Thursday, October 23, 2003
Why we need elective calliagnosia
The Higher Education Chronicle notes that good-looking professors get better evaluations. Article ranges from hilarious...
Mr. Lang has always earned high marks from his students at Assumption College, but he doesn't consider himself a "Baldwin" (for the clueless, that's a term for a hot guy, popularized by the movie Clueless). Apparently, though, some of his students do. More than one of them has made comments about his "buns" on student evaluations.
Now the assistant professor of English says he's self-conscious about his looks and his teaching. "I work very hard at my teaching," he says, "and I am a little disturbed at the possibility that students are evaluating my courses based on such a superficial criterion." He wonders if he's as good a teacher as he thought he was, and he's afraid to turn his back to his classes to write on the chalkboard.
...to surprising...
Some male professors also may be dismayed about another finding of the study: "Good looks generated more of a premium, and bad looks more of a penalty, for male instructors," say Mr. Hamermesh and Ms. Parker in a paper about their findings, "Beauty in the Classroom: Professors' Pulchritude and Putative Pedagogical Productivity." According to their data, the effect of beauty (or lack thereof) on teaching evaluations for men was three times as great as it was for women.
I'll do what the Chronicle does not, and link to the original academic paper: summary at NBER; alternate link.
BTW the title of this post comes from a term used in Ted Chiang's marvelous story "Liking What You See: A Documentary", which appears in his collection Stories of Life, and Others (available in hardcover and paperback).
Labels: academia, sexual-preferences, teaching
Tuesday, October 21, 2003
David Foster Wallace on Infinity
I'm sad to report that Quicksilver was a bit of a disappointment (maybe one of these days I'll write up why), but today I found something new to look forward to: David Foster Wallace's latest, Everything and More, a discourse through the history of the concept of mathematical infinity.
DFW's pretty much my favorite author these days. He's not only an excellent writer; he's uncommonly perceptive in thinking about writing: what makes writing work, the relationship between writers and readers, and the place of writing in our larger contemporary culture. Also, as an undergrad majoring in philosophy, he specialized in mathematical logic and semantics; maybe it's because I double majored in English and computer science, but there's something about the way his mind turns around in his writing that really clicks with me.
Of course, reading the new Wallace book is yet another claim on my copious free time. Sigh.
J. B. DeLong weighs in on globalization
A while back, I was quite surprised by leftist George Monbiot's series of articles ([1], [2], [3]; originally from The Guardian) defending the WTO. Now, it looks like Brad DeLong is weighing in on the side of globalization, with a long quote from a Nation article by Doug Henwood:
As the results of the ministerial show, the WTO was never really the institution its critics said it was. From the outset, it wasn't really dominated by big capital in the rich countries. It's a one-country, one-vote system, like the UN's General Assembly. The rich countries, especially the United States, don't like this arrangement. They prefer the Security Council, with its big power vetoes. The United States is especially fond of the structure of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, where votes are weighted roughly by GDP, giving the United States a 17 percent share of the vote and an effective veto. The rich countries finance the various institutions in revealing ways. At the Bank and Fund, both salaries and headcounts are high. The WTO has a small staff that's engaged in industrial action over pay and working conditions. As Columbia University economist Jagdish Bhagwati points out, the WTO's entire budget is smaller than the IMF's travel budget.
What might a weaker WTO mean? There was no sign of disappointment coming from the Bush Administration: US Trade Representative Robert Zoellick was quite optimistic after the talks collapsed. Zoellick hopes to induce a regime of what he calls "competitive liberalization," with countries eager for access to US markets fighting among themselves to please Washington. The US government is happy to negotiate separate deals with individual countries; it's always going to be the stronger party in any bilateral conversation. A weaker WTO will only stimulate the Bush Administration's unilateralist lusts. One of the organizers of the Cancún demonstrations told me people in the streets knew that what they were doing would strengthen the United States, but they wanted to damage the WTO regardless.
DeLong himself adds:
At one level, I want to tell Doug that although he is very welcome, he is about four years late to this particular party. Back when he was having his exhilarating time in Seattle, the protesters included:
- Hollywood workers who objected because NAFTA did not prohibit the Canadian government from subsidizing Canadian culture.
- NGOs that argued that Mexico's urban poor should under no circumstances be allowed to buy cheaper tortillas made from Iowa corn.
