via David Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy:
The new (2005) U.S. News rankings of law schools are being posted and discussed all over the web. Biggest surprise: Boalt drops to thirteen.
UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall is holding a Patent Reform Conference on 15, 16 April facilitated by the Federal Trade Commission, the National Academy of Sciences and the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. Much of the talk will surround the FTC's patent reform report and the NAS's patent reform report (which is due out at the beginning of next week; here's the statement of task).
With technology like on-line testing being patented (6,513,042), (which has vast quantities of prior art and obviousness) as well as cookies (6,714,926), I couldn't imagine a better time for such an confluence of constructive thought and criticism of the current system.
I'm posting all of this in an extended entry because it was quite long... you'll have to exit your feed reader to get the goods... sorry.
Assignment: Use key concepts from the readings to analyze the information model, cultural dynamics and/or dramaturgy of an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role playing game) such as SIMS, Counterstrike, Evequest, There!, etc. If you are not familiar with any MMORPG, please explore one. There! has a free trial from http://www.there.com (requires a Windows box).
I tried exploring a MMORPG (is there a particularly phonetic way of saying that out-loud?)... unfortunately, I couldn't find a Mac-friendly MMORPG that had a free trial (I'm home sick... no PC to play with). I also sympathize with Carolyn's comment on Dave's blog about not particularly liking games that force you to talk to strangers. That's too bad, I wanted to test one out to be a sport... I guess I'll have to attempt to do this assignment from my recollection of a game I played this past Christmas vacation. It was "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City". (Note: this isn't a MMO-like RPG... it's a first-person shooter against computer algorithms... so I broke the social networking part, sorry).
First, a brief description of the game... you are a (male) car thief (like in all of the Grand Theft Auto games I believe). In fact, this is so much a part of your being that there's even a special button on the controller precisely for this... that is, you press the Playstation's X button, and, when near a car you will open the door, grab the occupant, throw them out of the car and get in the car. I don't quite remember what the objective of the game was... it seemed like you had these missions you had to complete involving gang warfare, car stealing, drug dealing and all-around killing mofos.
The Information Model: The screen is mostly devoted to what a camera-crew would see if they were following you... very much like COPS but not so much at night with floodlights. The only things on the screen besides the normal view is your "life" and your "wanted" level... if your "life" goes down, you die... if you're crazy as all hell and do a lot of illegal stuff, your "wanted" level goes up until you've got what seems like the entire Miami PD after your ass. As well, certain signals pop-up from time to time to signal something important: a huge red 3D arrow pointing to a punk indicating that you've got him in the sights of your Glock, or a "target" that you drive over to complete/start/complicate your mission.
The normal senses that you don't have are either gone (smell, taste) or made-up for in other ways (feeling, hearing). In terms of hearing, you often can tell the cops are close to you by how loud their syrens are (unless you've got the radio in your stolen car turned all the way up... which has a number of unique channels). In terms of feeling, you have an inventory menu that tells you all the insane weapons you're carrying (everyone with a bazooka looks completely normal in a 3-piece suit!) and provides a map of the City.
Cultural Dynamics: The cultural dynamics of this game are funny... they try to replicate a city pretty well. People will talk to you in their "lingo" according to their class. However, there are some culturally dynamical quirks that go so far as to cause protests in meatspace (the physical world). That last link was to a protest to one of the Grand Theft Auto: Vice City missions... where you have to "kill all the hatians" to get to the next level. The gansters of this country have yet to rise up in arms against little mini-missions where you're instructed to "kill as many gansters in the next 60 seconds as you can for a bonus". Naturally, the smart folk wip out the automatic weapons, grenades and bazooka... It's interesting that you can steal a car from almost anyone in this game... even the cops. However, some cars are harder to steal than others... the tougher the car (usually) the tougher the driver. But you can always cap their ass and take it anyway.
Dramaturgy: Well, you frequently have to act like an accomplished, very-rich (you have mansions) car thief. That is, you have to think like this kind of person to get ahead. For example, having trouble getting past a certain level/mission? Well, little did you know that the mission cannot be accomplished without using your gang members as human shields (hide behind them). It's also interesting how you start to love the .50 caliber sniper rifle... what I mean here is that most people are a lot more dangerous up close... if you can learn to shoot them in the head from a couple blocks away, then run away before the cops get there, you'll go far. The weird part about the dramaturgy of this game is that you actually start to think like this when you try to win the game... that is, you have your idea of who this guy running around stealing cars and killing people is. But that is consistently shattered by these little vignettes that happen periodically where your character (god forbid) actually talks, walks and acts like some designer intended a "professional car thief".
