Spencer Roloson Palaterra Napa Valley California 2005 $12.99
Source: SpencerRoloson.com
Recently I have really come to love the Spencer Roloson Palaterra 2005. According to the winemaker’s website, the Palaterra is a blend of of 59% Syrah, 24% Valdigue, 12% Petite Sirah, 4% Carignane modeled on wines from the Southern Rhone, Provence and the Languedoc. The 115 year old Carignane vines and the 50 year old Valdigue vines give the wine gnarly old vine character, while the Syrah gives it plenty of fruit, texture and weight. A very original and enjoyable wine.
Altaïr Sideral Rapel Valley Chile 2003
$16.99 — 88 ST | 91 WA
Source: AltairWines.com
The Altaïr Sideral Rapel Valley Chile 2003 is a gorgeous blend comprised of 84% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Merlot and 6% Shiraz. This wine is big all around. The color is an intense and opaque dark red. On the nose there are aromas of charcoal, spice and cigar tobacco. On the palate the wine has a lush and full feeling with nice tannins and a hint of oak. The finish is long and complex. Overall this is a well-integrated wine that is drinking very well right now — and one that I suspect would be quite amazing if you could manage to keep it around long enough to find out.
However, that could be difficult! Indeed, after picking up a case of this wine at the local Pennsylvania Wine and Spirits store about a month ago, we’ve already gone through the first half a case! And we have not been disappointed. At $16.99 this wine is on the high end of what I like to spend for everyday drinking, but given the increasing difficulty of finding wines with a Robert Parker / Wine Advocate rating of 91 points under $20 I decided it was worth the splurge. By comparison the best price I could find on Wine Access was $23.99 at Gary’s in Madison, NJ, a well-known discount wine merchant.
I just finished watching Lawrence Lessig’s fascinating “Getting the Network the World Needs” in which he first summarizes 20th century cultural discourses (i.e., text, photography, film, music, etc) as being essentially either Read Only (RO) or Read Write (RW). With the exception of photography, Lessig sees the 1900s as largely passive and RO, and thus more or less consistent with the predictions of Sousa and Huxley at the start of the century.
At about 20 minutes, he gets to the heart of his talk: copyright laws. “Copy-right” laws regulate the right to make copies. He summarizes these regulations as differentiating between free uses, regulated uses and a thin sliver of fair uses.
For example, reading, giving and selling books are all free uses. However, today we live in a network economy. In this world, the use of copyrighted works implicitly requires that we copy those works. Unlike the 20th century in which culture was passively consumed, in the 21st century culture is actively produced/created. Thus, 20th century copyright laws + 21st century network platforms have produced a world of unintended consequences (ala Merton?) whereby the (re)production and (re)creation of culture entails de facto the violation of copyright laws.
One result has been a decade long copyright war (about 33 minutes into the video). It is a war of prohibition waged against filesharing. It is a war which has not reduced filesharing, but has simply labeled our children as criminals. He notes that apparently our children do not pay attention to Supreme Court rulings, because its decision to side with the copyright enforcers has in no way deterred filesharing. His working solution (at about 37 minutes) is a 2X2 matrix which differentiates between professionals vs. amateurs and copies vs. mixes.
Professionals must clearly have copy-rights if they are to have any incentive to create. However, amateurs should be free to remix these works. It is the intersection of amateur-copies and professional-remixes that Lessig sees as gray areas (are these Moral Gray Zones ala Anteby?). In terms of the amateur-copies, what are the limits to how many copies an individual can make? e.g., Can I share my “favorite” songs with my 10,000 “friends” on Facebook? Where do we draw the line on copies by amateurs? In terms of professional-remixes, at what point does an amatuer remix turn commercial? e.g., If my YouTube mashup goes platinum who should share in the profits? When does an amateur remix turn professional?
Clearly these are questions of value — and thus squarely within the realm of my research interests. Indeed, it is the questions raised by these gray areas that intrigue me. In particular, Lessig asks what does justice look like in a world where free markets meet free culture? One solution he poses but then immediately criticizes is the Darth Vader approach to fan mashups taken by George Lucas. In this case, Lucas owns the commercial rights to everything fans have created, even their original works, an approach Lessig equates to digital “sharecropping.”
