Thoughts on contracts and other documents

I have started working on markup for contracts to enable database functionality. Having spent a great deal of time (but not really) worrying about the fact that XML works on tree structures. Because one generally wants networks more generally (of which trees are a subset), I was worried that there are circumstances in which XML is insufficient, and so I played around with RDF for a while. XML applications are much better developed, RDF theoretically is more generalizable...couldn't make a decision.

Then I realized that for historians, we only need trees. For ego-centric networks, cross-relationships between branches are secondary to the relationship to the trunk, which for us means the document. I may need to think on this for a few days (and welcome commentary from my non-existent readership), but I think that we should ultimately be starting with the original documents and marking our way up. Under this paradigm, relations between entities mentioned in the document are functions of the document itself. This is a bit difficult to wrap my mind around, but I think it works like this:

• For entities mentioned in the head or foot of a document, their relationship is to the document (and to some degree, the implied readership). For example, the "Posted by Ian Miller" at the bottom of this blog post identifies my role, my relationship to the post (writer). In the context of most Chinese documents, this will be in a format like: "著 邰小宝" or "author: Tai Xiaobao".
• For entities mentioned in the document itself, their relationship is to the setting of the document unless otherwise specified. For example, in an American newspaper, "President Obama" is enough of an indication because in this context he is well known, whereas people from less immediate contexts are specified in more detail, as "German Chancellor Angela Merkel". In the case of historical documents of unclear provenance, this gives us some indication of where they come from. In a contract I am working on, for example, the sellers are identified as "长房林协、次房林必录," or "Lin Xie, primary household; Lin Bilu, secondary household." In other words, Xie is from the eldest son's branch of the family (whether in this generation or a former one), and Bilu is from the second son's branch. This implies that the context of this document is the Lin family or lineage, as the relationship given is to the family. Likewise, if I were to refer to Obama as "eldest son Barack," that would tend to imply that I am referring to him in the context of his family, whereas "President Obama" is in the political context.
• In some cases, entities are given a context that is not relative to the document. Me referring to Obama as "elder son Barack" seems a bit strange, but I might refer to him as "Ann Dunham's eldest son Barack," which specifies him relative to another context, that of his mother Ann. For the purposes of tree-structured markup however, this does not make the relationship external to the document; in fact, the relationship of Ann and Barack is itself a branch of the document by the fact of its mention.

Ultimately, many applications of the data contained in these documents requires us to pull these exterior relationships out of their context within the document. We may ultimately want to put them into a general network graph that cannot be fully specified by a tree. However, to historians, the source of the data about the relationship is as important as the data itself. To my mind, this means that we must first encode the relationship as part of structure of the document.

It is the nature of most (all?) documents that they can be encoded as trees. This was actually my epiphany today as I was working on coming up with a generalized tree structure for contracts: most documents are essentially the same as contracts; they:

• Have headers specifying the context of the document (authorship, date...)
• Specify entities by relationship to the context described by the document. First mentions of entities almost always specify this relationship. In contracts this is often written as so: "The vendor, Spacely Sprockets Incorporated". In other documents (i.e. news articles): Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany".
• Subsequent references to entities generally do not specify this relationship in full. In contracts, the format for these references is often defined at their first mention: "hereafter referred to as 'vendor' or 'Spacely Inc.'", which is not generally the case. Nevertheless, in second and third occurrences, you will usually see "Chancellor Merkel" (Germany no longer being specified), or even just "Merkel."
• Events and terms are generally broken into relatively discrete chunks to reduce the number of cross-references.
• Former agreements, quotes or prior events are set apart by quotation marks, paragraph breaks or (as in classical Chinese) set phrases or characters.
  

This means that I should make my document framework as general as possible. It also means that if I do a good job making a general framework, it can be used to analyze a wide range of documents.

It strikes me that this is the most exiting thing about doing history, or at least the type of history that I want to do. Documents generally come to us in linear format, demanding to be read from front to back. As anyone who has ever diagrammed a sentence or looked at guidelines to format cover letters, documents have underlying tree structures (this is especially clear in the blank contract provided in the Fujian Provincial Statues):


The epiphany of the day is that a general network graph can be built up from the individual trees (i.e. documents). To me, this is the real work of history: finding the trees in texts, building the trees into graphs, and then finding the logic within those graphs. This should not just be an exercise in pasting narratives together, but of seeing the broader shape of things!

