Just about now, at 11:59pm BDT on July 31, 2007, Britain’s military operations in Northern Ireland come to an end.

There was a bunch of press coverage about it here in London today, and I think that even though it is something of an afterthought considering the political peace process that has been at work for some time it is still a meaningful moment in the history of the United Kingdom.

Even more that the end of British rule in Hong Kong ten years ago, this represents a final moment in the story of European and British colonialism.

From The Guardian:

The British armys longest continuous military operation comes to an end at midnight when responsibility for security in Northern Ireland passes to the police.

Operation Banner lasted 38 years and involved 300,000 personnel, of whom 763 were killed by paramilitaries. The last soldier to die was Lance Bombardier Stephen Restorick, who was shot at a vehicle checkpoint in 1997.

From tomorrow, there will still be a garrison of 5,000 troops in Ulster, but they will not be on active operations and will be available for deployment anywhere in the world.Security will become the responsibility of the Northern Ireland police, and the British soldiers will have a limited role in supporting them.

The complete article from The Guardian: “British army ends Northern Ireland operation”

There’s a really interesting article in The New York Times about the proliferation of tools on the web that allow individuals to create and add information to maps. Google Maps and Google Earth are probably the most prominent examples of the tools available, but there are others as well. The article focuses on how people all around the world are contributing and collaborating on maps.

The article does not mention that much the other really amazing aspect of this technology: the ability to visualize historical change through map overlays. “Google Earth in 4D” is the shorthand for one version of this, which was developed by the David Rumsey Historical Maps Collection. The David Rumsey Collection took some of their historic maps and provided them as overlays in Google Earth, so it’s possible to overlay a city map of London from 1843 on the Google Earth representation of present-day London.

Apart from the new wealth of information being created by amateur cartographers using these web tools to map the present-day world, I think there is obviously huge potential for use by historians as a supplement to their research as well as to enhance their teaching.

‘What is happening is the creation of this extremely detailed map of the world that is being created by all the people in the world,’ said John Hanke , director of Google Maps and Google Earth. ‘The end result is that there will be a much richer description of the earth.’

This fast-growing GeoWeb, as industry insiders call it, is in part a byproduct of the Internet search wars among Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others. In the race to popularize their map services - and dominate the potentially lucrative market for local advertising on maps - these companies have created the tools that are empowering people with minimal technical skills to do what only professional mapmakers were able to do before.

‘It is a revolution,’ said Matthew Edney, director of the History of Cartography Project at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. ‘Now with all sorts of really very accessible, very straightforward tools, anybody can make maps. They can select data, they can add data, they can communicate it with others. It truly has moved the power of map production into a completely new arena.’

The complete article from The New York Times: “With Tools on Web, Amateurs Reshape Mapmaking”

I’m sitting at the Aeroporto Francisco Sá Carneiro in Porto, Portugal waiting for my flight back to London. This is a really new, modern place: flat screen tvs everywhere, lots of glass and metal architecture, etc. It can’t be more than a decade old, probably less. Everything is very efficient as well.

There’s only one problem with this airport as far as I’m concerned: its name.

Carneiro was a fairly popular Portuguese politician who died in 1980. He died in a plane crash while en route from Lisbon to Porto.

That’s right, an airport named after a man who died in a plane crash while en route.

The Wikipedia entry for Carneiro mentions that the airport was named after him, “despite objections that it would be in bad taste to name an airport after someone who died in a plane crash.” Leaving the taste question aside, I think it’s a little bit unsettling for those of us passengers who worry (perhaps irrationally) about air safety.

But, as far as ironic names are concerned, I think this one takes the cake for airports. Before I found out about Carneiro, I felt that honor should go to Reagan National Airport in D.C. - honoring someone who fired the nation’s air traffic controllers - but move over DCA, as far as names go, you’ve got nothing on OPO.

Portugal’s assumption of the European Union Presidency prompts The International Herald Tribune to write about the country’s relationship with Europe.

Although I’ve only been here a short while, and I’ve just seen most of the tourist attractions and historical sights in Lisbon and Porto, one of the observations I’ve made about the country is that it seems much more comfortable with its history of exploration and overseas empire than other European nations. The article explains some of the reasons why this could be the case, as well as why Portugal in some ways is more attached to its former colonies than it is to the EU.

In this old and nostalgic capital, filled with grand monuments to the navigators who helped create Europe’s first overseas empire in the 15th century, one begins to understand why the Portuguese have never completely learned to love the latter-day empire of sorts known as the European Union.

On the surface, it would seem natural that Portugal, a small country of 10.6 million people that shed an authoritarian regime, would have an instinctive affinity for the EU. The Union has been an anchor of democracy since the revolution that overthrew the dictatorship here in 1974. It has pumped nearly 50 billion euros into Portugal’s economy since the country joined the EU in 1986 and helps it to have influence beyond its size on the world stage.