Ultimately, Lessig concludes that the copyright wars must be stopped, and that we must pursue peace (sue for peace?) – through changes in our copyright laws. For him, abolishing copyright laws is not the answer. At the same time, he argues that in the 21st century the existing 20th century system of copyright laws can never work. Maintaining them will mean either revolution or the end of creation. Here he draws a parallel between the copyright laws and the Soviet Union. For Lessig, only by updating our copyright laws can we save another generation of children from being labeled as criminals for simply enacting culture.
Over the weekend I finally had a chance to try out my Kindle 2. Although I have still not found a satisfactory way to convert PDFs of academic journal articles into readable Kindle files, I am very pleased with the formating of books available through ManyBooks.net. And while most of the content on ManyBooks comes directly from Project Gutenberg, one important difference is the option to download .AZW files, which is Kindle’s native format.
So far I’ve downloaded over 50 books from ManyBooks — all for free – ranging from the complete works of Williams Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe to the Declaration of Independence and the 2007 CIA World Factbook. ManyBooks also offers a selection of copyrighted titles that are licensed through some flavor of open content license. For example, I downloaded Eric S. Raymond’s (1996) The Cathedral and the Bazaar, a short story by Kurt Vonnegut, and The Cluetrain Manifesto. Of course, it is doubtful I’ll be reading most of these titles anytime soon. But with 1.4 GB of storage, they are now at my fingertips.
Of more immediate interest to me are about a dozen books by scholars such as Henri Bergson, William James, Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, and so forth. In fact, yesterday I cruised through the first third of Pragmatism, a series of seven lectures delivered by William James at the Lowell Institute in Boston and Columbia University in New York, between November 1906 and January 1907. And it is here that I began to appreciate the power of open content, in particular, the power of Kindle + Project Gutenberg and ManyBooks + Google Books.
In Pragmatism,James (1907: 46) credits C. S. Peirce’s 1878 article in Popular Science Monthly as the first to introduce pragmatism into philosophy. Curious about what Peirce had to say, I first went to Google. Dissatisfied with the results, I tried Google Books. After a few minutes of searching, I found Popular Science Monthly Volume 12 November 1877 to April 1878. As it turns out, during this 6 month period Peirce published a series of 4 different articles, including “How to make our ideas clear,” the paper cited by James.
Through Google Books, I downloaded the entire volume (about 30MB). Then using Acrobat Professional, I extracted each of the 4 articles as separate files, ran OCR on them, added these PDFs to my collection of research on the philosophy of pragmatism, and created citations for all 4 in EndNote. All this without ever setting foot in the library. Long live open content.
Peirce, C. S. 1878. Illustrations of the logic of science. Second paper: How to make our ideas clear. In E. L. Youmans & W. J. Youmans (Eds.), Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 12 (November 1877 to April 1878): 286-302. New York: Appleton. Accessed from http://books.google.com/books?id=ZKMVAAAAYAAJ.
Bodegas El Nido Clio 2003 $78.99 — 92 ST | 96 WA | 90 WS
Bodegas El Nido Clio 2003
The bad news is that the wine cellar is in desperate need of a multi-case infusion of wine. The good news is that lurking in the nooks and crannies are some forgotten gems. Specifically, last night in my quest for something interesting, I rediscovered a stash of Bodegas El Nido Clio Jumilla Spain 2003. As best I can recall, it has been at least 2 years since I last had a bottle of this fabulous wine.
As some of you may know, the Clio is the lower priced sibling of the Nido. Although the Nido has a release price of more than $130 a bottle, at its release the Clio usually runs between $35 and $40, and is typically rated only one or two points lower. In other words you get nearly all the bang for way less buck. And this is a wine that perenially wins high marks from Robert Parker and others. For example, Robert Parker / Wine Advocate ratings for the 2002, 2004 and 2005 vintages have been 93, 97 and 95 points respectively.