The Cellphone Proletariat Revisited

The New York Times is visiting an issue that I came face to face with five years ago when I was teaching in Zhengzhou. Specifically, they are looking at the fact that college graduates, on average, early barely more than migrant laborers. Incidentally, the major arguments of their four commentators: a manufacturing heavy, export-oriented market; test-oriented, one-size-fits-all education; and a large gap between the top schools and the rest. One factor mentioned that I had not thought of is the demographic shift that is causing lots of older workers to retire from the blue-collar sector, leading to more openings there than in the thin management class. Altogether, I am rather impressed by my own analysis of five years ago (if not my spelling), although I think I focused somewhat too heavily on the political prospects of the cell-phone proletarians.

My perspective five years on is largely on the overwhelming importance of demographics and regional differentiation. My students observed to me back then that there were good jobs available in the west of China, which was and is the major growth area. Nonetheless, the tendency was for them to either remain in Zhengzhou, or to go to coastal cities like Shenzhen, Ningbo, Shanghai, Beijing and Tianjin. These are precisely the areas that have the oldest and most long-standing development, and are therefore faced with a glut of skilled labor while simultaneously facing the retirement of their blue-collar workforce. The relative unwillingness of young workers to go West is continuing to feed the sharp distinction between Xinjiang, where opportunities abound, and the coast, where they are limited.

At the same time, the population bulge caused by the post-war baby boom and subsequent sharp reduction of births under the One Child Policy means that there are substantial generational effects visible in the job market. The lack of managerial opportunity is to some degree a reflection of China's policy decision to continue to promote manufacturing. But the small income gap between educated and uneducated labor is large part a reflection of the growing demand for blue-collar workers caused by the retirement of large numbers of the sixties and seventies generations, who found work when heavy industry was the overwhelming emphasis of government policy.

It seems to me that many of America's economic problems are similar generation effects. It is a known issue that the differed benefits offered to labor unions in the fifties and sixties are part of the failure of American manufacturing as these commitments come to term. It is also worth noting that many issues came to a political head in America when they affected the white-collar middle class. In America, as elsewhere, the decline of manufacturing (and its outsourcing) led to a movement to white-collar labor, construction and service; it was only when Americans discovered that low-skill white-collar labor could be outsourced that it began to be a political issue.

I have grown too cautious to make predictions, only observations. Nonetheless, fun to revisit an old concern of mine.

Drugs, food, memes and civilazation

It has been nearly four years since I posted. I find that my intellectual center has shifted, and I have substantially less free time than in the previous two most intensive periods of posting, and yet I have, if anything, a greater need for a journal of my musings, if only for my own future reference. We'll see if there is any regularity here.

I recall one of the more striking epiphanies I had with aid from some poisonous mushrooms. It occurred to me that everyone was on drugs of some sort, and that there was a fundamental disconnect between them. Smokers exist in a different social and psychological mien than drinkers or potheads or whatever. The social, cultural, chemical aspects all reinforce each other in promoting a line of distinction between groups, as if there were separate tribes. Under the guidance of my mycological ally, these cultural distinctions condensed into almost visible streams of differing viscosity, spatial dimensions and currents. Drugs promote different paces of motion, types of thought and inclinations toward socialization. These interact and clash with the fluid norms and fixed rules of other overlapping social mien to create cultural pools.

Smokers exhibit gravitational attraction toward each other by the simple acts of bumming a cigarette or asking for a light. At the same time, they are actively repelled by non-smokers, who (in current social formations) are dominant in their demands for clean airspace. These attractions-repulsions push smokers to clumps on the perimeter of social and architectural spaces, which they cohabit - in their capacity as students, workers, tenants or whatever - with people who do not belong to their chemical tribe. There are reasons to believe that their chemical bonds are stronger descriptors of their nature than their occupational containers. Smokers are one type of reagent, they react in known ways to their bonding-pair object (cigarettes) that are modified to only a limited extent by the type of container they are in. Smoker and non-smoker engineers are silver nitrate and sodium hydroxide. The fact that they are both engineers is like saying the two chemicals are both in Erlenmeyer flasks. Smoker lawyers are silver nitrate in pipettes, the same compound in another container. Mixing smokers and non-smokers yields a brown precipitate, a clump of ash and tarry lungs that clumps on the sidewalk beside the exits.

