The Marks of a Hoax: Dickens and Dostoevsky

Copy of a Photograph of Charles Dickens (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Russian literature specialist Eric Naiman describes a fake anecdote in "When Dickens met Dostoevsky," (TLS 10 April 2013), and the bizarre, convoluted, trail that led him to find multiple pseudonyms of someone who seems to be a disgruntled independent scholar. I think some points turned up in his detective work show the typical marks of a hoax, and point to the deeper civilizational issues raised by falsehood.

Naiman traces "the connections between A. D. Harvey, Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham, Michael Lindsay and Ludovico Parra" who may be real friends of "A.D. Harvey" or pseudonyms. (The erotica connection may make your head spin!)

The Dickens-Dostoevsky story is supposed to have appeared in a letter of Dostoevsky describing a meeting with Dickens during his first visit to London. The visit to London happened. The visit to Dickens, in which he bared his soul never happened. But it sounded so good. The fake story originated in an unassuming scholarly note by "Stephanie Harvey" in a Dickens journal, citing an obscure note in an obscure Soviet journal. (Dickens lovers cited the piece in reviews, which brought it to the attention to Russian lit specialists who questioned the story's authenticity.) The fake story itself has some interesting marks of a successful and, indeed, powerful fake.

E-Book Dodge (Randy Cohen on eBooks

Randy Cohen's Ethicist in the NY Times Magazine responds to a reader who asks about buying a hardcover when he really wanted an eBook edition, and then downloading a pirated eBook copy.

Update: 4/9/10: The Bookfinder blog adds more to the discussion, quoting from author John Scalzi's blog.

Google Translate and Google Voice: a mass experiment

Image via Wikipedia

The New York Times has what strikes me as an important article on Google's translation service, and while it emphasizes processing power and data, there's more here. (The section on their original data is interesting too.)

Using Computing Might, Google Improves Translation Tool - NYTimes.com

Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems. [....]

Creating a translation machine has long been seen as one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence. For decades, computer scientists tried using a rules-based approach — teaching the computer the linguistic rules of two languages and giving it the necessary dictionaries.

But in the mid-1990s, researchers began favoring a so-called statistical approach. They found that if they fed the computer thousands or millions of passages and their human-generated translations, it could learn to make accurate guesses about how to translate new texts.

It turns out that this technique, which requires huge amounts of data and lots of computing horsepower, is right up Google’s alley.

Like its rivals in the field, most notably Microsoft and I.B.M., Google has fed its translation engine with transcripts of United Nations proceedings, which are translated by humans into six languages, and those of the European Parliament, which are translated into 23. This raw material is used to train systems for the most common languages.
But Google has scoured the text of the Web, as well as data from its book scanning project and other sources, to move beyond those languages. For more obscure languages, it has released a “tool kit” that helps users with translations and then adds those texts to its database.

And down here I wonder about whether we have allowed Google to use us for massive data mining of... voices:

Google has used a similar approach — immense computing power, heaps of data and statistics — to tackle other complex problems. In 2007, for example, it began offering 800-GOOG-411, a free directory assistance service that interprets spoken requests. It allowed Google to collect the voices of millions of people so it could get better at recognizing spoken English.

A year later, Google released a search-by-voice system that was as good as those that took other companies years to build.

The Times also links to a sidebar, comparing translations for famous works. Kafka, of course, has the vermin/bug/waterbug/cockroach issue to stump computers. Worth a look.

Re-reviewing the re-design of the NY Times Magazine

SPD has a review of the re-design of the Times' Magazine. Of particular interest is the discussion of the new faces chosen. I have to agree with some of the more recent commentators--I'm not too thrilled with all parts of the design: it's kind of design-y for my taste.

(h/t Andy Whitehead)

Textbook reshaping in NYT Magazine - How Christian Were the Founders? -by Russell Shorto

[Note: I was going to let this story pass and allow my comments to sit in my personal diary because they turn on matters of religious faith and because so much of the activism described here seems to me to arise from personal insecurity and need for affirmation from external sources, and these are always sore matters over which people can be very angry. And yet, I was deeply troubled by a lot of the very problematic approaches to American history and its teaching. I also think the strong influence of Texas, and its very clever law and rule making has made it an important market-maker in textbook publishing, in a way similar that some otherwise insignificant states have increase their influence through early primaries. So, with this caveat.... -Paul]

How Christian Were the Founders? - NYTimes.com

The past is a foreign country, and they don't always speak our language.

Russell Shorto in the NY Times Magazine talks about the influence of politics and religion on the development of school textbooks, notably because of the Texas State Board of Education. Texas has gradually supplanted California as the arbiter of what's included in textbooks nationwide, and many groups wanting to influence the young have been bringing their efforts to Texas. None of this is new to anyone who has watched this unfolding over the last two decades. The panicky tone is also typical. Shorto suggests that the fundamentalist Christians trying to influence the Texas State Board of Education are also looking to the idea of original intent in judicial rulings. (And also: "As Cynthia Dunbar, another Christian activist on the Texas board, put it, 'The philosophy of the classroom in one generation will be the philosophy of the government in the next.'"

Public education has always been a battleground between cultural forces; one reason that Texas’ school-board members find themselves at the very center of the battlefield is, not surprisingly, money.[....]  Texas uses some of that money to buy or distribute a staggering 48 million textbooks annually — which rather strongly inclines educational publishers to tailor their products to fit the standards dictated by the Lone Star State. California is the largest textbook market, but besides being bankrupt, it tends to be so specific about what kinds of information its students should learn that few other states follow its lead.

For me, this part was new, an evangelical Christian excavation of the pre-Revolutionary past to find documents opposed to the secularism (for lack of a better term) of the 18th century:

Apple's iBook on the iPad

Today's Apple announcement (liveblogged at the NY Times) had Steve Jobs diplomatically say of Amazon's Kindle, that Apple "we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a bit farther." The iBook app allow eBook viewing and purchasing within the application (like iTunes), so it's not necessarily tied to a particular hardware. The Times notes that Penguin, Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan and Hachette are signed up but not yet Random House.

The Times notes: "Apple uses the ePub format, the most popular open book format in the world. It’s unclear what digital rights management they are using and whether these books will be transferable to other devices that support ePub, like the Barnes & Noble and Sony e-readers."

James Patterson, Author (updated)

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Today's New York Times Magazine has a long piece about thriller potboiler author James Patterson. Patterson, who started out as a major mover and shaker in advertising at J Walter Thompson, has been transforming an old established publishing house like Little Brown. I do admire his insight that people buy the name (like Crest toothpaste or dog food), and buy it more often than the older houses assumed. It's also interesting and unusual that he works closely with the publisher in branding his books and approving design and cover. His stable of "co-authors" (who fleshout his detailed plot summaries and who he in turn revises) sounds like grist for scholarly mills some day. And yet, I found it all quite disturbing--how the new head of Little is nearly sychopantic towards him, how one of the people there compares him (implicitly) to Dickens (!).

And then I did some research on the Times's website.