- U.S. steelworkers who argued that Brazilian steelworkers needed to lose their jobs, now.
With no vision of what a better world would look like, the "anti-globalization" movement was from its birth doomed to become the puppet of whatever particular bunch of special interests catches their fancy--whether it is U.S. steelworkers who want Brazilians and Koreans to lose their jobs, subsidized Korean farmers who want to keep Filipinos and Indonesians poor, Louisianians who are upset by imports of Vietnamese catfish, or whoever.
DeLong's last paragraph overstates the case against the anti-globalization movement; but as of now, I am officially an "off the reservation" liberal w.r.t. globalization and the WTO. Global trade is a good thing. No Brazilian or Vietnamese company is going to beat Intel or AMD at making computer chips anytime in the foreseeable future; they won't even come remotely close. Ergo, the only way for such nations to acquire a competitive information technology infrastructure is global trade. The same holds for countless other kinds of goods and services.
Given that global trade must exist, some international entity must govern it. The alternative is a power vacuum which the most powerful player (viz., the USA) will fill. Given that some governing entity must exist, it may as well be the WTO as anything else --- as Monbiot points out, the IMF and the World Bank are fundamentally less egalitarian by design; and the anti-globalization forces haven't put forth a better alternative, unless you think anarchy is a better alternative. The right goal is to reform the institution, not to tear it apart.
Sunday, October 19, 2003
Notes on Kill Bill
Saw Kill Bill last night with SL and J (coincidentally, it looks like MS did too). The advance buzz has mostly been about the excessively gory, relentless, and conscience-free violence, which I did find annoying and cheap --- in a culture where a murderous robot can be elected governor, it doesn't take much imagination or courage to make a movie that merely depicts even more trivialized violence --- but I thought the real failure was that the action simply wasn't shot that well. Yes, I know this seems like a ridiculous assertion, given Tarantino's obvious visual fluency in general, but bear with me.
Tarantino shares the misapprehension, disappointingly common among American blockbuster directors, that the point of cinematic action is its result: he's quite careful to convey that the table gets knocked over and smashed up, or that so-and-so's body part gets hacked off, or that the blood gets splattered against the walls. But he fails to portray effectively the motion of the human body, which, for me, is what it's all about. Action is a form of dance. Well-executed action has a certain rude grace, and for me it's only satisfying when the film captures that grace visually.
It's instructive to compare the fight scenes in Tarantino's film with those in The Matrix or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Of course, those other movies had quite different aesthetic aims, but all three share the same choreographer; and the Wachowski brothers and Ang Lee were both, in their own ways, vastly better at showing you the action than Tarantino. When Morpheus and the Agent are fighting on top of the 18-wheeler, you never doubt for a moment exactly how the Agent knocks Morpheus over the side. You grasp every instant, every block and punch and reversal, and you can appreciate the impact of each individual motion. Likewise with Jen Wu and Shu Lien's first fight, following the rooftop chase sequence; this fight was additionally masterful because the specific motions of the fight/dance were actually an embodiment of the differences between their characters. Swashbuckling, romantic rebel Jen Wu repeatedly tries to take flight, and is pulled back to earth by Shu Lien, whose misguided attachment to tradition later dooms her own love. Compare these to Kill Bill's climactic showdown between O-Ren Ishii and Black Mamba: the swords clash (you can't tell how they clash; you see steel flashing and you hear the clang, but you don't know what's really going on); Uma Thurman falls; Uma gets up; the swords clash again; Lucy Liu gets scalped; game over. The difference between Ang Lee and Tarantino is like the difference between a comedy with genuinely funny, sharply-written dialogue, and one where the dialogue makes no sense but you know it's supposed to be funny because of the laugh track.
In short, Tarantino's movie depicts not so much action itself as the idea of action. Tarantino makes all the right manneristic cinematic gestures associated with action, and he positively relishes the gory result of action, but ironically he doesn't have much sensibility for the action itself. He's better at showing gushing blood than bodies in motion.
Now, all that said, Kill Bill wasn't exactly a bad movie. The music was great, and the film's packed with visual style. There's a cool anime sequence, in which the action's actually quite effectively conveyed (which is ironic, since there's much less motion in this sequence than in, say, the big swordfight in the club). But in a movie with so little of dialogue or character, the action's all there is; and if that's not spectacular, then the movie can't really be entirely satisfying.
Labels: film, film-reviews