Without going into further description of other drug tribes, suffice to say that this was mere background to my epiphany of this morning, aided by my new drug of choice (coffee). Incidentally, there are numerous studies calling the enlightenment, democracy, capitalism, modernity at large as the distinctive cultural formations of coffee. It strikes me that this is particularly true. The difference between coffee and tea cultures is perhaps more subtle than The Devil's Cup would have it, but there are differences nonetheless. Are the various caffeinated beverages subcultures of the same tribe? Admixtures of different elasticities? The shared chemical basis of coffee, tea, chocolate, guarana, yerba mate etc implies a history of different contexts for human-drug interaction, but also implies that there is something inherent in the human-plant symbiosis that demands stimulants (especially when we consider that adding ma huang [i.e. ephedrine] and coca implicates much of the subtropical and tropical world in supplying us with uppers). This demands further meditation.

Nonetheless, three further thoughts for future reference. First, the interaction between these substances and human society that produces the most notable cultural forms appear to occur when borders are crossed. In their native setting (if that can be constructed as such), coffee, tea et al do not stand out as rabble-rousers, catalysts or enemies of the state. It is when they encounter an unfamiliar cultural formation that you get things like cafes provoking the English Civil war and capitalism, or cocaine fueling the paradoxical 80s. This effect is strengthened by attempts at control and prohibition.

Second, food is not distinct from these impulses. Rice, corn, even avacados imply certain cultural formations when combined with certain social orders. These lead to a certain mutual dependance where it is hard to ascertain whether corn is controlling us or we are controlling corn (if that is even a meaningful distinction, debt to Michael Pollan as always). The critical factor here is that food and drugs are not merely memes that affect society at the intellectual/social level, comparatively confined to these levels and describable as infections of the social body. Because we ingest them, food and drugs are infections on the physical human body as well, in fact they often manifest as things we would more normally call diseases: everything from lung cancer to diabetes to beri-beri is implicated in the diet-culture-nature-nurture realm of drug interactions.

This is getting hard to keep clean, but if we think of food/drugs as infections on the social and physical body, it becomes hard to disentangle. Where is agency? Where is causation? Nonetheless, it is relatively clear that broad swaths of phenomena appear to be infectious through non-traditional disease vectors. We are used to thinking of infectious diseases as things like smallpox or malaria: transmitted human to human or some other host to human, the proximate vector being biological: a virus, bacterium, fungus, prion or whatever. But these infections have other determining factors - certain types of sociability and spatial factors, as well as genetics are associated with the susceptibility to (and therefore transmission patterns of) AIDS, chicken pox and malaria, to name a few. Can't we consider diabetes in a similar light? It has genetic factors for sure, but susceptibility is also closely associated with social patterns, and its proximate vector of transmission is chemical (sugar). Under this formulation, we should consider disease to be more than a physical disorder, it is also a social disorder, and an ecological disorder.

New Years Reservations: Monkeys-riding-tigers will be Boys

Happy nineteen eighty-twenty-seven everybody!

Top news story of the year so far: kids are too excited about reading!

Now the time-honored tradition on the occasion of the New Year is to make resolutions to eat better, excercise more, be kinder to acquaintances, spend more time with family, focus on work, stop sweating the small stuff, pay attention to detail and other impractical, contradictory and cliched goals. These resolutions are then generally broken by, well, today. In any case, I have decided to explore the possibilities contained within this new leaf concept. My first assertion, based on little other than that last metaphor, is that resolutions might be best left for the spring. But that's a little too facile, so let's not short-circuit this before we get any lightbulbs.

My first thought, in terms of resolutions, was very much along the traditional diet-and-exercise lines. This type of resolution is a real John Travolta of a tripple-threat: it promises to extend your life, increase your health and energy now and give you something to bitch about with everyone else who is failing at their diet-and-exercise resolution. And if it ends up a flop some time after the fourth or fifth major feature, it promises to come back in a new and fatter iteration sometime down the line.

