a thaumaturgical compendium

Interesting brief article in Queue on IBM’s Dogear social bookmarking tool for the enterprise. It appears to be a system like del.icio.us, but with the ability to assign groups and to set up levels of privacy.

They skip over the most interesting and difficult part: How to get folks to use it! They casually mention that they built RSS right into the system, as if that was an immediate sell. I think it could be used to great effect in classes and in academic meetings, but it seems to have had a lukewarm reception in these venues.

In particular, the Association of Internet Researchers meeting encouraged tagging for the conference. First off: not sure that an academic conference encourages tagging. It seems to me to be something that has to happen over a long period of time. Second, they gave folks too many options: suggesting del.icio.us, Technorati, and Flickr tags, to an audience among whom (ironically, I think) tagging is not a common practice. In all, the effort fell flat. But it had the standard “let’s do it and see what happens” vibe. Nothing wrong with that vibe — it is very Web 2.0 — but as I said, the value of tagging something for a fairly broad conference seems limited to me, especially (and this is key!) if it isn’t integrated into the whole.

I’ve also had my classes tagging this semester. Since the class “home page” is an aggregator (like this one) it’s easy to pull the RSS from del.icio.us and integrate it with the standard stream. Yet only those who already knew about tagging are tagging.

I’m now thinking about the Cyberporn and Society course for next semester (yes, it is a little late), and how to better integrate tagging into the course. I think an important step is to provide more of an overview of what tagging is all about and how to do it so that students have a better idea of what it is.

It is always a trade-off in a course: how much time do you spend talking about blogging/wikis/bookmarking/etc. and how much time do you spend with the actual substance of the course. In other words, what is the ROI (return on instruction) for focusing on the “ways of doing” rather than the “ways of knowing.” I have generally shied away from “teaching the tools.” Set up some expectations for product — I always thought — and students would teach themselves the tools.

Recently, I’ve been reconsidering this a bit. It’s a truism that we are never teaching, but hoping our students learn to learn. It strikes me that certain kinds of tools (how to use a library, for instance) have a very high long-term ROI. While my “don’t teach the tools” made sense when we were dealing with Flash or GoLive (v.1, yikes!), when it comes to social computing, it may be something worth really focusing time and resources on.

Sure, some of you may say “duh”! But that’s a bit of a new direction for me.

The verbal boxing match over Google Library at the New York Public Library on Thursday (there is a Quicktime stream of the debate at that site) was a bit more lively than most scholarly roundtables. At times, it seemed like the audience’s champagne might have been spiked with a bit of Jerry Springer juice.

The majority of the discussion, both the meatiest and most discursive bits, occurred between Allan Adler and Lawrence Lessig. Lessig has his own post mortem, but a few things really stuck out for me, and these were threads that were largely left hanging.

Certainly, the take-away for me was that “fair use” needs to be re-defined for digital media. Or rather, “fair use” needs to be defined. What none of the parties would agree on is that one of the difficulties in translating fair use into the digital age is that it is fairly ambiguous in the analog age. There are certain uses that are clearly covered by fair use, certain uses that are clearly infringing, and a not insignificant number of uses that are really at the whim of whatever judge hears the case — if it gets that far.

But something that struck me even more directly was an overlooked difference of opinion. At one point, David Drummond (the representative from Google) claimed that “a digital card catalog requires a full copy” of the original texts. I quickly wondered whether this claim was true. Because if it is not true, it yields a much more interesting, and potentially tractable, description of the disagreement between Google and the publishers.

Since you do not have the benefit of (Wired editor) Chris Anderson’s frequently proffered visual aid (which led to a bit of eye rolling after it was produced a fourth and fifth time) let me start by reminding you of what Google Print Library (Google Book Search as of Thursday) provides you from copyrighted, in-print works. Amazon’s “search inside the book” actually reproduces the pages around the word or phrase you search for. Google only provides a certain number of words on each side, what they call a “snippet” of text.