Yates and Orlikowski:
I hate the word structurational. It's dumb. But I get why it's important.
You know, I'm not so sure that there's anything all that novel or complex in this article. The idea of a genre of communication... that is, methods of communication change in time and form (physical and content-related) doesn't seem particularly novel. Peter says (his blog seems to now work),
Clearly there are a number of new genres emerging (like blogging) that are developing into genres and we'll want to be able to discuss how medium and culture are interacting. This article is an example of the way organizational theory analyzes online cultures.
Hmmm... so in the sense that Y&O proposed a diachronic network-theory typologoy for communication, it is interesting. So what do we do with it? They recommend examining how charateristics of genres spread (as in blogging) or are inherited as well as examining historical changes in genres. Cool...
Geertz:
You've got to love this article. It is a great illustration of how different cultures can be... I was really suprised how infused with norms Bali cock-fighting is (Beavis... heh, heh, he said cock). To think that you're supposed to bet with family and hometown! This is much different from Vegas, for example, where money rules... and family has been known to stab each other in the back here in the U.S. over gambling (not that this has happened to me).
Laurel:
This was more of a curiousity to me than anything else... not being a UI designer, I haven't been exposed to a lot of that. I do find it fascinating that one can take ideas from dramaturgy and apply them to design. Such an easy leap, but such stark consequences. I can't tell you how much I hated clippy and how hard to turn off he seemed. That in itself was enough for me to buy a Mac... why? Because he assumed I always needed help and way always there. It should have been more like an accomplished butler.
Salen & Zimmerman:
This was damn wicked. Right up my alley. I like to see everything in terms of signal to noise. This is what astronomy is all about and we spend days at a time calulating the signal-to-noise ratio of images we're going to take with respect to science we want to do. It's interesting to see that people (like Shane) think that noise is a very important part of playing games... especially that introduced by human players on the other side of the screen. It's interesting how well signal is dealt with in games compared to other types of computer software. UI peeps: are games just traditionally better at UI design? A notable exception: Sim city. That game was hard for me to figure out at first (when I was like 14)... it didn't read the directions and it was hard to tell exactly what was going on... some residential neighborhoods got better (taller) and some got shorter and less-detailed... then I learned that this was the pixelized version of a ghetto.
Judge: Sharing music via networks legal in Canada | CNET News.com
Just in: Making copyrighted music available for sharing on a computer network is not illegal in Canada, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday, handing the record industry a sharp setback in its international fight against file swappers.
UPDATE [14:07]: Here is the decision hosted by [EPIC].
This month's Wired carries a great Larry Lessig column on IDDs -- "Insanely Destructive Devices". What he describes is the possibility of dangerous pathogens (be they biological or nantechnological) that can replicate themselves. The result, a totally fuxxored planet and very little of a thread of civilization left... if any.
Larry goes on to talk about a class he taught on the various doomsday scenarios and what kind of policies would be appropriate to avoid these outcomes. The initial reaction of his students was "positively soviet" with recommendations of locking down scientific thought. Then he describes "one student" who recommended looking at it in a very different manner: we need to eliminate the incentives to create such malevolent pathogens. That is, we need to delete the urge to kill large amounts of people:
Then one student suggested a very different approach. If we can't defend against an attack, perhaps the rational response is to reduce the incentives to attack. Rather than designing space suits, maybe we should focus on ways to eliminate the reasons to annihilate us. Rather than stirring up a hornet's nest and then hiding behind a hush, maybe the solution is to avoid the causes of rage. Crazies, of course, can't be reasoned with. But we can reduce the incentives to become a crazy. We could reduce the reasonableness—from a certain perspective—for finding ways to destroy us.
The point produced a depressing recognition. There's a logic to P2P threats that we as a society don't yet get. Like the record companies against the Internet, our first response is war. But like the record companies, that response will be either futile or self-destructive. If you can't control the supply of IDDs, then the right response is to reduce the demand for IDDs. Yet as everyone in the class understood, in the four years since Joy wrote his Wired piece, we've done precisely the opposite. Our present course of unilateral cowboyism wil continue to produce generations of angry souls seeking revenge on us.
We've not yet fully understood Joy. In the future there most certainly will be IDDs. Abolishing freedom, issuing space suits, and launching wars only increases the danger that they will be used. We had better learn tat soon.
I've been trying to articulate this for a while now. We don't need wars... we need to initiate the very much harder task of figuring out what part of our culture that we export is destroying us. We need to undercut the demand for terror.