So let's hit up diet first. I'm already a failed vegitarian of some sort, so that's not really a new leaf so much as a slowly composting one. I thought about becoming a stronger sort of vegitarian, giving up eggs or dairy or both, especially after reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, which made commercial egg production sound much worse than I imagined. However, Michael Pollan also convinced me that veganism doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

His argument runs something like this: if everyone was a vegan, no cows, chickens etc would be raised, and because they cannot survive in the wild, they will go extinct. In other words, veganism evades the crime of killing an animal by committing the crime of extinting a species. There is a problem with this argument; a very big one. It falls pray to a universality fallicy. If everyone in the world was a vegan, chickens would probably go extinct because they don't make good pets and noone would be raising them for meat or eggs. However, if even 1% of the population continued to eat eggs and meat, they would continue to raise chickens and things would be fine. In any case, something like 4% of the population is vegitarian and something like 4% of them are vegan, so the problem of vegans causing the extinction of chickens is not imminent.

The stronger case against veganism, to my mind, is contained within Pollan's extinction argument, as well as other places in his book (which I strongly recommend, by the way, as long as you don't mind ruining McDo for yourself). It runs something like this: humans are naturally omnivores, this is evidenced by the facts that we have multi-function teeth, big brains and can't make vitamin B12 for ourselves. The case is presented that cows are generally healthier (both for themselves and for us to eat) when they are allowed to behave like cows rather than meat factories. Likewiswe with pigs. Likewise with grass (which works much better as a polyculture, even for the purpose of making ethanol). So it is fair to assume that humans are healthiest, and probably best for their environment, as omnivores. So long, that is, as they treat their cows like cows and their chickens like chickens and so on. That does not mean factory farming but it does mean farming: these species have evolved to the point where that is their natural environment. Things are healthiest when cows are allowed to be cows and humans are allowed to be humans.

Finally, there is the koala argument. Apparently koalas have a head that is much bigger than their brain, which means that they probably used to be omnivores and required a bigger brain, but now that they only eat eucalyptus, they have tiny little brains. So, while vegitarians are smarter, they are not smarter because they don't eat meat, they don't eat meat because they are smarter (they are also more likely to be female). So there is the possibility that over generations, vegans eating only corn and soy would develop smaller brains than omnivores and become sub-human. Then again, I doubt the intelligence of anyone who consumes only a few foods by choice.

So veganism is out. And I don't really need to loose weight, I'm more concerned with developing habits to prevent future weight gains, so I don't really need any extreme diets (btw, people on diets are more likely to be fat, but this again is a selection bias). So I decided my goal for this year is to cure myself of some of my eating-when-bored-or-tired habits. These include, but are not limited to, eating late at night, taking multiple helpings when I'm not really hungry and pretty much any time I eat cereal. My reading has also indicated to me that most cereals are pretty far from actually being food, so that seems like a good type of thing to cut out. I mean, grape nuts and bran flakes are fine, but anything with more than about six ingredients is probably just processed corn. So I decided to stop eating after 9 pm and stop taking multiple helpings at meals. This has the added benifit of meaning that I will be more genuinely hungry for snacks which, along with naps, are about the greatest invention ever. On a more emotional level, I've decided to encourage myself to enjoy that slightly hungry feeling.

Well, so far I've already broken both the 9 pm thing and the second helpings. Two nights ago I had about six slices of pizza between 9 and 11 for exactly the reasons I'm trying to avoid. Yesterday, I had too helpings of a dinner that really wasn't good enough to merit being over-full. So I'm 2 for 2 and it's been 2 days. Good start to the year.

I'm pretty good about exercise as well, so I'm not entirely sure how badly I need a resolution in this department. I've come to recognize the fact that I feel much better when I get out for a run or do some yoga, and I'm pretty good at getting in three or four days a week. I've gotten a little bit worse about stretching, which happens every winter (stretching cold is no fun and probably not great for your muscles anyway), plus I'm nursing a knee injury that makes some stretches unadvisable. But I would like to get back into my better flexability by the end of the spring. In fact, I'm starting to think that this sort of long-term goal may be a better idea for an exercise resolution. You know, something like I want to be able to run five miles in fourty minutes by the end of the year. So I'm thinking, in view of my tentative plans to do something hardass this summer that I want to be in good shape before I go rather than getting in shape along the way. That's pretty general and yet pretty specific. And doable. Maybe that's not such a good thing...

