I was on WB11 News (New York City), on a segment of “News you can use” (to promote your network’s entertainment offerings). Yes, it’s pretty sensationalistic, but it got the facts right, I think. Anyway, if you were ever dying to see a video of me walking down the street engaged in conversation, here’s your chance (wmv, mov).
If you are in or near Newport Beach this weekend (+Monday) and want to have a quick lunch with a famed blogger-prof / ne’er-do-well, drop me a note.
We are conditioned to think of spam as a bad thing. What if we really wanted to make a statement about warrantless monitoring of Americans’ communications? Yes, we can encrypt our email, but frankly, except for some folks on the tin-foil-hat margin (which doesn’t seem quite as marginal these days), usually the people who are using strong encryption actually have something to hide. And when only those who have something to hide encrypt, it really makes it easier for the NSA to focus their resources. Moreover, much can be learned by traffic (who sends to whom, even without the “what”).
Using, for example, PGP is not enough. You need to use PGP to encrypt a message for that special someone, and then send the email to everyone you know and a few thousand you don’t. This pool that you send to can be randomly assigned (beyond your real contacts) and shift slightly with the addition of a few dozen new random email addresses every day, so as to disguise real new contacts.
There are plenty of downsides. Total email traffic would go through the roof. Spam is bad enough now with—really—a fairly small number of spammers. I can see this choking mail servers pretty quickly. If you got everyone’s email, that would be a bad thing, so you would want to set up overlapping communities of recipients. And of course, you would need the recipients to opt-in to receiving encrypted spam.
I have to assume that at least some of the spam I receive every day is just this: steganographic broadcast of private messages. But it seems to me that we could all use a little privacy in our electronic communications these days.
Extending a mail reader to work with this would be simple enough. Try to decrypt every email coming in: if it comes up garbage, trash it. Heck, as long as you are extending the reader, you could make it capable of forwarding encoded messages, adding an additional layer of obscuring noise.
Some time last year, a group at UB got together to write a proposal for a new funding track from NSF focussed on creating a center for learning. The CFP was unusual for NSF: it was highly interdisciplinary and considered learning in the broadest sense. So I pulled together some references and some approaches we might take. This was chopped down to “adult learning and public institutions,” which was very safe, and also not particularly interesting to the NSF. I wasn’t on the grant. I guess they thought I was too “out there.” I suspect—meglomaniac that I am—that I was just “out there” enough.
Nolan and Hunsinger are heading up a new journal, Learning Inquiry that—at least if the call for papers is any indication—is open to some of the more liberal definitions of where and how learning happens: “The journal is a forum centered on learning that remains open to varied objects of inquiry, including machine, human, plant and animal learning as well as the processes of learning in business, government, and the professions, both in formal and informal environments.”
I definitely plan to send a manuscript in to the journal here at some point. I suspect a good chunk of my readers might also find the journal to be of interest as a place to read and a place to write.
Time magazine is running a story entitled Sex in the Syllabus that includes quite a bit on my course “Cyberporn & Society.” It begins:
With classwork like this, who needs to play? Undergraduates taking Cyberporn and Society at the State University of New York at Buffalo survey Internet porn sites. At New York University, assignments for Anthropology of the Unconscious include discussing X-rated Japanese comic books. And in Cinema and the Sex Act at the University of California, Berkeley, undergrads are required to view clips from Hollywood NC-17 releases like Showgirls and underground stag reels.It’s called the porn curriculum, and it’s quietly taking root in the ivory tower. A small but growing number of scholars are probing the aesthetic, societal and philosophical properties of smut in academic departments ranging from literature to film, law to technology, anthropology to women’s studies…
Luckily, nothing to scare my current (at least for the next couple months) institution. It includes quotes from a student in the class (Mr. Schwartz) and his parents, as well as Dean Penniman from the School of Informatics.
Update: When I taught this course for the first time, I suggested turning it into a three course sequence: sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. I find that David Silver is now teaching a course with that title at UWashington. How cool is that?
I first ran across Zipcar when they started operating on the campus of the University of Washington six years ago or so. Seemed like a good idea then (though it struck me as a little pricey), but we had a car. For those who don’t know what it is, you carry around an RFID embedded card, and can reserve cars parked all over the city (NY, Boston, San Fran, etc.). You just get online, or use your mobile, and reserve for an hour or more. When your appointment comes, your card will unlock the car and you can use it for your appointed time. They cover insurance, gas, and parking at the origin. Coolness.
Fast forward to 2006, and we are living in a neighborhood where monthly parking is around $400, if you are lucky enough to find it. So, for needed jaunts out of town, Zipcar makes a lot of sense. Especially when you can choose to tool around in a BMW 325.
When I signed up, they had a “tell a friend” program, which saves $25 off the first rental. Since you are all my friends… When you sign up, use the the promotional code “PassItOn” (no quotes). No interest here—I don’t get a kickback. Just a good service I’d like to endorse.
Britannica has finally gotten around to responding to the Nature article that suggested that Wikipedia and Britannica are not that different. They posted their response as a pdf perhaps as a way to make sure fewer people would actually read it. (Someone needs to tell corporate America that PDFs are great for some things, but you should put it in HTML unless there is a good reason not to.)
They attack the Nature article, suggesting that the work is shoddy. I have to admit that this was my first response in reading the Nature piece. It isn’t an article that would make it through peer review. They didn’t reveal the details of their methods, and when the details were revealed, they didn’t inspire confidence. If the accusations that Britannica makes are true, and Nature played fast and loose with the articles they pulled from Britannica, this further undermines the usefulness of their report.
However, the fundamental problem with Britannica’s complaints is that—with the exception of the above serious sampling issue—whatever biases were present in the analysis were present for both sides: Britannica and Wikipedia. Perhaps the type of bias favored Wikipedia, but I seriously doubt it. Indeed, when Britannica complains about reviewers not liking particular phraseology, it strikes me as likely that this would be something that affects Wikipedia more than Britannica.
In the end, the response is—strangely—both substantive and hollow. Clearly, Nature could have taken the time to do a better study. Just as clearly, what they did is indicative of the quality of Wikipedia. The claim that Wikipedia is somehow abject and untrustworthy is incorrect was the point of the article. Britannica seems upset that somehow people missed the idea that Britannica still did better than Wikipedia in many ways. They haven’t missed that point, I don’t think. It’s just that the idea that an openly-edited, freely available encyclopedia has come close to the closed model of encyclopedia production we are used to is the real news. The better headline for the story might have been “Wikipedia is good enough.”