova Peter of Georgia State University look at the relationship between inequality and tax progressivity in a large number of countries over the 1981-2005 period.  The takeaway:

We find that while progressivity reduces observed inequality in reported gross and net income, it has a significantly smaller impact on true inequality, approximated by consumption-based measures of Gini. We show theoretically and empirically that, under specific conditions, tax progressivity may increase actual inequality, especially in countries with weak law and order and a large informal nontaxable sector.

Boom goes bust in Iceland

The Guardian describes the unwinding of boom times in Iceland, via Instapundit. I hadn’t realized the extent to which Iceland benefited from the cheap credit bubble.

Off to Michigan-Illinois Saturday

I will be at the Michigan-Illinois game this Saturday in Ann Arbor, which is homecoming. I will be joining my ex-roommates at their tailgate. I’m excited to see the Rich Rodriguez-coached Wolverines live for the first time. Go Blue!

Update: Had a great time, apart from the game, which the Wolverines lost 45-20. A step forward or two, a step back, it’s going to be that kind of season.

Netizens stuck on stupid?

James Bowman reviews Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future in The New Atlantis. The review also explores the commonalities between Bauerlein’s arguments and those of Nicholas Carr in his recent Atlantic piece “Is Google Making Us Stupid.” 

To wit, the Internet and Google encourage a different way of engaging with text — “information retrieval as opposed to knowledge formation” in Bauerlein’s formulation. As a culture, we may be experiencing a profound shift in the way we think and in our sense of self. Young people, in particular, will find it much more difficult to develop the attention span needed to immerse themselves in books for pleasure or enlightenment because their brains are being wired to quickly scan shorter passages of text and to find facts that are of immediate use.

In Bowman’s view, Bauerlein and Carr are not pessimistic enough. He points out that the people and institutions that should be upholding higher standards of scholarship and understanding — literature professors and the educational establishment — have been seeking for generations to tear down traditional Western culture and expose its supposedly inherent “racism” and “patriarchy.” The reshaping of our minds by Google, then, simply accelerates and reinforces an existing destructive tendency in today’s culture toward ahistoricism.

These are very provocative and important arguments. As research in cognitive psychology proceeds, it will be interesting to see whether our thinking and neural wiring are changing in response to ubiquitous IT.

I’m not an “unthinking technophile,” but I find myself somewhat skeptical that movement in this direction, if it is occurring, will constitute an unmitigated disaster for the culture.

A few quick thoughts and questions:

• During the presumed, now fading, golden age of wise mentors guiding impressionable youth through the Great Books and Great Ideas, what proportion of the population was actually imbued with the ability to understand and appreciate Proust, or Max Weber, or whoever? Mass literacy, after all, is a relatively recent phenomenon (post Industrial Revolution). Mass higher education is even more recent. If students who used to sleep through American lit are now IMing and Twittering, what is the culture really losing? 
• Suppose that as a result of the Internet and IT a higher proportion of the population is gaining a greater acuity with information and ideas than it previously possessed, albeit at a level that some would label superficial. Hasn’t something been gained by civilization, society, the economy? Might the new ways of thinking and being contribute to our ability to add value, economic and otherwise?
• Isn’t it possible that at least some people will retain the ability to engage text at a deep, contemplative level despite Google? Isn’t it possible that such abilities and the opportunities to develop them will come to be more highly valued as culture becomes more information-infused?

Anyway, back to power-browsing…

UPDATE: Made a few editorial tweaks 10/7/08.