Now, I could be wrong, but it seemed that all parties were relatively OK with this use, that they felt that it fell within the bounds of fair use. They did not articulate this precisely on the publisher/author side, but they instead focused on the way that this index was obtained: by scanning the full text of thousands of books. Even if this library never left Google HQ, it could easily be argued, as Adler said several times that night, that by scanning the books of several excellent research libraries, Google will have accumulated the largest digital library in the world. This hasn’t happened for free — scanning books is expensive — but it has happened without further money being paid to the publishers.

Frankly, this is the part of the project that I find most exciting, and those involved in the project must recognize that while “Googlifying” the physical library is an exciting project in itself, the “byproduct” of this — an immense, digitized store of human knowledge, is far from negligible. Indeed, as I have noted before, such a library becomes the largest potential pirate’s booty in the history of the internet. The question is not whether the information will be liberated, but how long that will take.

There is an alternative. There is no reason that Google should have to keep the original files. Word frequency “thumbprints” are enough to do the search, and it is possible to store the snippets without keeping them in their original format. Of course, if you store the snippets, it is just a matter of time to be able to reassemble them, but at least you get away from the “complete copy” issue.

Alternatively, I bet Google would avoid a world of hurt buy buying rather than borrowing these books. I think the authors and publishers would be happier with a more extensive licensing agreement, but they would have a lot less to complain about if they bought duplicates of the books (those that are in print) that they will be scanning. Worst case, how much could this cost? $60-$100 million?

In any case, it was an interesting discussion, and it wouldn’t have been if there hadn’t been someone there to at least volley with Lessig. I know he already has a lot of fans, but I have often been disappointed by the ability of those who write well to form their opinions “on the fly.” This is clearly not a problem for Lessig.

* The Art of Demotivation (via Pang)

* What America really needs is wild elephants.

* Speaking of big animals. They upgraded the size of the shark that attacked my little sister: 18 feet, and about two tons. Or, roughly the size of a Chevy Suburban.

* Extreme Mormons: “How can you spread the Lord’s word when you are standing on the darn handlebars?”

* Never too early to learn the need for the long view.

* Progressive, the nation’s 3rd largest auto insurer, is paying beta customers who put a black box in their cars. Nose of the camel. I can’t say that I like that my insurance premiums cover irresponsible drivers, but I also don’t imagine (given the appropriate vehicle) ever driving across the Mohave at less than a hundred miles an hour. And once the ability to monitor is in place, it is only a matter of time before police enforcement is provided access to that data.

Now, what would be cool is if it calculated your premium in real time. You’d have your speedo, tach, and current minute-by-minute insurance rate. Take a corner a little quick, and your rate jumps up. Drive the speed limit on long freeway trips once a week only, and your rate gradually falls. Pay-as-you-go risk management.

* Electronics and solid object printers are, like, so five minutes ago. How about printing new organs. Sure, that scene in 5th Element seemed fanciful, but maybe not so much.

* Are you against the war? Do you think that the yellow ribbons send the wrong message? Do you not care too much about whether your car gets keyed by someone who “doesn’t take kindly” to folks who don’t support the government? Try the Question War magnet.

* You know what’s fun on a Friday night? Remote controlling decapitated fruit flies using lasers. Seriously.

* Please don’t leave any comments reviewing this post, as it may be considered patent infringement.

So, this is a bit embarrassing, but since I am making students in my com theory seminar and my systems seminar write reaction papers, I figure it is only fair for them to see what I wrote as a masters student. I was searching my hard drive for something related to the class, and ended up with this old weekly response paper I wrote as a grad student at Washington. This was the standard “photocopy and distribute” sort of response that I am trying to replace with the blogs and aggregators. But — perhaps luckily for me — only a small number of fellow students could read it at the time.

Now I am rectifying that. Heck, I might get wild and see what other wonders are hidden in my hard drive. The response appears unedited (though boy-oh-boy are there some bits I would like to edit in here; note that every time I write “clearly” it appears before something fairly opaque) and is offered as an example, though certainly not a model!

