Spring 3.1+ Environment properties not being resolved when using dollar-notation placeholders in bean properties? Read this :-)

So after spelunking through the Spring source, I found out that it was my fault, of course. Why:

1. I needed a in my spring XML, even with nothing else, just to tell Spring to look for ${...}.
2. My spring schema version was on 2.5, which of course doesn't have the global Environment stuff and assumes you don't want it.

This lesson brought to you by many tram rides and a sleeping toddler.

Patterns of Refactored Agency: blogger compels me to post this as the keyboard beckons my fingertips...

Patterns of Refactored Agency: Not that I agree with all of it, but it's a very interesting to apply the refactorings to various aspects of life and see what happens:

"I’ve found it to be a good general-purpose cognitive tool to try to see the world with agency located in unconventional places. Normally, we like to imagine ourselves as the chief agents in our lives – making choices, taking actions, pursuing our own interests that we have identified for ourselves. There is nothing wrong with this, of course. It’s no doubt much more healthy to think in that way than the inverse – to view yourself, for example, as nothing but a puppet of external forces. But it is not so good to be trapped in a single fictional model of the universe. To understand large systems we need to go beyond the everyday model of agency and think in new ways."

Napsterisation - how to educate the world? (for certian values of 'educate')

Napster, Udacity, and the Academy Clay Shirky:

"It’s been interesting watching [napsterisation] unfold in music, books, newspapers, TV, but nothing has ever been as interesting to me as watching it happen in my own backyard. Higher education is now being disrupted; our MP3 is the massive open online course (or MOOC), and our Napster is Udacity, the education startup."

New Left Review - Rob Lucas: The Critical Net Critic

New Left Review - Rob Lucas: The Critical Net Critic:

In this argument, what Carr termed ‘intellectual technologies’ in particular—map, clock, typewriter—both augmented our mental abilities and transformed them. Each carried an ‘intellectual ethic’, a hidden norm of mental functioning, that might be obscure to users—and even inventors—yet which shaped them nonetheless. As these technologies entered general use, passing down the generations, their intellectual ethics became ingrained in the structures of human experience, acquired as standard by each individual. The history of technology could thus be read as a history of transformations in the human mind.

Regardless of whether or not you agree with the thrust of this article, the technology world needs more of this kind of thinking. Completely rejecting the humanities at a cultural level means that the world of technology can be remarkably unreflective.

Exit, Voice and Loyalty by Albert O. Hirschman

With a full title of "Exit, Voice and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organisations and States", this is a fairly old (1970) but nevertheless current and interesting book. Written by an economist making forays into political science, his first point is that 'exit' is not necessarily the only response to discontent, dispute or 'unsatisfaction', and that 'voice' - aka protest, causing a stink, making a fuss - is also a perfectly legitimate response, and interacts with exit in interesting and sometimes unpredictable ways.

The book makes a second point, seemingly in reaction to a trend that was only just getting started in 1970, and is sadly now more-or-less embedded into the modern cultural mindset: the applying of free-market principles to absolutely everything in the public sphere - regardless of the benefit gained thereby. Healthcare, in the USA particularly, is of course a prominent and relevant example.

These points, concisely addressed in 125 pages, are slightly ironic given that Albert Hirschman commits the now-classic Thing That Economists Do by insisting on looking at everything as an economic transaction - families, political parties and cabinet politics all fall within his purview. That there are thoughtful things to be said illustrates the utility of this frame of reference, but to the exclusion of all others? Well, this is a treatise on economics after all. I shouldn't grumble :-)

(P.S. an interesting anecdote about how I actually read the book: when it arrived, via a second-hand book seller on Amazon, 12 pages in the penultimate chapter were blank, probably due to a printers error. 'How annoying,' I said to myself, and promptly checked the title on Google Books. No such luck - half the pages missing in my copy were also missing there, too. I checked Amazon 'look inside' and that was even worse. Finally, I googled '"Exit, Voice and Loyalty" pdf'. The first result was a complete copy of the book on a server with a domain ending in .cn. I downloaded the complete book, printed out the pages I needed, folded & glued them into the book, and went about my day. Make of this what you will.)

