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I love this: Lou Dobbs has a typical ranting op-ed on CNN.com denouncing the fatalistic attitude of today's politicians, and includes this graph:

Our public education system is failing nationwide. While SAT scores decline, teachers in every state fail competency exams, and our high school dropout rate shows no sign of real improvement. Both parties point to their bipartisan bandage, No Child Left Behind, rather than propose real and immediate solutions.

Sounds fair enough. The trouble is: SAT scores aren't declining. Math scores have never been higher -- they're 14 points above where they were 10 years ago. Verbal this past year is four points above where it was a decade ago. And yet, during that time period, there has been a 38% increase in the number of people taking the test -- a trend which has the effect of dragging down the average, since the new test takers tend to come from the bottom of the class. (Their equivalents in 1996 didn't bother taking the test because they didn't plan on going to college.) There's also a huge increase in minority test-takers, who tend -- again, on average -- to have lower scores than the rest of the population. So even with an expansion in test-takers, and a swelling minority population with many non-native English speakers, the overall average for both verbal and math has improved since 1996. It's one thing to be a fatalist about the state of the education system in the U.S. It's another thing to simply get the facts wrong.

Updated 6/1: A couple of you have written in to say that the problem with this logic is that the SAT tests have been re-normalized several times over the past decades so that 500 would be roughly the average score. This is true, but the last time it happened was 1994, so it's irrelevant to my point about trends over the past ten years. And secondly, the SAT folks and other education scholars are not idiots: they know the scores were adjusted, and so when they do long-term trend analyses, they adjust them back so that it's an apples-to-apples comparison. This chart shows you the adjusted history (along with the raw scores.) The picture is very clear: a steady decline from late sixties to about 1990, and then a steady increase since then. And for what it's worth, most, if not all, of that decline from 67-90 is attributable to the dramatic increase in SAT test-takers, not to some overal decline in educational standards.

Sunday Morning Historicity

From Jeffrey Weiss's letter to the Times Magazine this morning, responding to Kevin Kelly's future of the book piece (Weiss is the head of Modern Art at the National Gallery Of Art):

Kelly's argument... possess a common flaw, which is expressed when the contents of books are routinely referred to as "information." books (and other forms of text) are, of course, far more than that.... Texts, which are not just objects but encounters, possess context: ideology, historicity, consciousness, form, not to mention body, material depth....

What does this really mean? Books convey consciousness whether they're digital or print. Last I checked ideology, historicity, context -- all these things are forms of information. And in fact, it's precisely this extra layer of context that's likely to be accentuated in Kelly's "universal library", as books become annotated by other readers and scholars, explaining the ideological baggage behind a given work, or its historical context (or its "historicity," as Weiss puts it.)
Look, there's a legitimate objection to Kelly's vision if it means that people simply stop reading books in a linear fashion and start exclusively reading remixed, annotated snippets, primarily because there are limits to the complexity of the ideas and experiences that one can convey in a snippet. But Kevin is enough of a student of technology and media to know that the old forms and conventions rarely end up getting eliminated by the new: we're still listening to the radio and watching movies despite the rise of television, still watching television despite the rise of the web, and still reading books despite all the media innovations of the twentieth century. What Kelly is saying -- I think -- is not that people will stop reading three-hundred page books from start to finish, but that they'll be able to augment that reading experience with all sorts of powerful new connnections and commentaries and, yes, "encounters."
The irony is here is that remixing, sampling, annotating and deconstructing texts is precisely what post-modern theory was supposed to be all about -- to expose the historicity and ideology, the context and consciousness of the original work. You'd think theorists of contemporary art would be embracing the universal library idea, not dismissing it.

