a thaumaturgical compendium

Lessig writes of a threat to GPL from a number of representatives of the New Democrat Network. A letter has suggested restricting R&D funding for those who produce GPLed software. I wrote the following in response:

I am surprised and disheartened to read of the support for legislations meant to hobble public licenses for software, as expressed in a letter recently sent to New Democrats by Messrs. Smith, Kind, and Davis. Software protected by the GPL license encourages entrepreneurial development of software by private industry, while providing a common intellectual good for the nation. It remains the surest way of maintaining the “intellectual infrastructure” of the United States in the future. As such, it should remain the mainstay of public funding for R&D, and its use should be encouraged.

The only corporations this will hurt are those that have deliberately built upon a model that lacks interoperability within the marketplace: a decidedly “old economy” approach to protecting a market. In your report on the NDN retreat (http://www.newdem.org/issues/) you make note: “’Don’t protect old business models’ was a mantra heard throughout the retreat.” And yet, this seems very much at odds with such advice.

New Democrats have a voice in maintaining an innovative society, and the global position of the US in the software industry. I hope they will use it not to protect lumbering giants, but to drive innovation in the market.

Just when you thought you could have no more fun with Google, along comes Googlism. I like what it says about me, even if it’s a little dated… :) (via Brad Choate’s blog.)

When I first became a TA, I noticed there was a grandmother problem. Despite claims that our society was aging, it quickly became clear to me that within a few years, our grandmothers would die out. During a period of one year, I recorded the number of students who had lost a grandparent (almost always the matriarch), and found, shockingly, that nearly 1/5 of the students had a grandmother die each year. Now, at first, this might seem unlikely. After all, wouldn’t that mean that after 5 years most grandmothers would be dead?

Not really, remember that this is a moving sample. Remember, also, that there is not a one-to-one correspondence between grandmothers and students. In some case, a single lost grandmother might impact dozens, possibly scores, of college students. Also remember that each student has two biological grandmothers.

You see how complex this becomes. Yet we can deduce that for the average student at least one grandmother will likely pass on during their years in the university. It is a sad, statistical fact.

Now, we all know that correlation does not mean causation, and that increased university attendance need not cause a septuagenarian epidemic. Yet, there is some evidence that grandmothers die at even higher rates just before exams. Now, any trained social scientist will see this as a measurement error. Of course, grandmothers die at all times during the semester, it is simply that an instructor is unlikely to be alerted to this fact. (This is the flaw in this otherwise exemplary study.)

The conclusion, however, is even more bleak. My informal measurement of 20% per year was based only on data collected immediately before and after exams. When we include other periods, the number is closer to 40% or 50%, meaning that all but the smallest number of students will lose both grandmothers during their college years. As a result, as college attendance increases, we are likely to see male life expectancy to far outstrip female life expectancy in the US. As these findings become general knowledge, more women will refuse to have children, or will insist that they have poor educations. The effects of this are clearly long-term, but the potential harm to society is extreme. This area demands further study.

Talking about porn in the “Media in the Information Age” class this week. I was planning on only showing the first half of the excellent Frontline episode called “American Porn,” but students wanted to see the whole thing. It’s shocking to me that we don’t spend more time on pornography in media and communication classes, but I am also giving it fairly short shrift in this course. Haven’t even gotten a chance to get to my overheads (pdf, 160k) yet. If these seem disjointed, it’s because they are an odd mix of things I missed in talking about news somehow trying to show up in the middle of a discussion on porn. Somehow, though, the censorship of the two are not as different as they may first seem.

I’m kind of glad we did get to the second part of the Frontline episode, since it discusses a part of the industry that is, well, disquieting. One of the early posts on the discussion board for the class comes from the illustrious Jennifer Kelly who added and discussed a link to a Salon followup interview with “Lizzy Borden.” I think it’s good that students have a chance to think about pornography as an industry. Those things that are beneath the dignity of the average academic, or otherwise unimportant, seem to be the ones really worth understanding.

I need to see if I can get Paul Cambria in to do a guest lecture for the Media Law class next semester.

I know where I go to get news. There’s the stuff on the left, mostly, with a handful of other sites now and again. That and public radio in the car make up pretty much everything. It’s natural to wonder where the digerati get theirs. Luckily JD Lasica was astute enough to ask. Check out “Where Net Luminaries Turn for News.” (Via Seb’s Page, and you can follow the bunny trail from there.)

I made a case for Python being the language of choice for teaching undergrads in the new Informatics major. Maybe I can get folks in the department to read this essay on Python in bioinformatics. Along with a project to extend the use of Python in bioinformatics, maybe the language will make the same kinds of inroads it has made in physics and elsewhere. It would be nice to use this as a model for social informatics: but there is nothing similar in terms of an agenda in our field (if it is, indeed, a field).

It seems clear that in the case of social activism one of the primary roles played by the net is simplifying logistics. Heard a report on NPR the other day that suggested that the internet has changed the process of peace protest among students because they can get the word out so quickly and effectively. Protests that once attracted only dozens now attract thousands.

It seems to me that there is a microtrend emerging that does this on a smaller scale for communities of interest. I first noticed this when I caught announcements for the International Python Meetup, and subsequently saw several others, many hosted by Meet Up. I wonder if this is a model that works. If so, it’s extremely interesting, even for an introvert like myself.