Seemingly within the realm of conspiracy theory, but:

When half a million Americans died and nobody noticed | News | The Week UK:

"Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the 19 April 2005 edition of USA Today: 'USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.' During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation's population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly "surprised" and "scratching [their] heads" over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

For his Chinese melamine/Vioxx comparison, Unz went back to those 2005 stories. Quick scrutiny of the most recent 15 years worth of national mortality data provided on the US Government's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website offered Unz some useful clues.

"We find the largest rise in American mortality rates occurred in 1999, the year Vioxx was introduced, while the largest drop occurred in 2004, the year it was withdrawn," says Unz. "Vioxx was almost entirely marketed to the elderly, and these substantial changes in the national death-rate were completely concentrated within the 65-plus population."

The 911 Wars by Jason Burke, and The Don Camillo Omnibus by Giovanni Guareschi

I read about The 9/11 Wars by Jason Burke on Tim Bray's blog and thought "that sounds interesting", and so it is. I'm about half-way through this impressively researched book - it's 1/3rd notes, references, and indexes by weight - and so far I find it both highly educational and deeply depressing. Every time I put down the book I take a deep breath and think "what a mess!".

And so it's a pleasure to recommend the second book I'm working my way through as a light-hearted antidote. Regaling the exploits of the Catholic priest of a small village, Don Camillo, and his constant struggles with the Communist mayor, Peppone, it's hard to stay depressed after reading a couple of these short stories.

"Why fiction is good for you" at the Boston Globe is an interesting look at whether or not fiction is morally improving. Personally I would be a lot less happier without it.

What conditions give rise to great artistic achievements? Wealth, urban centers, belief in God. Wait: What?

20120513:See update below

Future tense, IX: Out of the wilderness by Charles Murray - The New Criterion:

"Upon reading Daniel Boorstin’s The Discoverers many years ago, I became fascinated with the ebbs and flows of human achievement, and especially those points in world history that have been associated with a flowering of great accomplishment. The most famous are Athens in the Periclean age and Florence in the Renaissance, but there have been many other less spectacular examples. Sometimes, the surge of great creativity is most obvious in a particular domain—literature in nineteenth-century Russia, for example—but strides made in one field are usually accompanied by strides made in others. Historically speaking, what accounts for the difference in the fertility of the cultural ground?"

Update: Firstly I should acknowledge that the title is the Arts & Letters Daily summary of the essay.

Secondly, reading a bit more about the author is enough for me to discount the conclusions of the article. Thinking about it a bit more, other, less predjudicial, reasons present themselves.

Assigning scores based on his own judgement to hundreds of pieces of data, it is no surprise that the overall result would reflect his own judgement more broadly. In addition, even if such scores were awarded impartially, which I doubt, it may well generate such a noisy dataset that you could slice & dice any which way you wanted to obtain your desired conclusions.

As such my posting of this article is probably a case of confirmation bias, and my update above is probably an ex post-facto justification. Who knew :-/

Phillip K. Dick: where all those wonderful books came from

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS | The Exegete:

"There are, in fact, numerous ways to find a trail through this wilderness of crazed speculation. At one and the same time, the Exegesis is an expository prop to Dick’s later fiction, a kind of creative workshop testing out ideas that would find form in VALIS and The Divine Invasion; the tortuous searchings of a remarkably resilient spirit mangled by years of drug abuse, failed marriages, and literary neglect; a palimpsest of learned disquisitions on complex philosophical problems, such as the nature of the relationship between identity and time; a contemporary recasting of Gnostic theology, the Dead Sea scrolls rendered as a kind of space opera; and much more.

Personally I think The man in the high castle, A Scanner Darkly, and VALIS are three of his best.

Towards a politicisation of Hello Kitty: a first look what's involved :-)

I Have No Mouth but I Must Scream – The New Inquiry:

"Why doesn’t Hello Kitty have a mouth? Is its absence more than an expedient, minimalist design choice? And does her lack of a mouth necessarily translate into the absence of a voice, as the arguments tend to go? The first Hello Kitty product, after all, was a coin purse with HELLO printed in block capitals over an image of Kitty; her name is her form, and it is speech.