Lost Does Dickens

What did everyone end up thinking about this season of Lost? My wife and I have been bouncing around on TiVo time with the show for most of the year, which meant we were usually an episode or so behind the rest of the world, and thus I spent most of the year studiously avoiding any conversations about the show, for fear of spoilers. (Of which, more to come in this post, so consider yourself warned.) I thought the season started brilliantly, sagged in the middle (weighed down in part by the sheer number of characters) and then was quite brilliant at the end. The whole "I think I crashed your plane" bit with Desmond in the final episode was right up there with my two other favorite Lost moments: the decoding of the French woman's looping help message; and Locke's expression and line after watching the first Dharma film -- "We're going to have to watch that again!" (Which, by the way, might as well have been the title for the second half of Everything Bad Is Good For You.)

I've been joking about the lack of apparent connection between Everything Bad and The Ghost Map, my new book about cholera in 19th-century London. But Lost neatly supplied the missing link with the season finale: the copy of Dickens' Our Mutual Friend that plays such a crucial role in the episode. Our Mutual Friend is the first book quoted in The Ghost Map -- on the very first page, as it happens. Dickens' narrative interweaves with the themes of my cholera book in a number of ways: for starters, they're both obsessed with London's epic waste removal problem in the middle of the nineteenth century. The novel was also going to be central to the dissertation I never got around to writing at Columbia, in my English Lit grad school days. When it flashed on the screen during Lost this week, I thought: "Hey, I'm an expert on that book! Someone should get me to a Lost fan forum pronto."

It'll be interesting to see if they actually try to build some kind of extended meaningful connection to the book's plot next season. Beyond the trash theme, the most striking thing about the plot is (VIctorian spoiler alert!) the assumed identity of the protagonist, who, after his long-estranged father dies, fakes his own death in order to spy on 1) the people who ended up inheriting his father's fortune, and 2) the woman his father intended him to marry. (At least, I think that's right -- those Dickens plots are complicated.) I could imagine the narrative of Lost somehow mimicking that structure in season three, though I'm not exactly sure how. They certainly have the estranged dead fathers, the sudden fortunes, the spying, the arranged marriages. Maybe I'll have to watch that last episode again....

Our little serendipity thread has now hit the big time, in the form of a BBC editorial by Bill Thompson, who comes down squarely on the meme-killing side:

Listening to John Peel under the covers late at night and hearing bands that my parents and friends would never know about was the only way to be "told of such genius" available to me as a child. But my daughter can get her recommendations and even sample the music directly from her friends or, on a good day, me. The potential for discovery is enhanced, but it doesn't rely on formal channels or on large institutions like libraries. On the web, every link and every page of search results can lead to the same sort of serendipitous discoveries that used to be the province of library shelves or conversations in musty common rooms. And those links are available to all, not just the privileged few granted access to the university library or the academic world.

Nicholas Carr has a thoughtful (no surprise there) response to our most excellent serendipity thread from a few days ago:

Once you create an engine - a machine - to produce serendipity, you destroy the essence of serendipity. It becomes something expected rather than something unexpected. Looking for serendipity? Just follow these easy links! Serendipity becomes a game of trivial pursuit. It becomes an end in itself rather than an unanticipated surprise that leads you to some greater understanding. Serendipity should be a doorway, but on the web it's a kitschy picture stuck on your refrigerator with a magnet.

He's stacking the deck here slightly by referencing a Google tool called Serendipity that Eric Schmidt previewed a while back. The real "machine for serendipity" that I was referring to in my original post is not nearly that specific: it's the architecture of the web itself, which was not explicitly designed for accidental discoveries (quite the opposite, in fact) but which turns out to have an additional, unplanned serendipity-enhancing effect. (One that has been amplified by the growth of the blogosphere.) The web is a machine for serendipity in precisely the way that the Dewey Decimal System or the OED or a city neighborhood is a machine for serendipity. There's nothing kitschy about that.

Just bought the newly announced MacBook, for which I've been waiting eagerly the past few months. I still wish it were just a little lighter; I'd be perfectly happy to have the CD/DVD drive as a external device I could connect when I needed it. But it looks like a great machine all around. I did a custom configuration with extra RAM and disk storage, and it's still reporting that it will ship in 1-5 days, which seems pretty impressive. We'll see when it gets here...