However, as I said, I've been thinking about this for a while. One thing about all this has been bugging me from the beginning. The war on drugs. That is, the war on drugs is a case-study in how war doesn't solve a (perceived) ill. However, what about reducing the demand for drugs? We've tried that (anti-drug campaigns) and it has worked reasonably well. However, terror is different. It seems that most of the muslim terrorists are upset that our liberal values will infect their culture... how do we control this? Do we stop trying to preach civil liberties and equal rights (race, gender, sex pref., etc.) to other countries? What does this kind of foreign policy look like? It looks very different than what we've got now...
IBM has amended it's counterclaims in the SCO case... suprisingly groklaw doesn't seem to have anything on this yet. C|Net is on the beat and has the scoop ("IBM seeks copyright judgment against SCO"). Here's the text of the new counterclaim (they dropped the claim on patent no. 4,821,211).
"IBM does not infringe, induce the infringement of or contribute to the infringement of any SCO copyright through its Linux activities, including its use, reproduction and improvement of Linux, and that some or all of SCO's purported copyrights in Unix are invalid and unenforceable."
Bonus: Here are the other IBM patents... which you can enter into google with the word "patent" to do a USPTO lookup! (4,814,746, 4,821,211, 4,953,209, 5,805,785)
Alan Guskin from Antioch University spoke today at the UC Berkeley's California Hall (where the Chancellor is based out of). I've written up my notes in an extended entry...
How do institutions respond? They muddle-through. That is, they try to make as many incremental changes as possible...
increase workload,
hire inexpensive faculty,
cut stuff that isn't essential,
increase tuition to the maximum allowed,
more forceful presentations to legislature and private sector,
refinance debt,
cut non-essential academic areas.
libraries are cut more than other places
because it's there.
digital resources make a big difference.
lots of savings there.
No changes are made to the way students are handled.
Technology can make a big difference but should not replace profs/TAs.
Problems with muddling-through
You cannot muddle-through forever... you can't fund-raise enough to make up for loss.
Tuition levels cannot be increased forever.
Required increases in technology ad significant costs to budge without any savings.
Many budget reduction are one-time only... unfortunately, you can't cut twice. ("You can stop washing windows once, how do you stop washing windows again?")
Quality of life of faculty and staff deteriorates.
Quality of education starts to degrade.
Class sizes go up.
We have seen ourselves over the past 40-50 years as successful... but to maintain this, we need a stable economic situation.
How to transform from muddling-through to something else?
Challenge assumptions about how students can learn (that is, not just in classrooms)
Need to refocus on student learning not faculty teaching.
Need to refocus on student learning productivity not faculty productivity.
To affect this, we need to inject a level of pain or "anticipatory pain" that induces them to realize that there is an urgency to undertake fundamental change. Anticipate the pain and act before it gets so bad that it demoralizes everyone.
What are the new educational assumptions?
Student learning can occur in many different arenas.
Need to develop high-quality teaching and learning strategies.
Technology can be effectively utilized in core of educational process.
faculty have new roles.
libraries have made great leaps and bounds... use them.
new organizational structures are needed to deal with this.
Don't seek short-term solutions for long-term problems.
A vision of the future is very important to keep institutional focus.
How do we increase student learning and maintain the quality of faculty work-life with fewer resources?
We can solve the problem on the backs of faculty/staff backs or student backs with no problem... but something gives.
How do we do them all at once?
Organizing principles:
Create a clear and coherent vision of the future focused on student learning, quality of faculty work-life and reduced costs.
Align and transform all academic and organization programs and structures of an institution around a coherent focus.
Without the creation of a clear and coherent institutional vision, serious fundamental reform is not possible.
Focusing on student learning yields a much richer set of educational possibilities... it's not so important where students learn but that they've learned it.
Outcomes-based assessment: Not how many credits but what they've demonstrated that they've learned.
Learning communities: These link taught courses with a common set of students across courses.
Technology: interactive learning, transmits information, and is integrated to the core of
Out-of-class learning: service learning, practice-based learning...
Curricular audits: So much of what we do in higher education is not questioned. We accumulate all kinds of programs/courses/curricula via institutional learning.
Transform the organizational systems consistent with vision of the future.
Organizational systems are built to maintain the present operations through incremental adjustments.
Organizational systems include: how we count, how we reward, how we allocate funds, who and what we support, how we provide services. These systems are built to resist large changes!
Annual budgets align an institution's expenditures with the vision of the future:
question all institutional functions and service to determine alignment with vision.
determine which most accurately reflect campus' vision and fund them
involve faculty, staff, and administrators at many levels.
Assess essential and non-essential administrative and student services, and reduce or eliminate the non-essential.
Redesign essential service around new technologies, thereby reducing costs and improving service.
cross-training of staff to deliver effective and efficient services.