No exception to this trend, the 2003 was rated a whopping 96 points. According to my records I paid about $35 a bottle several years ago (that was before life on a Ph.D. budget). Today, I found it in stock at Wine.com for $79 a bottle, and elsewhere for $99 to $119 a bottle. It appears that “wine” may be the single best asset class I own in terms of five-year return on investment
Anyway, the wine is 70% Monastrell (61 year old vines) and 30% Cabernet Sauvignon (26 year old vines) and a huge 15.5% alcohol. According to Robert Parker, the Clio spent 26 months in a combination of French and American oak. The Clio 2003 has a deep, thick and intense purple color. Aromas are of creme de cassis and licorice, along with some toasty/leathery notes. On the palate the wine was lush and opulent, very complex, and still full of fruit. This wine is a real mouthful. And the finish was easily over 30 seconds. The wine is drinking very, very well right now, and shows no signs of running out of life.
I plan on having another bottle tonight in celebration of Valentine’s Day. Cheers!
This semester I am teaching MGMT 451W Business, Ethics and Society, which is a required course for management majors at Smeal. It is also a W course, which means that it is writing intensive. As such it also fulfills one of their degree writing requirements. Because of the focus on writing (and the amount of grading it generates) the class size is thankfully kept small — 25 students.
Our latest assignment asked: Is Starbucks a socially responsible company? I divided the assignment into two parts: 1) an individually authored paper (3-page maximum), and 2) participation in a team debate. First, students were giving the option of choosing their own teams or having me assign them to a team. (All picked the former option.)
I then assigned each team to a particular stakeholder group (i.e., employees, consumers, or suppliers), along with a particular position (either arguing that Starbucks is or is not ethically and socially responsible towards the assigned stakeholder group).
In addition to being assigned a core group of five readings, everyone was expected to find 2 additional legitimate, credible sources related to their assigned stakeholder position . The papers were then to summarize the arguments for their assigned position (2 pages) and to counter expected arguments on their opponents (1 page). The assigned readings included:
Argenti, P. 200 “Collaborating With Activists: How Starbucks Works With NGOs.” California Management Review.
Herbst, M. Dec 31, 2008. “Starbucks’ Union Blues.” Business Week.
Maher, K. Jan 23, 2008. “Starbucks Emails Describe Efforts to Stop Unionization.” Wall Street Journal.
Starbucks Corporation. “2007 Corporate Social Responsibility Report.”
Stone, B. Jul 4, 2008. “Lax Real Estate Decisions Hurt Starbucks.” New York Times.
Each team was then expected to combine these individual papers together for an in-class debate. On the day of the debate each of the six teams argued their side for 5 minutes. Then we took about 5 minutes for them to caucus and decide how to spend their 2 minutes of rebuttal time.
Along the way each team rated the four teams not related to its own position (e.g., the pro consumer team rated both employee teams and both supplier teams, but not themselves or the con consumer team). I also rated each debate team. Grades were assigned based on a combination of individual papers and each team’s ability to combine all the individual work into a cogent argument.
Along the way I developed a Debate Rating Sheet, a Grading Sheet, and an Assignment Feedback Sheet (designed for me to assess the assessment, namely, how well the assignment accomplished my learning objectives). Each of these is provided below.
Overall, the quality of the papers and the debate teams was better than I expected. Perhaps more importantly, feedback on the assignment exceeded my expectations in terms of the the learning and reflection it provoked on the part of the students. It turns out that many of them were assigned to positions that ran contrary to their own feelings and this forced them to see issues in a new light.
Through the assignment others recognized their own tendency to argue based on feelings and not credible evidence. Critically, almost everyone seems to have come away with the realization that ethics and social responsibility are not black and white issues. Instead, telling the story of companies such as Starbucks is complicated, one that defies a simple explanation or determination.
Another paper I recently completed is entitled “Phenomenology and institutional theory: Should institution be taken for granted?”
This paper investigates the concept of institution, a concept which has been used by scholars from across a number of disciplines to explain a wide variety of phenomena. Among organization scholars working in this tradition, one fundamental idea is that institutions become taken for granted to some degree. Over the years this linkage between the two concepts has itself become institutionalized and taken for granted. Any sense of difference that may have once existed between institution and taken for granted seems to have been forgotten.