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A few times this week, I have chatted with folks about the use of humans by computers. To what degree does the introduction of a new user interface or, for that matter, any technology change the nature of individual thought or social interaction?

There are plenty of specific and general examples of this that are commonly called up. Cell phones and email have changed the way students move around a university campus. So much so, I suspect, that on campuses that have more grass than we do up in frozen Buffalo have likely seen new patterns of erosion. In Japan, they refer to “thumb tribes” (親指族), or youth for whom the thumb has become king. They reportedly have stronger thumbs than the norm, and use them more often for pushing other buttons.

I also recall a science fiction novel in which the characters speak “IBM” and other languages based on the brand of computer they use. I think it would be fun to do a content analysis of Mac users’ blogs and PC users’ blogs to see if one uses certain terms (choose, start, crash) more often. Andrew suggested that Palm Graffitti might also change the way people write in a similar fashion. Certainly, some forms of internet dialect have leaked into everyday conversation, but that isn’t really the same thing.

Amazon has introduced what they call their Mechanical Turk in beta. The original Mechanical Turk was an artificial artificial intelligence, an Ottoman automaton chess player that beat both Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte in games. Of course, it was operated by a hidden human.

Amazon’s project falls on a number of attempts to harness collective micro-efforts by individuals. It pays participants a few cents for each “HIT,” each use of your cerebral computer. Some things are just easier using human brains, and until they figure out a way to scoop it out of your head, they are stuck with you as well.

In the past, this has been used as a clever way of defeating CAPTCHA-like systems. The bot (a spambot, for example) need only “outsource” the recognition part to a human. It turns out there are lots of things that can be so parted out to a human. The Wikipedia is only one example of this micro-effort. If any one person were to sit down an encyclopedia, people would think they were crazy. Sure, drafting full articled takes more of a macro-commitment, but most edits are only worth a few cents-worth of time, and people consider it to be a “give-a-penny-take-a-penny” form of knowledge distribution.

Amazon’s project is designed to provide classification of images, and other things humans seem to be better at. It will allow for a fairly easy programmatic interface to this process. The first thing I thought of, when I saw this, was content analysis in the traditional human-coded form. Of course, you are usually able to train coders, but if you have a really good codebook for a single item, and a little cash to pay for the process, you could do some pretty cool content analysis project this way. Intercoder reliability would inevitably go down, since there is no time afforded for decent training of your “recognizers” but, as they say, you can make it up in volume.

Every time I teach about privacy it bugs me that students are not bugged; or rather, they are not bothered about being bugged. Or something. What I am trying to say is that my students at the graduate and undergraduate level seem nonchalant about issues of personal privacy. It’s enough to make me wonder if I’m (overly) paranoid.

I mean, should it freak me out that CALEA now applies to any VoIP application, so that my Skype has to have a backdoor built in? Should that “bug me”? Moreover, does that mean that if I secure my voice communications, say by commenting out a backdoor in an open source VoIP application, I am violating federal law? And when open source is outlawed will only outlaws use open source?

Should I be bothered by experiments for remote controlling humans. There are other ways of compelling people to move, like microwaving crowds or using directional sonic blasts, but generally, when I think inner ear, I think “my stuff, leave it be.”

Should I worry about efforts to collect DNA from me if/when I am arrested. I’ve never been arrested, so I’ve never been fingerprinted (thus leaving “evil mastermind” available as a future career choice — Mwuahahaha!), but I have a feeling I wouldn’t really appreciate the FBI adding my DNA to their growing database. Gattaca wasn’t a great movie, but it would make an even worse model for public policy.

The main problem is that each of these pieces are not individually scary, it’s only when they are all collected and combined that privacy is breached. This, in the abstract, is difficult to get people excited about. Sure, you can point to issues of identity theft and other problems, and this is likely to get people interested, but the idea that the government may go one direction, and you the other — that you may want to protect this information because there is always the possibility, however remote, that you will end up at the wrong end of a policeman’s sniper scope — seems beyond what folks can be concerned about it. Sure, they say, the FBI might bend the rules here and there, but that’s not the same as a modern Stasi. Besides, if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about, they say.