Oh, and by the way, I went with the white case. I know it's cool for Apple to be making a black laptop, but it looks more PC-like to my eyes in black...

Great to see Kevin Kelly's cover story -- "Scan This Book!" in the Times Magazine. It's effectively two essays: one about the future of electronic text in the age of a universal library, and one about the Google book scanning controversy. Kevin's great on the latter, but because I'd been following that story fairly closely already, I almost wish they'd given him a whole feature to riff on what kinds of writing and reading practices will emerge as all these books take on new digital lives. This was just a teaser:

Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability — the nifty translation of a book's full text into bits, which permits it to be read on a screen anywhere. But this vision misses the chief revolution birthed by scanning books: in the universal library, no book will be an island. Turning inked letters into electronic dots that can be read on a screen is simply the first essential step in creating this new library. The real magic will come in the second act, as each word in each book is cross-linked, clustered, cited, extracted, indexed, analyzed, annotated, remixed, reassembled and woven deeper into the culture than ever before. In the new world of books, every bit informs another; every page reads all the other pages.

Hey, that reminds me a of a certain serendipity conversation I was just having the other day...

Can We Please Kill This Meme Now

Jason linked to this op-ed on the "endangered joy of serendipity":

Serendipity is defined as the ability to make fortunate discoveries accidentally. There's so much of modern life that makes it preferable to the vaunted good old days - better hygiene products and power steering leap to mind - but in these disposable days of now and the future, the concept of serendipity is endangered. Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become such a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet. Put a couple of key words into a search engine and you find - with an irritating hit or miss here and there - exactly what you're looking for. It's efficient, but dull. You miss the time-consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves, of pulling down a book because the title interests you, or the binding... Looking for something and being surprised by what you find - even if it's not what you set out looking for - is one of life's great pleasures, and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience.

I find these arguments completely infuriating. Do these people actually use the web? I find vastly more weird, unplanned stuff online than I ever did browsing the stacks as a grad student. Browsing the stacks is one of the most overrated and abused examples in the canon of things-we-used-to-do-that-were-so-much-better. (I love the whole idea of pulling down a book because you like the "binding.") Thanks to the connective nature of hypertext, and the blogosphere's exploratory hunger for finding new stuff, the web is the greatest serendipity engine in the history of culture. It is far, far easier to sit down in front of your browser and stumble across something completely brilliant but surprising than it is walking through a library looking at the spines of books. With music blogs and iTunes, I've discovered more interesting new bands and albums in the past year than I did in all of my college years. I know radio has gotten a lot worse, but really -- does anyone actually believe that radio was ever more diverse and surprising in its recommendations than surfing through the iTunes catalog or the music sites? It's no accident that BoingBoing is the most popular blog online -- it's popular because it's an incredible randomizer, sending you off on all these crazy and unpredictable paths.

I mean, look at what's on the front door of Kottke this morning: soccer jersey fonts, debate over travel time to JFK, best American fiction poll, funny t-shirt joke, new Google software, Richard Feynman video, Tufte design riff, etc. What's the organizing principle? There is none -- other than Jason's quirky taste -- and that's precisely why so many of us visit his site every day. It takes me thirty seconds to make all those connections by reading Jason's blog. I defy McKeen to walk into a library and find so many weird and diverse and interesting things in an hour of staring at bindings.

Updated a few hours later: Alan Jacobs writes in to the comments section:

My particular situation is that of a scholar, and I think Steven is -- what's the technical term? -- nuts to think that I now have more serendipity than I did before. When I used to rely on print dictionaries or encyclopedias, I would very often forget what I was looking for because, in thumbing the pages, I would stumble across all sorts of interesting words or topics, which would lead me to look up other interesting words or topics, along the way to which I would be distracted by yet other words or topics that I had never seen before.