And of course, there are the other categories of resolutions. Get organized, be optimistic and such. For example, I might make a resolution to always post my blog on time. That seems like a pretty safe one, because I know I'll break it by the second month of the year. In fact, I'm starting to think that keeping a resolution might be more dangerous than breaking one.

See, apparently free will is somewhat of an illusion, something we construct for ourselves after the fact. We are monkeys riding tigers and coming up with justifications for where they go. If we keep our resolutions, doesn't that just mean that the monkey is becoming more convinced that he's actually in control? Sounds a little dangerous to me. I definately get the feeling that I'm being taken for a ride when, at 11 oclock I head for the third peice of cake. Also, we apparently remember regret better than we remember guilt. So maybe my resolution for the year is to enjoy the ride, the six peices of pizza and my monkey chagrin.

Writing in the Margins

Some things that I wonder about:

-We are often disgusted by the sight of urban blight, functionally ugly construction, coal and oil smoke, rusting automobiles. It seems like we find old-but-not-yet-outdated technology as the prime example of the ugly and polluting aspects of our urban environment. Shiny new technology is exempt until it's not so new. More interestingly, truly old technology is exempt as well. We consider things like water mills, early machinery, wood stoves and the like quaint. But consider, there was a time when these were cutting-edge technology. There was also, therefore, a time when they were becoming increasingly marginalized technology, but had not yet dissapeared. Were they considered unsightly and polluting? Going further back, was there a time when log cabins were a shiny new technology and mud huts seemed a blight on the landscape? Or is this perspectieve a product of modernity?

-It seems to met that the greatest innovations, the ones the represent real leaps forward rather than incrimental steps, come from the margins of society more than the professional innovators. Apple computers present a very interesting perspective on this. When Steve Jobs and the Woz were putting together machines in their garrage, they were cutting edge, then when Mac's were at the height of their popularity, they ceased to be making much in the way of innovation and then, after nearly failing, they returned to the forefront of innovation. Another way to look at this is that highly chaotic times present the impetus for real novel ideas. The warring states, for example, was a relatively chaotic period in China; it is also when the most formative philosphies took root, including Daoism and Confusionism as well as the ultimately less sucessful Moism, Legalism and some others. This is, of course, all anecdotal; I could very easily be pulling out only the examples that support my thesis. Something worth exploring, although I wonder how that might be done....

-Under the assumption that margins are where the most interesting ideas come from, where are the best places to look for innovation? Here are some that I've been thinking about: the megaslums forming around major cities in the developing world (notably, these will soon hold the majority of the world population), the drug trade, areas struck hard by the AIDS epidemic, failed states, prisons. In some cases, there may be too many externalities, or the situation may be entirely too marginal. In other cases, the innovations may be a little or no practical use outside of the situation in which they arise, or may be destructive in nature. In particular, consdier that terrorism and the manipulation of the UN and the international community represent major innovations in managing conflicts across massive power differentials. Some other things we've heard a lot about, microfinance being a prime example, came out of megaslums. If I were a major investment agency, that is where I'd put a lot of focus.

-Increasingly, the indication seems to be that large groups of people are better at making solutions than elites. Even though those people may individually be idiots, in aggregate, they make better decisions than highly intelligent and educated elites. Maybe. Mom got me a book on this that I haven't had the chance to read yet. My observation: masses of people are better at voting on things indirectly or when there is a clear outcome. For example, buying things is essentially a vote. Another example might be American Idol: zombie Americans with nothing better to do than watch reality TV seem to do a pretty good job of choosing sucessful singers. Then again, this should almost be a truism, because the measure a a singer's sucess is preetty much based on how many peopel like them. But maybe what we need is more direct democracy. Why not run voting issues on TV or internet-based applets that have a panel of experts to help people see the different sides of the issue and then let them decide. One of the major disadvantages, that interested people are more likely to vote, doesn't nessisarily seem like such a disadvantage. Voting fraud might be, but then again, it already is.