Transformative actions require investment in new technology and personnel.
Build a system of assessment for institution-wide learning outcomes
restructure faculty and other campus roles around learning outcomes.
create a library of the future.
Library of the Future
The transformed library of the future will be at the core of teaching, learning and scholarship.
Virtual reference librarians: chatting with a librarian in Australia off-hours.
We often don't think about the Library as a key player in the transforming of student learning... but it is.
Implementation Process
The present system's purpose is to maintain the present system.
The system will reject experimentation.
There is a danger of the whole process of change destroying the old process... this needs to be planned for.
Conclusion
It does not make sense to follow a path that is likely to lead to a slow and inexorable erosion of the nature of the academic profession s we know it.
choosing to follow the path outlined requires and overhaul in our thinking about how the education and organizational systems of almost all colleges and universities are and could be organized.
These are tough choices in a difficult time, but they offer a hopeful vision for the future of colleges and universities.
Sorry to quote and run... this is from a story in The Scotsman ("When copyright is king").
When copyright is king
Campbell Deane
There's an old line that one of the perks of the job for lawyers who look after the estates of dead people is that their clients aren't around to tell them what to do. It came to mind last week when it was revealed that Elvis Aaron Presley may have roots in the village of Lonmay, Aberdeenshire, where one Andrew Presley was born before he sailed across the pond to the United States in 1745.
It was a story which inevitably tempted sad men in ill-fitting wigs and white jumpsuits to the scene, and invited speculation that the village could become somewhere the King's fans might want to visit. Maybe the local bed-and-breakfast could change its name to the Heartbreak Hotel?
Elvis spent only two hours of his life in Scotland (that famously brief stop-off at Prestwick Airport), but might have been slightly tickled by the idea of his fame being marked in the rather backwater location from where his forefathers came. He came from Southern poor white trash, but was always proud of his family and his roots.
In any event, it has now been decreed that no such thing will ever happen by lawyers for the Elvis estate. They greeted the happy news of their deceased client's Scottish connection with their customary heavy-handed copyright warning.
[...]
I'm starting to become more concerned with blogs being a potential hiring liability... now, since I plan on being in academia until I rot or dry up, that's not a huge concern of mine. But Kevin over at the Tech Law Advisor points to Anonymous Lawyer's comments on how this is a big problem for professions like lawyers ("Dangers of Non-Anonymous Blawging").
After reading this, I think I finally get what danah is talking about when she says that "people don't get persistence on the net." I thought it was just a matter of security through obscurity at first... that is, people aren't popular so they don't have a lot of eyes on their public blogs. But that's not it... it is more about the fact that determined individuals and organizations (like this one and this one) will undoubtedly record everything that they can (that is public). And you can't take this stuff back or blast it out of existence as the Anonymous Lawyer's associate attempted to.
My review of the Numbers' new album, In My Mind All The Time, off of Tigerbeat6 just went up on CLINK!. Find it here. Despite what the article says, I've licensed it under a CC attribution license.
I'm not sure what to think of the following three stories... they appear to be reporting concern in India of "unscrupulous" foriegn businesses taking patents on Ayurvedic techniques. The answer? Patenting your products before the bio-pirates get them!
Here's a great excerpt from the last article:
In his presentation, Dr. Madhyastha noted that India was a treasure trove of traditional wisdom and indigenous knowledge. But owing to "indifference" and "ignorance," many knowledge systems had disappeared.
He said the indifference towards patenting traditional knowledge had left open the field to discerning entrepreneurs from other countries. After the Indian economy had been liberalised, at least 20 medicinal plants and agricultural products of the country had been patented by developed countries, which was a glaring instance of bio-piracy, he said. [emphasis added]
Aeonn over at regressing.net notes that, in a quest to ban Female Genital Mutilation, the Georgia House of Representatives has banned genital piercings for women. There was no debate and the amendment passed unanimously. The bill now needs to go back to the Senate to get the piercings amendment cleared. And you've got to love this down-home Southern quote:
Amendment sponsor Rep. Bill Heath, R-Bremen, was slack-jawed when told after the vote that some adults seek the piercings.
"What? I've never seen such a thing," Heath said. "I, uh, I wouldn't approve of anyone doing it. I don't think that's an appropriate thing to be doing."
Not only is this law now targeted just for women who want to pierce their plumbing, but it would punish such evildoers by 2 to 20 years in prison! I wonder what Rep. Heath would say if he knew that men did this too? Men can still get all the Ampallang, Apadravya, Foreskin, Frenum, Guiche, Hafada, Prince Albert, and Reverse Prince Albert piercings that they want. Be warned about exploring that last link! NSFW!!!