And, in the end, they are probably right. For two reasons. First, if the government goes the wrong way, I suspect most Americans will follow. “My country and my government right or wrong” is the new brand of patriotism. It hasn’t gone wrong enough yet that there is reason to fight directly against government authority, but that option must always be left open. (And, I would say indefinite detention of citizens is stepping very near the line.) Many in Europe understand this, and have privacy laws that reflect that fascism is not gone, it’s just been temporarily banished, and remains a threat worth protecting against. Most students don’t have a problem with the government or private companies having this information because they cannot imagine a situation in which they would choose to come into substantive conflict with either.

Second, maybe I’m the one out of the loop. Maybe privacy was just a social artifact of the mass society of the twentieth century. Maybe now, as we are transitioning from the mass to the network, it has become time to give up our quaint notions of personal privacy. Or if not give it up, at least have it change. Maybe we will retain some form of the “right to be left alone,” but our information — our data — will be wide open. Hard to say, really. I do suspect, though, that my kids will have a very different view of privacy than I do.

Halloween has passed, but in one of my seminars this semester, a few weeks down the road, we will be talking about privacy and it will once again be my job to try to scare people, to give them something to think about. In some ways, I think I usually manage to do this, but not enough that most will agree that something should be done about it. The best I can hope for is a collective “sho ga nai” from the students.

Maybe these things bother me because our guards aren’t that guarded. It’s not just the theoretical issue of a police state that bothers me. We are still very far from such a possibility, but recent events have shown how quickly that distance can be traversed, when it complies with the will or permission of the people. After all, we (reminder: the “good guys”) these days seriously debate how much torture is too much.

In the systems class we are forming groups for the final project, which is, in practice, a fully formed and executable proposal. Not, mind you, a “I just thought this might be a cool idea” sort of proposal, but more of a “I’ve done a thorough literature review/benchmarking, am familiar with the best practices, have an IRB proposal, can slam dunk any criticisms” kind of proposal. In order to allow for uniformly high quality in the project proposals, I am allowing (erm, “making”) folks work in groups.

Everyone emailed me resumes and reasons for why they might or might not want to be appointed as group leaders. I will admit that I am surprised by how many didn’t want a leadership position. I suspect that this has a lot to do with experiences in which the leader did all the work for the group. If any of the leaders of the groups in this course end up doing all the work, they will have failed at their jobs. In fact, leadership is all about coordinating the efforts of the team.

The following people will be leading teams this semester: Croniser, Cunningham, Cywinski, Gianni, Kwiatkowski, Seibert, Tredo.

Each team will have three members, a couple will have four. The members of each team will not, as is common in many classes, be assigned randomly, or via informal processes. Each leader will be given 1000 points to allocate to closed bids on people they want on their team. They can allocate these in any way they like. If they are sure they want one person, they can bid all of their points for that person. If they want to spread those points across 10 people, ensuring that they get at least some of these, they can do that. Obviously, you want to be someone in demand…

Those of you who are not listed above as a team leader need to post answers to the following questions to your blogs by Monday (Halloween) night, at the latest. Remember: people besides the team leaders are going to see this, so be careful in crafting your self-advertisement.

1. What are you good at? Do you have particular talents or skills that would benefit a team? How have you demonstrated those skills? Be concise, but complete.

2. What do you most enjoy doing? What is your passion? What would you do if money were no object?

3. Think back to a project team you especially enjoyed working with. What about that team made it good? That is, what do you look for in a project team, its members, and its leaders?

4. Think back to your least favorite position. What is it that made it a bad fit for you?

5. What else is important for a team leader to know about you?

6. The end project proposal represents a proposed capstone project. Do you have some ideas — either general or more specific — for the form of project you would be most interested in working on?