In an effort to retrieve this distinction, the paper returns to Husserl, on whose philosophy these concepts rest. In doing so we find a richness and distinction otherwise glossed by merely reciting the idea that institution becomes taken for granted. The paper concludes that institution and taken for granted are phenomenologically distinct concepts. Through writing and documentation institution can become taken for granted. However, the process is reversible. Indeed Husserl’s real project seems to have been a demonstration of how taken for granted can and must become institution if we are to ever truly know ourselves and our world.
You can download a copy of the paper at the link below, or by visiting the Research section of my blog. As always, I invite your comments and feedback.
Over the last several weeks I’ve been able to finish the latest versions of several papers. One of these is a paper currently titled “Institutional change: A review and evaluation of research designs from1977-2007.”
This paper analyzes the research designs of empirical studies of institutional change published in leading management and sociology journals from 1977-2007. Generic institutional change research strategies are evaluated in terms of their strengths, weaknesses, rationale and appropriateness. Studies are further evaluated in terms of threats to their internal, external and construct validity; measurement types and classes; time scales; ethical considerations; and statistical conclusion validity. Overall, field studies, especially those drawing on archival data and event history analysis, are found to be the dominant research design.
The discussion highlights four potential limitations of these prior institutional change studies related to (1) tensions between the theoretical and operational level of analysis, (2) data limitations with regard to understanding microprocesses of institutional change, (3) the possible misspecification of the effects of historical time on hazard rate independent of elapsed time, and (4) the reliance on archival measures which are themselves constituted by institutional pressures. Finally, the paper proposes a research design that would provide additional precision in the control and measurement of variables of interest.
You can download a copy of the paper at the link below, or by visiting the Research section of my blog. As always, I invite your comments and feedback.
Kaiken Ultra Malbec Mendoza Argentina 2006
$12.99 — 91 WA | 90 WS
Source: KaikenWines.com
This is my third post about the Kaiken Ultra Malbec 2003. My other posts are here and here.
For better or for worse, we drank the last bottle from our case many weeks ago. However, over the holiday one of my relatives — and blog readers :) – had several bottles on hand and was happy to share the wealth. I can now say with great confidence, this may be the finest bottle of wine produced in the 21st century for under $13. Truly a wonderful wine for the money.
Over the holiday I took three wines, each of which cost $10 or less, to one of the family gatherings. The wines included:
Arthur Hills Cabernet Sauvignon Paso Robles California 2006 — $9.99
Nine x Nine Zinfandel Lodi California 2006 — $9.99
Bodega Norton Malbec Barrel Select Mendoza Argentina 2006 — $8.99
I had high hopes for all three, especially the Arthur Hills, as finding a decent California Cab for $10 has become almost impossible. Unfortunately, my search continues. The Arthur Hills was by far the worst of the three wines. It had a bizarre nose – think some combination of rotting organic matter and petrol. On the palate it was watery thin with flavors of strawberries — but of a decidedly artifical nature. At any rate, not what you want from a Cab. In short, this is one of the worst wines I can recall drinking in a long while. After a few sips, it went down the drain. It looks like the Gun Bun Cab gets to retain its title as the best California Cab under $15.
Next up was the Nine x Nine Zin. I was hoping for perhaps an alternative to Renwood or Dancing Bull. Certainly for $10 I had no expectations of Ridge… Alas, for me, this wine was also a disappointment. Mind you, it was not so visibly flawed as the Arthur Hills, but it was still just a bit beyond the borderline of acceptable. Of course, in wine as so many other things opinions vary; one of the other wine enthusiasts at the party thought it wasn’t so bad.
The third of the three turned out to be the best. The Norton Malbec was fragrant on the nose and full and lush in the mouth. It would benefit from a bit more grip on the palate and a little less ripenness, but overall, this was a drinkable wine. I have also recommended this wine to some friends who reported back that they enjoyed it very much. Although the Norton will never be mistaken for Kaiken, it is perfectly adequate for social gatherings and everyday drinking.