UPDATE: Michelle (my girl) says, "Freedom of Mutilation, man!"
I'd like to point out that one of my all-time favorite bands, Trans Am, is coming down from D.C. to the Great American Music Hall in late May. Never heard of them? Check out this little mp3 snipet of "Music For Dogs" (450K) from their latest album, Liberation. Liberation is very political, electronic, musically complex and oh-so-original... note that these guys are very talented musicians. If you'd like to hear more tracks (RIAA free!), go here.
Further, If you like obscure, cheap modern music and you live near the Bay Area, you might be interested in my shows page where I post shows I've seen that catch my eye. These shows are taken mostly from the list.
A great Slate article by Dahlia Lithwick "One Nation, Under Hallmark, Indivisible - Is the God of the Pledge of Allegiance a deity or a greeting card?". The closing quote is a gem:
This case is a mess, and not just because of the underlying custody issue, and not just because of the 11,000 outrageous "tests" the court has cooked up for Establishment Clause cases, and not just because of the serious possibility that it all ends in a 4-4 tie. The case is a mess because, whatever you may think about God or the pledge, if you really apply the case law and really think "God" means "God," then Newdow is right. But Newdow can't be right. Can he?
Note that this guy Newdow is representing himself at the Supreme Court!
MUCorpLaw is a law class that is blogging their subject matter...
GROKLAW points to a great article ("Microsoft Strategies for Lovers of Freedom and Justice") authored by David Cartwright. It gives some simple strategies that netizens of all sorts can employ instead of relying on regulatory solutions to rein in Microsoft. I've translated the document in easy-to-email, easy-to-read Markdown... you can get it here and I'll post the article below...
There have been some who have expressed dismay that after Microsoft was found guilty in the U.S. antitrust trial, not enough happened to make it change its ways. However there are choices that consumers can make, if they wish to have an antitrust impact.
There are, actually, a variety of reasons why you may wish to decrease or avoid the use of Microsoft products. Perhaps it's the snowballing license fees, or the constant feeling of insecurity amidst a sea of viruses and worms, or disenchantment with Microsoft's constant attempts to create proprietary lock-ins, or even a desire not to support a monopoly. Whatever your reasons, when it's a corporation that Judge Jackson noted has prodigious market power and immense profits, one individual's actions may seem inconsequential.
However, that would be to underestimate the power of one, and the power of a million ones. A single snowflake is a delicate thing, but a million snowflakes together can stop traffic.
So for those who wish to take steps to reduce their dependency on one vendor, here are some practical steps. The steps outlined apply, first, to anyone (particularly if you fall into the 90%+ segment of PC users who use a PC running Microsoft Windows) and then are particularized for specific roles or organizations, such as hardware companies, software developers, Microsoft employees, universities, schools, and Microsoft competitors. The list is not exhaustive, so feel free to use it as a starting point.
Easy Steps for everyone
Steps for the adventurous
Small and Medium Businesses
Enterprise and Government users
Universities and other Teaching Institutions
PC Manufacturers
Software Developers
IT Evangelists
Embedded systems developers
Microsoft competitors
Microsoft Employees
Revision: 25 March 2004
Background Reference:
US DoJ Findings of Fact (1999): http://www.usdoj.gov/...
Vendor References:
Embedded Linux News: http://www.linuxdevices.com/
Gaim: http://gaim.sourceforge.net/
IBM Lotus: http://lotus.com/
Jabber clients: http://www.jabber.org/software/clients.php/
Knoppix: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html
Konqueror: http://konqueror.org/
Mozilla: http://mozilla.org/
MySQL: http://www.mysql.com/
Novell Partner Locator: http://www.novell.com/partnerlocator/
OpenCD: http://theopencd.sunsite.dk/
OpenGroupware.org: http://www.opengroupware.org/
OpenOffice: http://www.openoffice.org/
Opera Software: http://www.opera.com/
Palm OS: http://www.palmsource.com/
Red Hat: http://www.redhat.com/
Samsung Contact: http://www.samsungcontact.com/en/
Sun StarOffice 7: http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/index.html
Symbian OS: http://www.symbian.com/
(c) 2004 David Cartwright
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License
Damn... trying to find a movie time and I get every 'Ladykillers' banner they can throw at me:
The Northern and Southern California chapters of the ACLU recently (and quite quietly) released a set of recommendations entitled, "Joint Report And Recommendations On Electronic Voting".
What's the gist? They recognize that they were a tad premature last year in demanding that all California counties move to electronic voting (their lawsuit survived appeal but tanked with the full 9th Circuit appellate court (ruling)). They seem to place more favor with the benefits that DREs bring to the disenfranchised (illiterate, non-english speaking, disabled) over the grave risks of using them in their current state of disrepair.