Yet Portugal has an ambivalent relationship with the bloc of 480 million people it will now lead as EU president for the next six months. It is sometimes said here that Europe was the last continent to be discovered by the Portuguese.

‘We were the first European country to have an empire and the last one to give it up,’ said Jaime Nogueira Pinto, a biographer of Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, the dictator who ruled Portugal for nearly 50 years. ‘So the Portuguese, more than most, are sensitive about losing our national identity.’

The complete article from The International Herald Tribune: “Portuguese resent EU as they take its helm”

Yesterday Gordon Brown’s government announced that it would be putting off the reform of the House of Lords that has already been put off several times before. Obviously it is a very complicated and contentious issue, and it may be a good decision to wait until after the next general election so there is more of a national consensus about what should be done (among other things this may prevent a potential constitutional crisis by making the current Lords members feel more pressure to accept the final proposal.

One point in The Guardian’s report reminded me of the truly odd and ironic nature of the British Government:

In March the Commons voted overwhelmingly, in a free vote, for a 100% elected Lords, and with a 38-vote majority for an 80% elected Lords. There was a 280 vote majority for removing the remaining 92 hereditary peers, left over from the previous attempt at Lords reform in 1999.

In a bizarre paradox, those 92 hereditary peers are, in fact, the only elected members of the Lords, as their places were endorsed in a ballot of their fellow hereditary peers when the government got rid of 900-plus Lords eight years ago.

The complete article from The Guardian“Straw to unveil Lords reform plans”

After my pleasant flight to Lisbon Monday evening I was fairly tired and wanted to get right to the hotel. There was a relatively short wait to clear Portuguese immigration and passport control. I was a bit confused to see the labels on the three lines: citizens of Portugal, citizens of Portuguese-speaking countries (Brazil, Mozambique, and several other former colonies), and citizens of European Union countries. What about the rest of us? It’s quite possible that I missed a sign or mis-read one because I was extremely tired at this point. I just went in the EU queue and was fine.

My guidebook and internet reading told me that I should go to the Tourist Information desk to purchase a taxi voucher instead of just selecting a taxi outside. There is a slight premium but a few euros for convenience after a long day and flight seemed to make sense (what “American” logic!). The desk employees were extremely nice and helpful, although they seemed almost skeptical that I wanted to purchase the voucher which made me chuckle to myself. Maybe that is a good sign that there is no longer an issue with taxi drivers overcharging passengers, or just a sign that few people take advantage of the service.

It was about 15-20 minute drive to the hotel. My taxi driver knew a little English, and we talked a little. I got the distinct impression that the hotel I was staying at, the Sheraton Lisboa, was a high-end hotel and I think he was trying to figure out how or why a young guy in jeans and a baseball cap was staying there.

The hotel was spectacular, and definitely every bit the five star place it was made out to be by the guide books. It seemed to cater to a business traveler clientele, I think I was the only person not in a suit in the lobby around 9pm when I finally arrived to check in.

I was so exhausted that I went to sleep almost immediately after I got to the room. The next morning I woke up at a relatively reasonable hour in the morning and started to explore the city.

I walked from my hotel a few blocks to the Marques de Pombal statue which is in the middle of a large roundabout where several main streets intersect. Adjacent is the Parque Eduardo VII, a large park with hot and cool greenhouses in addition to grass, pathways, and water feature. I also discovered a Francisco Botero statue in one part of the park which seemed to fit the landscape perfectly. The park was named after King Edward VII of England who came to Lisbon in 1903.

I then walked down Av da Liberdade toward the Praca Dom Pedro IV. This 20 minute walk gave me a sense of the beauty and the history in the city. Av da Liberdade is a wide boulevard, with very wide tree lined sidewalks. It is almost possible to forget the traffic going by on the street. The sidewalks are all tile mosaics, perhaps cobblestone is more accurate although the individual stones are much smaller than traditional cobblestones. There are repeating designs in the sidewalks that continue for miles. In fact, during my entire time in Lisbon I never saw a concrete smooth paved sidewalk.

The buildings are relatively unobtrusive and retain a certain amount of aesthetic consistency. Looking at them reminded me of Buenos Aires, Argentina, also a bit of San Francisco as well.

Overall, my initial impression is that this is a beautiful city with so much history to see. I am going to wish that I was here longer, and I will definitely want to come back!

I flew to Lisbon Monday evening, July 16th, on the Portuguese national airline, TAP Portugal, which also happens to be a United Airlines partner and Star Alliance member. The flight was fairly normal; it’s always amazing to me how equalizing the air travel experience is regardless of which country or carrier. Boarding passes contain the same information, the safety demonstration is basically the same, there’s an in-flight magazine, etc. The TAP magazine, incidentally, had split pages with articles in English and in Portuguese which was really neat. Some of the translations were slightly off but no complaints.

