Big Data

I'm starting work on something (a book? something shorter?) about the gathering momentum behind "Big Data" and the intersection of Big Data with the right to privacy. I'm actively soliciting ideas for good stuff to read on this topic.

Cicero, De Inventione 1.2: A Translation

But if we wish to consider the origin (principium) of this thing which is called eloquence, whether it is an art or skill or some sort of training or natural talent, we will discover that it derives from the most respectable causes and that it has been developed by the best methods. For there was a time when men wandered in the fields here and there like beasts and sustained themselves with wild food; they carried out nothing according to the dictates of reason, but more often with brute strength; there was not yet a system of divine worship or human government, and no one was yet acquainted with lawful marriage; no one had any assurance that the children he beheld were his own; no one enjoyed the benefits of fair and impartial law.

Cicero, De Inventione 1.1: A Translation (Continued)

Long have I thought about the question, and reason itself leads me rather to believe that wisdom without eloquence is of little advantage to nations, but indeed eloquence without wisdom too often is an obstacle, and never an advantage, to them. Therefore, if someone neglects the most appropriate and honorable study of reason and duty and wastes all his effort in training to speak publicly, he is developing into a citizen of no use to himself and harmful to his country. But the one who arms himself with eloquence so that he does not oppose advantages to his own country, but instead actively fights to obtain them, this man seems to me to be a citizen of the greatest value and utility to his own relations and to the public at large.

Cicero, De Inventione 1.1: A Translation

I have often wondered, and at length, whether facility (copia) in public speaking and in-depth study of eloquence have caused more good or more ill for both men and nations. For when I consider the damage to our own republic, and when I think back over the ancient disasters of the greatest nations, I realize that not the least part of these ills were brought on by the most eloquent men; but when I propose to investigate in the literary record events far distant from our memory because of their antiquity, I come to understand that many cities were founded, even more wars were extinguished, the most stable communities and most hallowed alliances were accomplished as much by the force of reason as--and even more easily--by eloquence.

Rosa Luxemburg

"The working classes in every country only learn to fight in the course of their struggles.... Social democracy... is only the advance guard of the proletariat, a small piece of the total working masses; blood from their blood, and flesh from their flesh. Social democracy seeks and finds the ways, and particular slogans, of the workers' struggle only in the course of the development of this struggle, and gains directions for the way forward through this struggle alone."

--Rosa Luxemburg

Action as antidote to free-floating theory: the emphasis on struggle is salutary and will provide the only way forward, if a way forward is to be found.

Now, to draw myself a bath.

Sunday Walk

Well, I finally did it--I accompanied (albeit walking) JSP on the route he runs 2-3 times a week, ending up in Battery Park. 5 miles in all! Prince came along too, but I think he was surprised by how long we were gone. I bet he sleeps well tonight!

Stigma, Luck and Public Assistance

I'm reading one of Tony Judt's last books, Ill Fares the Land, and it has gotten me to thinking: why is accepting public assistance--to the extent it still exists--a source of shame? Why is it so difficult to acknowledge that all of us may need a little help from others from time to time? Of course, I suspect that the answer lies in the age-old conflict between individualism and communitarianism, a conflict that appears to define American culture to a greater extent than is the case, say, in Europe.