I think this is a tad sensational. I hate to sound callus, but are we going to accept a dangerously flawed technology—like the current slate of e-voting with DREs which provide no independent audit or voter-verification—just because a tiny minority of voters may not be able to vote entirely independently? I would rather they not be allowed to vote at all if this would mean the rest of us got the assurance that our vote was counted accurately in an auditable manner.
They do have a few great points to which I should bring your attention. From page 9:
4.6 New DRE architectures may emerge that would render a V-VPAT system unnecessary.
Really? I want to see this. I think the Open Voting Consortium has one solution: using entirely open-source code on commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) PCs. Not much you have to trust there.
Next, from page 12:
5.5 Non-Paper Audit/Recount.
While the adoption of a V-VPAT may be necessary as an interim measure, the California Affiliates do not believe that, in the long run, a V-VPAT will necessarily prove to be the best means of providing an independent record of votes cast using DRE voting systems. V-VPAT is at the moment, however, the system which is closest to being developed as a viable means of conducting a recount. That is why the California Affiliates insist, above, that efforts be made to quickly develop a robust and reliable and accessible V-VPAT system. The fundamental problems inherent in relying on a paper record should not be underestimated, however, and cannot likely be eliminated completely. We therefore strongly urge the development of an electronic voting architecture capable of producing an independent record of each electronically-cast vote to be used in performing the audit and recount functions currently envisioned for the V-VPAT. [emphasis added]
What the hell is this if not a paper record? Independent/official records need to be verifiable by the voter before being placed in a ballot box. How are we going to do this without paper and in such a way that a common voter understands what the hell is going on? That is, we can think up as nifty of a security scheme as we want, but if the average/median voter can't easily understand it, it will be just as mysterious as the current DREs with proprietary code and no verifiability. Simplicity and transparency are close cousins... in that vein, from page 13:
5.6.4 Because open source code provides greater security and transparency, it increases voter confidence. Therefore, the Secretary of State should encourage the development of a non-proprietary, open source DRE voting system, such as the Australian model.
Ah, the Australian model... good stuff. Don't forget the OVC!
Finally, the recommendations they list in the Appendix are really good... even if just this part of their document were implemented, I'd rest easier at night. Here are the recommendations (I'll embolden things I think are especially important):
ADDITIONAL SECURITY MEASURES TO BE ADOPTED BEFORE ANY DRE VOTING SYSTEMS ARE USED
Separate the voter-casting function from the vote-tabulating function so that these two functions occur on separate and independent systems.
Base official election results only on tabulations from the memory cards from each voting machine, which shall be hand-delivered by two persons from the polling place to the central vote tabulation facility. While counts should also be transmitted via modem, those counts may be used only in the event that it is shown that memory cards from a particular polling place have been lost or corrupted.
Require all vendors to escrow with the Secretary of State the source code for all vote-casting and vote-tabulation software to be subjected to a security assessment by an independent testing body.
Require that all pre-election Logic and Accuracy testing be conducted only by election officials or by an independent testing agency and not by any person who has any affiliation with the vendor of the voting system.
Load all machines with identical, digitally signed software that is checked both before and after the election to ensure that the software used is the software that has been escrowed with the Secretary of State.
Submit a statement under penalty of perjury both from the county Registrar of Voters and from a responsible official from the vendor of the voting system that he or she has made diligent inquiries and has ascertained that no untested or uncertified software has been installed on any voting machine or on any computer equipment used to tabulate voting results.
Adopt detailed protocols, subject to public review and comment, that will ensure the physical integrity of the voting machine from the moment the software is loaded through the vote-counting and vote certification process.
Adopt detailed protocols, subject to public review and comment, that will ensure that each polling place has all of the necessary equipment, infrastructure, and supplies to ensure the voting process will not be delayed, including provision to enable voting to continue in the event machines break down.
Upgrade the number and training of poll workers to ensure that at every polling place poll workers are competent to deal with any anticipated technical or mechanical problems arising from the use of DRE voting machines.
Word to your mother. That last bit is good stuff... we don't want Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia or Intercivic employees touching the machines on election day unless it's to get a refund on a hopeless system. Way to go ACLU-NC and ACLU-SC... you do seem a tad schizophrenic in all of this, but you're standing up for the little guys, as always. I wouldn't want it any other way.
This is an instant classic... an annotated SCO stock price chart from LWN:
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Word up. Spanish Dancing. Or "What kind of hilarity can ensue with a high Google ranking and an anonymous comment submission form."
