I’ve got my theory mojo working - at least erratically - and have a stack of books by or about Erving Goffman by my desk to prove it:

From Things observed

(While I am sharing pictures, also see various London-specific stuff in my other album below):

London discoveries

Some musings of Alan Watts, an English populariser of Eastern philosophy, on the temptation to concentrate on the destinations in life - must… finish… PhD! - rather than on the journey - entertainingly accompanied by animation produced by the creators of South Park. Five other such animated musings are also available online.

OK I admit my teaching may not have been at my best today. I’ve been suffering from the flu since Friday and am still hardly at my best. There was a moment in the tube on the way to my workshop that I thought I might throw up, but it passed. I may also have been a little distracted by guilt – you see in order to come today I had to leave my (exhausted) wife at home with our (still sick) baby child.

But there wouldn’t have been time to find someone to replace me and I know you are paying more than £10,000/$20,000 to learn at the LSE (plus a great deal more for living expenses in London) so I felt I had to do my best to attend – I can’t remember a lecture or seminar ever being cancelled because of ill-health when I was being taught (though I may have forgotten a time or two).

To be honest though this was an advanced workshop session on Internet methods - a subject I enjoy talking and thinking about, and I was being a little selfish – I actually really like teaching, and a workshop full of graduate students who are (on the basis of marks and financial commitment at least) some of the ‘best and the brightest’. So I was really looking forward to my workshop…

Until I noticed early on that your attention was elsewhere. To be more precise you were using the Internet access I (foolishly) arranged in case it would be needed for teaching in order to surf some kind of funny images site. Which was bad enough. But then you started to smirk and show them off to the woman beside you. Then would have been the time to call you out on it I suppose, but I didn’t really expect you to carry on in the same way for the entire one-hour session. But that doesn’t mean what you did was fine. Here are a couple of tips.

1) You don’t get marked for attendance at the LSE – you get marked for results. If you know in advance you don’t have any interest in the subject don’t turn up – I assure you you won’t be missed.
2) If you do want to surf recreationally, sitting under the speaker’s nose is the wrong place to do it.
3) Distracting another potential learner – even one you hope to impress – puts you pretty close to the bottom tier of my personal student hell.

If you do come across this weblog posting in your idle surfing consider this a warning – if you start anything like that again in next week’s workshop, I will waste a precious minute or two of teaching time giving you a piece of my mind. It may not cure my flu but it would certainly make me feel better about teaching for a little while…

I love that successful Finnish doctoral candidates are presented with a top hat and sword - at the LSE we have to make do with a little champagne in plastic cups (at least in my department!)

According to this summary of a recent study at York University in Toronto,

A body of research suggests that playing video games provides benefits similar to bilingualism in exercising the mind. Just as people fluent in two languages learn to suppress one language while speaking the other, so too are gamers adept at shutting out distractions to swiftly switch attention between different tasks.

Je suis le champion mental du monde alors!

The LSE Library is having a sale today of several thousand books it doesn’t want. Unfortunately, they keep almost anything of any value. All I could see was books like this inspirational study by George Kazakov. Even a hardened bibliophile would have a hard time loving these but there was a steady stream of would-be purchasers anyway.

I was stunned to discover that not only was this book mentioned in Google - 3 times - someone had actually referenced it in an academic journal! Truly no scholarship is entirely wasted.

So if you are in London, you read this, and you want to know more about Soviet peat in the 50s, dash on over to the LSE library - the sale is on until 16:00 and I have a feeling it may not have been snapped up yet…

P.S. In a strange quirk of fate the first academic publication I have been involved with was published today - details are available here. I hope it doesn’t meet a similar fate to Kazakov’s work - at least not during my lifetime…

Thank you Cartoonbank!

If you are or have been a long-term resident of the US or of China, please visit this survey by a student at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. It “focuses on different uses of weblogs in mainland China and the United States and is a first step to investigating the increasing political influences of the weblogs in Chinese civic lives.”

I’m taking a couple of days ahead of time to look around. If you are coming to the conference as well, drop me a line - probably text messaging to +44 793 171 1988 is easiest if you can do it, or leave a message/call me at the Congress Plaza 312 427 3800 - and maybe we can meet and chat before I start running around like a maniac seeing all the interesting sessions (there are more papers that sound interesting than I can possibly catch in person, alas!)

P.S. Do check out and contribute to the AoIR Chicago wiki I started up.

P.P.S. You might want to use the Technorati aoir6 tag to tag any postings relating to the conference once you get here.

Policy has an article in this month’s issue by Johan Norberg (who has a blog). I have posted earlier about Layard’s theories and other theories about how to maximise happiness in society. Layard (baldly summarised) believes money over a certain level doesn’t make you happy so progressive taxation is useful as are social policies like pushing for full employment – even if that is economically inefficient – because employment stability is very important in determining happiness (and since highly stratified incomes produce envy and the perceived need to match your neighbors which produces unhappiness).

Norberg correctly identifies that in societies where individuals have little hope of bettering themselves they tend to be unhappy and uses the example of communist states, and of states where there is low or no growth (Ireland in the 70s and 80s). It is true that low growth and high unemployment lead to unhappiness, but this is not inconsistent with Layard’s thesis - welfare states can have growth and low unemployment as well (though granted it seems to be more difficult).

He does have his finger on something when he says that, “the fact that growth has continued that makes it possible for us to continue to believe in the future”. But this I believe is something we need to work on educating people out of, both in schools and through the media. Unless we can find a way to ‘grow smart’ we will end up running into natural limits sooner or later - especially if developing countries take the same course. It may be true as Norberg says that the increase in wealth in developing countries continues to raise our overall levels of happiness, but it is also true that the rate of increase in happiness is slowing almost to a halt while the cost to our environment of the rise in wealth is increasing.

He also suggests, provocatively, that the welfare state reduces happiness because it takes away the challenges that we need to be happy. But the psychological research he cites refers to the benefits of challenges that are hard but within our power to tackle. The danger of states with inadequate safety nets are that many people living there are faced with challenges that are simply insurmountable - the challenge of getting your kids into university when the fees are not subsidised and the only jobs you can get don’t pay a living wage for example. And those challenges are not, I would suggest, conducive to happiness.

In the footnotes to his article I found the World Database of Happiness which has various interesting indices and lots of links to related papers.

An aside: I have become so used to being able to comment on blog postings or messageboards/comment boxes on media websites that it was irritating to find neither Johan’s blog nor Policy magazine (subheads ironically “ideas, debate, opinion”) have a means of instant
feedback (though at least they offer email addresses for private comment).