Links for 8/12/09

by Andrew Gillen

Kevin Carey:

it'd be easy enough to use this merely as a point for Illinois in the Great American Corrupt-o-Thon it seems to be contesting against the state of New Jersey , or to chuckle at the inevitable appearance of the words "whose law firm donated $105,000 to Blagojevich's campaigns."

But really, isn't the only out-of-the-ordinary thing here that the people in Illinois were dumb enough to give their list an official name?

Tim Ranzetta loves the New Zealand financial literacy site http://www.sorted.org.nz/

Mark Bauerlein on the Sokal affair (where Sokal got a paper with intentional mistakes and incoherent reasoning published)

the paper itself was certainly not an "elaborate hoax." It was outright blather, and it should have rendered the credentials of the author irrelevant.

That his credentials could, in fact, succeed as "cover" underscores another symptom of a discipline in decline. Why do people resort to credentials when judging a work of scholarship? Because they don't believe in objective standards by which to judge the work itself.

Someone should tell Harvard that going after “a college in Singapore that not only was calling itself Harvard Business School but also selling the rights for the name all over Asia” is good, but that trying to trademark “Ask what you can do’’, “Lessons learned’’, and “The world’s thinking’’ is a bit arrogant. Not to mention it goes against the whole free flow of ideas that we are always told is a hallmark of HE.

Aside: In a similar vein, Brad DeLong taunts the Associated Press.