What set this flight apart, and called attention to the deficiencies of US airline practices, is that all passengers were served a hot meal with all beverages complimentary on a two hour flight. The meal was actually pretty good, certainly not the quality I would expect at a nice restaurant for dinner but still much better than some meals I’ve had in my life. On a two hour flight in the US passengers are lucky if they get a small snack bag of pretzels. United doesn’t even sell its snack boxes to economy class passengers on flights less than 3 hours. I’m not surprised that the TAP flight experience was superior in this regard, because several years ago on a one hour flight from Bangkok, Thailand to Phnom Penh, Cambodia there was a full meal service for all the passengers on the entire plane, complete with wine, dessert, and coffee.

I should also add that this plane ticket was anything but outrageously expensive. Total price including taxes and factoring in the exchange rate was about $100. My only uneducated guess as to how TAP, Thai Airways, and other international carriers are able to offer this level of service while their American counterparts (including their supposedly interchangeable Alliance partners, not just the discount competitors) keep cutting amenities is that labor costs much be much lower. Airplanes, airplane parts, jet fuel, etc. are all commodities sold on an international market and I would assume that TAP doesn’t pay less for its Airbus A320 than United pays for its. Airport operation costs probably vary as well, but labor costs in my mind would trump these.

I do not know if this hypothesis is correct, and I certainly do not know enough about the airline industry to even venture possible solutions. Certainly American airline employees’ unions are too powerful to ever accept massive wage concessions (the unions representing United employees were reluctant to give concessions even after 9-11 when the entire company was teetering on the brink of liquidation). Airline management does not seem any more flexible, after all, these were the people who thought up taking away complimentary meals and selling snack boxes to save money in the first place.

Still, I wonder if more Americans flew short haul flights between two international destinations if there wouldn’t be more popular clamoring for better service. At the very least, more people would be asking the question of US carriers instead of assuming that low cost, short distance flights mean poor to no amenities / service.

On The Chronicle of Higher Education website I read the article by Professor Rob Jenkins (Chronicle Careers: 7/11/2007: Pimp My Course) about his decision to “pimp” his course by incorporating more technology. Professor Jenkins was motivated to do this because:

The truth is, as far as today’s students are concerned, I’m not a ‘young’ professor anymore and haven’t been for at least a decade. Nor am I particularly hip or cool. Most days I don’t even wear jeans in the classroom, 12 years of administrative duties having decimated my graduate-school wardrobe.

Worst of all, I’m hardly ‘cutting edge.’ To be honest, I’m doing pretty much the same things in class I was doing 20 years ago. For Pete’s sake, I still illustrate some of my favorite points by using anecdotes from MASH, that favorite sitcom of my generation that few of my current students have ever heard of, much less watched.

Clearly it’s time for a major teaching makeover, in the spirit of TLC’s Trading Spaces or better yet MTV’s Pimp My Ride, in which cast members take old cars and update them with new paint jobs, ground effects, stereo systems, and so forth. In the end, the cars may be only marginally more functional, but they sure look a lot cooler.

Resolving to ‘pimp my course,’ then, I went straight to the experts, colleagues who really are cutting edge. Under their tutelage, the first thing I learned is that I definitely need to use the computer a lot more during class. And I don’t mean just to check my e-mail while the students are writing essays.

My immediate reaction upon reading those paragraphs was to feel like a professor who correctly references the television programs “Trading Spaces” and “Pimp My Ride” was really much more “cutting edge” than he claimed. Nevertheless, reading about Professor Jenkins’ experience made me think about the entire concept of pimping a course.

I’m still slightly on the outside looking into the whole process considering that I’m still a graduate student who’s never had complete responsibility for a course. I have, however, been a pimp for an undergraduate course taught by a professor of mine, of which I will be the head Graduate Student Instructor in the fall. Several semesters ago I presented the idea of podcasting the introductory European history course to Professor Laqueur. I’ve also helped him move from slide carrousels (which he used when I took the course from him as an undergraduate in the spring of 2000) to digitized images and slides using Microsoft PowerPoint first and now Apple’s Keynote software.

In preparing for the fall semester, I thought it would be neat to have a short video (”YouTube-esque”) to introduce the course to prospective students and I found a very talented undergraduate to put it together for the class. The video is available on the History Department website homepage: http://history.berkeley.edu.

On one level, none of this is really necessary. Professor Laqueur is an immensely talented lecturer who engages his students even in a large lecture class regardless of the technology he incorporates. The course fulfills a number of requirements, for the undergraduate history major and for the College of Letters and Sciences, so enrollments are usually near capacity.