This is a perfect example of what I was talking about in my original post. There are two primary elements to this situation: first, the random stumbling across of something unexpected thanks to the alphabetical organization of the reference book (and the lack of digital search tools), and then this process of being led to other interesting words or topics thanks to that original swerve. It's true enough that Web's structure has eliminated the first kind of "discovery" -- you don't see alphabetical or Dewey Decimal "neighbors" the way you do walking through the stacks or reading book index. But the Web is far better at the second part of Alan's scenario: following a trail of associations from some original starting point. Pick a given entry in the print Britannica and a given entry in Wikipedia, and try to find ten interesting loosely associated articles published in other venues around the world. It's a thousand times easier to do this on the Web, obviously.

So the question is: is there anything in the online experience that compares to the random discoveries of alphabetical or Dewey Decimal exploration. I would say -- nuts or not -- definitively yes. I read regularly about 20 different blogs or other filters, and each day through them I'm exposed to literally hundreds of articles and clips and conversations and songs and parodies that I had no idea about when I woke up that morning. Many of them I just skim over, but invariably a handful of them will send me off on some crazy expedition from site to site, ushered along with the help of other bloggers, Google, del.icio.us, wikipedia, etc. I'm constantly stumbling across random things online that make me think: what is the deal with that anyway? And then an hour later, I'm thinking: how did I get here? I can't tell you how many ideas that eventually made it into published books and articles of mine began with that kind of unexpected online encounter.

Yes, those initial starting points are filters defined by my initial tastes. But my taste is for surprise and novelty -- and that's what they deliver. Serendipity is not randomness, not noise. It's stumbling across something accidentally that is nonetheless of interest to you. The web is much better at capturing that mix of surprise and relevance than book stacks or print encyclopedias. Does everyone use the web this way? Of course not. But it's much more of a mainstream pursuit than randomly exploring encyclopedias or library stacks ever was. That's the irony of the debate: the thing that is being mourned has actually gone from a fringe experience to a much more commonplace one in the culture. Boingboing has a million readers, for crissakes! Right now, on their front door, we have a study of monkey drinking habits, a roadsite alert sign hacking project, a "news of the weird" story about a German would-be suicide, a re-writing of Robinson Crusoe, a collection of vintage cartoons, a digital mapmaking tool, and so on and so on. And this eclecticism is what you get every day there -- which is precisely why it is the most linked-to blog in the world. Now factor in reading a dozen other blogs of comparable range. This is now the daily information intake for millions and millions of people around the world. Why isn't that an increase in serendipity?

Everything Bad In Paper

So I meant to post last week to say that the paperback of Everything Bad is Good for You was released on May 2. It's a nice new edition -- I wrote a little afterword reflecting on the intensity of the book's reception, and it has an amazing four page spread of quotes from the reviews. It's funny with Everything Bad -- I assumed given the controversial thesis that it would attract more critical reviews than my other books. But in the end, I think it turns out to be the most positively reviewed of all four of them.

I'm doing a little publicity for the paperback, but nothing like last May/June, which was truly unlike anything I've ever experienced before. (For those of you who missed it, here's the May archive for this blog.) I've said this a number of times in public talks about the book but I'm not sure I've ever said it here: I wanted to start a conversation -- and perhaps even change people's minds a little -- about the state of pop culture with this book, and certainly the conversation part succeeded beyond my wildest dreams. (It's harder to judge the mind-changing bit.) But for all the book's emphasis on games and new media television, I needed to write an old-fashioned book to start that kind of debate. I needed 200 pages of sustained, linear argument for people to take it seriously, particularly given how preposterous the idea sounded to many people at first hearing.

So yes, books are not the dominant cultural form they were in the 19th-century, and yes, some of these new forms have amazing complexity to them that we'd do well to understand and appreciate. But books still matter in this culture, and if you're trying to change the way people think about a complicated issue, the advice is the same as it was two hundred years ago: write a book.

I love this time-lapse video of FedEx planes arriving at Memphis during thunderstorms -- particularly when the storms finally center themselves squarely over the airport, and all the planes suddenly scatter. Reminds me of some ant foraging animations I've seen. It also looks frighteningly disorganized, like all the planes are individually coming up with a flight path on their own, though I'm sure that's not the case.