Most political engagements with Hello Kitty have taken the mouthlessness issue as their impetus. They generally, through subversion or perversion, ironize Hello Kitty’s apparent inability to speak, suggesting her lack of expression is being upheld as a model, particularly for the young Asian girls who form Hello Kitty’s immediate target audience. A woman’s value, this particular feminine feline’s lack of mouth seems to say, is contingent on her voicelessness."

What I find interesting is that the whole corpus of modern Literary Theory & cultural studies etc. is normally applied to works of high literature etc. As I understand it, once, applying theory to "contemporary" cultural artifacts was seen as avant-guarde and radical. Now, one could argue that it is these artifacts that need more thought than ever applied to them.

How we ignore the long-term effects of violence on children, adults and our communities

“I See Everything Through This Tragedy” | The Interrupters | FRONTLINE | PBS

"At 10:45 on the night of March 13, 2009, Rodney Orange waited for his 14-year-old grandson, Gregory Robinson, to arrive home. Gregory had been at a high school basketball game, and as the car he rode in pulled up outside the house, Mr. Orange heard the sound of semi-automatic weapons. He remembers two distinct sounds of gunfire, suggesting there were two shooters. More than 50 shots were fired. He rushed to the car. Gregory had been sitting in the backseat and had thrown his body on top of his two younger cousins, one five years old, the other nine months. He saved their lives. Gregory was shot in the back."

The site for the film mentioned, is here: The Interrupters.

How to Read a Poem, by Terry Eagleton

I thought this book would be good to read since I knew very little about poetry; in many ways I still do, but I think I've been made more aware of the nature of poetry itself.

One might think this would be a rather simple book - I did, not knowing that Eagleton is a literary theorist and critic of some stature. The book is actually about modern literary theory applied to poetry, and is pretty densely packed. Given what I now know of Eagleton, it's not surprising that there's a fair dollop of politics too. This seems reasonable if one believes as he seems to, that all culture is political and all politics is cultural. Now and again his Marxist-Christian colours show through rather vividly, and this is no bad thing.

The book, for all it's intellectual heft, is very well-written and has a wonderfully discursive, conversational lilt to it. It was a real pleasure to read, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in enriching their reading experience.

The Islamist, by Ed Husain

I read this book having thought a long time ago "that sounds interesting", and it was. What strikes me is how modern the roots of Islamic extremism are compared to traditional Islam as practised for hundreds of years in many different cultures.

The book is essentially a circular, growing-up narrative of rejections and turning-aways, first from traditional Islam, then from modern fundamentalism, following the murder of a student; and then a turning back to traditional Islam again.

Husain now works at the CFR in New York on Middle-Eastern studies.

Does globalisation make it harder for us to avoid confronting the moral consequences of our lifestyles?

rc3.org - Our moral complicity in China’s working conditions:

"Lately, working conditions in Chinese factories that produce consumer electronics that we all use and love have gotten a lot of press. Mike Daisey has been touring and presenting a one man show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, on this subject. Portions of it were recently aired on This American Life. Perhaps not coincidentally, the New York TImes published an exposé on Foxconn last month that looked into the poor pay, unlawfully long hours, and dangerous work conditions at the company’s factories.

I’ve been following the subsequent debate. Tech pundit and Apple fan David Pogue responds with what is largely a straw-man filled argument about the price of electronics doubling and the fact that all companies use these factories, not just Apple. Mike Daisey responds ably.

I want to talk about two aspects of it, though. One is the scope of the problem, and the other is the fairness of singling Apple out. As the article points out, Apple is not the only electronics company that manufactures its products in China. Almost everyone does. And of course, we’re only talking about electronics manufacturers. What are working conditions like at Chinese tire factories? Or toy factories? Or the factories where they make buttons for shirts? The story is the same across industry in China, if not worse."

Debt: the first 5000 years: two reviews

The book comes highly recommended, and there are two reviews, one in Guernica and one in The New Inquiry, both of which are apparently very well-written.