On the other hand, I find it increasingly hard to imagine this course *without* all the technology incorporated. The use of digital images in Keynote for the lectures was about more than beautification. Professor Laqueur started several years ago using images that were essentially the same as the ones he had used in physical slides (mostly because one of my jobs as an undergraduate was to scan the physical slides). Each semester that goes by he’s added and/or replaced some images resulting in almost all of the images shown in class being visually stunning. The technology makes it very simple for him to zoom in on particular aspects of an image that he wants the students to notice. Of course, art historians did this sort of thing with multiple carrousels and a tremendous amount of preparation before, but computers make it so much easier.

The podcasts, too, seem to enhance his teaching as well as students’ comprehension. Students sitting in class are more likely to sit back and pay attention to the lecture, rather than feeling as though they have to take down every fact and detail for a possible exam, when they know that there is an audio recording at their fingertips when they need it to review material. Most students in past semesters’ of podcasting have listened to lectures in addition to, not in place of, attending them. Of course, this is not always true, and some students undoubtedly feel like the podcasts make it easy for them to miss lectures without consequences. In a class like this one, though, there is no way to escape the weekly discussion section led by a GSI which is the place where attendance and participation are recorded as a part of the final grade.

Ultimately, my point is that all of the “pimping” I’ve been a part of for this course has, I think, served to enhance the teaching and the overall experience for the students. It seems to me that this is what technology is supposed to do, that is, be a useful tool to enhance rather than replace strong teaching and interesting lecture content.

Hopefully Professor Jenkins will have an equally positive experience with course pimping. My experience is that the fact that he is thinking about these things and actively trying to figure out which will work best and/or be useful and helpful for his students already puts him in a category ahead of many of his colleagues. Not to mention the fact that he’s familiar with MTV and TLC programs!

Two new biographies of Alexis de Tocqueville are reviewed in The New York Times. The sense of the review is that each of them complicates the standard notion of Tocqueville: he was “an unlikely student of democracy and an even less likely voyager to the American wilderness.”

Hopefully I’ll have a chance to read these sometime soon. I’ve always had only a fairly general familiarity with Tocqueville and would like to know more about him.

Americans generally quote Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” as a way of patting themselves on the back. Tocqueville’s first volume, published at the end of 1834 after a nine-month tour of the New World, was the first great study of American institutions and political culture. It declared the American Revolution the triumph of “a mature and considered taste for liberty, not a vague and indefinite instinct for independence.”

But there is another way to read Tocqueville. If Volume 1 laid out what Americans had made of democracy, Volume 2, published six years later, laid out what democracy had made of Americans. This was a bleaker subject. Self-rule had its paradoxes, Tocqueville showed. Equality could come at the price of intellectual independence. And if one man was just as worthy of a political voice as the next, why should any individual involve himself in politics at all? Hugh Brogan, a historian at the University of Essex in England, shares the preoccupations of this second Tocqueville, without sharing his conclusions. In an erudite and combative new biography, he presents many of Tocqueville’s misgivings about democracy as specious and reactionary.

The complete review by Christopher Caldwell in The New York Times: “Even God Quotes Tocqueville”

A couple weeks ago I wrote about how I didn’t think there was much truth to the claim of social stratification between Facebook and MySpace users. Or, more specifically, I argued that to the extent there were differences in the demographics of the users of each site it was a product of structural differences in the rules and management of the sites.

Today a report from the network ratings company Comscore confirms what I was saying. It turns out that since Facebook opened up its membership to the general public instead of restricting it to college students in school “networks,” the demographics of the site have changed.

“Given its roots as a college networking site, Facebook has historically shown very strong skews toward the 18-24 year old age segment,” said Jack Flanagan, executive vice president of comScore Media Metrix.  “However, since the decision to open registration to everyone, the site has seen visitors from all age groups flood the site.  As the overall visitation to Facebook continues to grow, the demographic composition of the site will likely more closely resemble that of the total Internet audience.”

The statistics showed:

Once a social networking haven for college students, Facebook’s decision to open registration has helped attract new visitors from outside the 18-24 year old age segment. In fact, the 38-percent increase among 18-24 year olds was the lowest rate of growth of the age segments represented in the study. The most dramatic growth occurred among 25-34 year olds (up 181 percent), while 12-17 year olds grew 149 percent and those age 35 and older grew 98 percent.

I hope that Danah Boyd, the author of the piece I responded to several weeks ago, takes this sort of quantifiable information into account and retracts her claim that there is a widening gulf between the two sites that represents a sort of social networking “digital divide.” Her cry of wolf about a “digital divide” that seems to not really exist takes away attention from more meaningful problems of equal access to technology.

The complete comScore report: “Facebook Sees Flood of New Traffic from Teenagers and Adults”