It's funny what Google can tell you... I was googling for info about dynamic and static library linking with the LGPL, and I came across Creative Commons versions of both the GNU General Public License (GPL) and the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). For reference, here is the actual text of the GPL and LGPL from the Free Software Foundation. However, these don't seem to be licenses you can choose via the Creative Commons "Choose a license" wizard... yet.
Does this mean that software is in the pipes for Creative Commons? I couldn't find the BSD license by guessing the URL or via Google... does the Creative Commons plan on not offering a BSD-style license (where subsequent works can be closed/proprietized)?
Oh, by the way... here's a great explanation of dynamic vs. static linking and the LGPL.
That wild and crazy guy Jeff just kicked down an RSS 2.0 template that includes links to comments... so you allow your readers to better keep track of commenting. Here's the new feed. I'll post the xml template in an extended entry... Grrrr, between using Markdown and Movable Type, it's very hard to post the xml file into an extended entry. Find the template on Jeff's blog (here, right-click and then save). UPDATE: I've added my own mirror of this file here:
free.(via Aaron) All hail Aaron Swartz and John Gruber. They have graced the cybershpere with the presence of Markdown... which I might add, conveniently plugs-in to movable type and with which I am writing the current post. After you've downloaded the Markdown.pl file and ftp'd it to your MT plugins directory... check out the syntax page and then it's markdown file to get a feeling for the power of Markdown. And this is 100% free fucking software.
Our spring break just started. I can't express how happy that makes me. To celebrate, last night I went and bought some Wyder's Raspberry Cider... good stuff, it is.
While I was paying for my goods with a credit card I had a thought on transactions (credit-card, licensing, etc.) that I'd like to share.
The very-nice checkout girl scanned my stuff. I swiped my credit card. She asked, "Debit or credit?" I said, "Credit" She hit a button on her console. By this time I was looking at something else... a magazine on the checkout rack, perhaps. She said, "You have to hit the little green button, sir." I looked down at the credit-card swiping machine... it had a prompt that said, "$11.65 is your total. Is this OK? Press the Red button for 'NO' and the Green button for 'YES'." Of course, I pressed green button.
Then I said, "I always forget to do that. It's always 'OK'. In fact, has it ever been not OK?" The checkout girl said, "You know, It's never been not OK... every one either knows that's part of the checkout, or they forget and I remind them."
This got me to thinking... what is the purpose of making the credit-card holder hit OK? Presumably, it's so they have proof that you've approved the purchase amount before the transaction is undertaken. So, why the hell do we then sign the receipt? That seems more for identification purposes... that is, if there is a challenge to the transaction, whomever (the store, the credit-card company, etc.) can use this to see who's signature it is. Why can't the signature also be used as an approval of the transaction amount? Is that because the transaction is already committed at this point?
Then, I started to think of other contexts where a similarly ridiculous 'OK'-like prompt was given. I thought of licensing transactions with software. No one ever reads the licenses or software agreements (also termed EULAs). There is always a prompt given where the user is expected to either agree or not agree with the terms of the license. Inevitably, no one (or very few people) ever declines to accept the terms of the licenses. So, what the hell is the goal of having an accept/decline prompt for license transactions? Is it to get the user to spend an hour with their lawyer attempting to translate the licenses into lay-person speak? No, it is more of a protection for the vendor. That is, the vendor can claim you had to accept the license's terms before you began to 'illegally' reverse-engineer their product. But the truth is that no one reads these damn things and very few actually understand them. The goal should be to get the user to understand and accept the terms of the license.
So, how do we get the users to understand the terms of the license so that they're in a position to really make an informed decision about whether or not they should decline/accept these terms? I think, at least, we will need either Creative-Commons style software licensing where the license is translated into a few different layers (machine, lawyer, lay-person). At most, we should have, instead of a simple decline/accept prompt for software licenses, a license quiz (like the GPL quiz, but shorter and more simple) that actually tests if the user has read the specific software agreement being declined/accepted.
I realize that this will be a barrier-to-entry of sorts for people that don't take tests well or to those who can't read or are dumb. But it seems that people are so quick to license away fundamental rights they have at a click of a click-wrap button... like reverse engineering or, in some cases with Microsoft, their rights to criticize the product (free speech). In fact, I think a test or two here and there could do very well for public policy in the United States... regardless of the Florida voting fiasco in 2000, imagine if George W. Bush had had to take a small quiz on domestic and foreign affairs before being allowed to accept the GOP nomination. He wouldn't be our president.
What got me to stop? Trans Am's latest album Liberation... it's a fucking instant classic. If you don't like it, you suck... just kidding, of course. I tend to be less picky about a lot of things (food, music, etc.) than most people.
This got me wondering... what about people in 2nd and 3rd world countries that work a manufacturing line for 12 hours per day? Are they immune to RSI? I think not. I bet they either 1) work through the pain and find a way to work that hard and not get injured or 2) ignore their injury or 3) they must have to leave a given job after it becomes too painful. I wonder what the turn-over rate is for these kinds of rough manufacturing jobs? And how do people who do it for many many years cope? Further, it would be interesting to grab a few of these longer-lasting folks and run them through an MRI... to see just what their body has done to cope or how bad it has been damaged. This could be a whole paper for the proper medical researcher...
Haikus for Wednesday:
Really six degrees?
Did Milgram possibly cheat?
Maybe Kleinfeld's cheap?
Studying online,
can cause headaches all the time,
your info is mine!
The readings for Wednesday were:
I found this set of readings interesting in the sense it was nice to see Milgram's state-of-the-art study, a very harsh critique and a very recent empirical vindication of Milgram. Kleinfeld goes a little over the top in his/her criticism of Milgram's research (The guy is dead! How the hell is he going to respond?)... although she/he makes some good points. Especially, about how it's not "six degrees of separation"... more like "if you really want to connect to someone, and if it's possible, it can probably be done in an average of six degrees of separation".
I found the Wellman article to be mostly un-interesting... it's mostly a review article and as is the case with survey courses in higher education, you get a taste of the subject but not enough to illustrate what people who do this stuff find so interesting to make it a career.
(for people not at SIMS, I will be posting blog assignments for a clas that you may or may not find interesting... I will preface the titles of these entries with "208B" and you may or may not choose to ignore them.)
First, I need to come clean: I didn't read Fischer or Granovetter. (although I've already done all the reading for Wednesday... so there!) I take from the discussion in class that weak ties are important for jobs and information... although ryan doesn't think that SIMS people have any information that he hasn't seen.
Second, I'd really like to make these entries short enough so that someone will read them if they find them interesting (even if that is only danah!). So, I've decided on a compromise: I'll do rhyming haiku abstracts and then longer entries.
Social networks rule
too damn busy in school
to read and accrue
What are the purposes of your various social networks? My social networks are largely academic, friendly and familiar. Parts of these overlap. The "purpose" of these networks? I don't rightly know... I didn't erect them consciously with a specific purpose, they just exist and I hope that they don't get measurably smaller due to some act of mine. The academic social network is for geeky information, friends are for fun and family is rock solid and to die for.
What are the shapes of your social networks: how large are they? How do they combine face-to-face and online contacts? How old are they? What are their functions? Whoa! One at a time, there partner! Let's see... my academic network is large, my friend network is small and my familiar network gets bigger with every new Young or Hall-family human brought into this world. Friends are old and new, academics are mostly new but there are some oldies and family is mostly old. "Functions?" I don't like that question... I know that I "use" my networks but operationalizing them to this point makes me feel weird.
Are you going to use your social networks to get a job? Find a partner? Possibly... probably not. I've got a job for a while... I'm trying my damnedest to keep my partner although I'm so busy she rarely gets to see me.
How, and when, do you use your social networks? All the freakin' time. I am a prolific emailer and an information junky. I consume information mostly from my academic network, dissimenate to academics, friends and family.
Propose a typology of the functions, origin and duration, and size and density of social networks, based upon your own experience. I'm going to do something else. Since my academic and familial networks only grow... I'd like to talk a little bit about my network of friends. I had a lot of friends in undergrad. at Northern Arizona University and as well during High School in Albuquerque. Both of these networks experienced a punctuated evolution of sorts... that is, when I moved away from High School and then from undergrad. my friend network seemed to experience a mass-extinction.
This social network extinction was particularly dramatic when coming to grad. school here at Berkeley. In contrast, when coming from High School to undergrad. in Flagstaff I lived in a dorm with a slew of other people out of their element, in need of friends. At grad. school, I didn't have easy contact to the demographic that makes up what I had become comfortable with calling my "friends". And, goddamn if it's not hard as hell to make friends the older we get. This has changed somewhat with my change of career paths from astrophysics to tech. policy... SIMS kids are very heterogeneous, artsy and unabashedly fun-loving... now my biggest barrier is just having enough time to socialize... especially since I don't see my partner very much and I love her to death.
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Has anyone out their seen New Jack City... Weseley Snipes, ICE-T, etc? This tactic sounds exactly like that used by crack dealers. Unfortunately, it is more nefarious than crack dealing as Microsoft gets a tax break for giving away software... which is why the biggest player in the software industry pays no corporate tax.
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