Author: mklang

Steve Mann assaulted at McDonalds (& censored by Facebook?)

Steve Mann is an amazing person. He is the father of wearable computers and is well worth reading about (Wikipedia for example).

He recently published a recount of an assault he suffered at the hands of some paranoid McDonalds staff. It’s strange, it’s terrible and it deserves to be spread. Obviously McD should be offering apologies and offering to repair his equipment.

Read the full story here: Physical assault by McDonald’s for wearing Digital Eye Glass it will also give you an idea of why Steve Mann is important to tech development in general and to Googles upcoming glasses in particular.

While this tragic and scary it is not really something I was going to blog about. I tweeted it… fine. I was going to post it on Facebook and got this:

Well ok that’s odd but I didn’t use the exact link, how careless of me. So I tried again.

Seriously? Is Facebook blocking Steve Mann’s blog? What is going on here?

 

Posted on by mklang

Gold Open Access is Bad for Science Publishing

Recently I was listening to a podcast discussing the recent Finch Report which comes out in favor of the Gold path of Open access. What open access is attempting to resolve is the problem that much of government funded research costs too much before it is made accessible. It costs so much that even some research libraries are unable to access the results.

The basic model is that the researcher applies for funding. This process is time consuming and often fails. Therefore too many people are chasing too little money. Those who are fortunate to receive funding will eventually need to publish their findings in scientific journals in order to advance in their careers (and to push scientific progress forward).

Scientific journals are basically other academics acting as editors and reviewers (for the most part unpaid). So the government is paying the academics to do this work as well. Once the material is published the university libraries have to buy a subscription in order to make the work available to their researchers.

Cash Flow

How many times in this process have we paid for the the results before they are available? In most cases none of the material is available to a wider audience outside academia.

The Gold Route to open access would make research available to researchers and the general public by making the researchers pay the publishers in advance to make their material available. In other words taking the subscription fees from the library budget and adding it on to the research grants.

There are problems with this.

1. The lock in to publishers is still strong. The reason why we are discussing a scientific publishing crisis is that the cost of purchasing access to the articles is too high to bear. Gold Open Access does not address this problem in the long term. Sure, in the beginning it may be cheaper than subscriptions but we are still locked into the publishers who have raised the prices of subscriptions to a level that even wealthy universities are struggling to survive. Do we really think they will not do the same when faced by individual researchers desperate to publish in order to move forward in their careers?

2. The greed issue. Journals need to fill their pages with scientific articles. Isn’t there a danger when they are being paid per article that they will be tempted to dismantle rigorous standards in favor of cash?

And most importantly

3. Authors without funding (Read Mark Carrigan’s excellent piece on this). What about those unfortunate researchers who did not receive funding? Either they will not publish (impossible situation in academia), they will take money from other projects to pay for publishing (Fraud? Embezzlement?) or the universities will have to pay (increases costs again).

As funding is the exception and not the rule (most grant applications are denied) most of the publishing in my field is done without direct financing. For example this summer I am busy writing two articles during my holiday. They are important to me and to my research but they are not funded through projects. But once I publish I will be in a better position to obtain funding – who should pay for this?

The gold route creates a wonderful situation for the publishers and will turn the well financed researchers into direct sub-contractors to the publishers, and those without financing into the beggars.

This is not good science.

Posted on by mklang

Silly linking terms

Its nothing new that procrastination while attempting to write leads me off in some very strange surfing directions. In my desperation to avoid producing text I clicked on the Legal Issues link on a website and came across this

Links to our site

In creating a link to this site please indicate that we are the source of the information by including an acknowledgement near to/in the link. We would be grateful if you could notify us about the link. Please also ensure that we are not brought into disrepute by the creation of the link; in such cases, we will request the link’s removal (and, if necessary, may bring legal proceedings to seek its removal). Please note that we may move pages on this site or change their address without prior notice.

First off I was interested in their requests (1) Indicate we are the source, (2) Notify us of the link & (3) Don’t bring us into disrepute. While none of these are particularly difficult in any way they seem to indicate a lack of understanding about what a link is.

These are absolutely nowhere near the worst examples: FastCompany wanted you to fax them for permission before creating a link again in 2007 we blogged about a site that absolutely prohibited linking without permission. Here at least you don’t need to ask permission!

Yet, the best part above, is the unfortunate idea that they will take legal actions against any links that bring them into disrepute. Again this is not without precedent: the best must still be the 2001 KPMG song link row.

Finally I enjoyed their informative notice that they may “move pages on this site or change their address without prior notice”. I would really enjoy seeing any site attempt to give prior notice before moving (or removing) a webpage. Would this be considered to be adequate prior notice: “Dear Internet: On the 31 May we intend to delete this page. We are sorry for making you a bit smaller or for any confusion this may create.”?

Linking terms, such as these are odd. They are generally ignored by most users (and most probably unenforceable), if noticed they are definitely bad PR.

The web was never built, and probably never would have been built, if everyone asked and awaited permission. And since the advent of sharing via social media texts like these make even less sens.

The question is why they persist?

Update

TJ McIntyre trumped me via twitter with the news that the Irish always have to be worse 🙂 Irish Charity Told It Needs To Pay A License Fee To Link To A Newspaper Article. Should we laugh or cry?

Posted on by mklang

GikII 2012 Call for papers

My favorite conference is GikII. it wins in weirdness of topic, depth of research and thoroughly nicely people. The call for papers for this year is out now: Check it out here. This is technology & law taken to the edge!

It’s harder than it used to be to write a Call for Papers for GikII, the so-cool-it-hurts blue skies workshop for papers exploring the interstices between law, technology and popular culture. Back in the day,  you could dazzle the noobs just by mentioning past glories like the first paper on Facebook and privacy, Harry Potter and the Surveillance of Doom, regulation of autonomous agents according to the Roman law of slavery, edible technologies and copyright in Dalek knitting patterns. But nowadays we live in a world where we routinely encounter unmanned surveillance drones used to deliver tacos, in commercial asteroid mining with Richard Branson, 3d printers used to create human organs and the fact that Jeremy Hunt still has a job. Still, if any of these or the other many phenomena of the digital age in desperate need of legal attention are digging a tunnel out of your brain, then send us an abstract for the 7th Gikii workshop!  Maybe this year it will be your paper which contributes the seminal GikII meme following in the honoured footsteps of LOLcats, flying penises, and knitted Daleks.

Posted on by mklang

Expressions in Code and Freedom: Notes from a lecture

Being invited to give an opening keynote is both incredibly flattering and intimidating. Addressing the KDE community at their Akademy is even more intimidating: I want to be light, funny, deep, serious, relevant, insightful and create a base for discussion. No wonder I couldn’t stop editing my slides until long after sundown.

Tweet: doubly useless

The goal of my talk was to address the problem of the increased TiVo-ization of life, democracy and policy. Stated simply TiVo-ization is following the letter of rules/principles while subverting them by changing what is physically possible (wikipedia on origins and deeper meaning)

In order to set the stage I presented earlier communications revolutions. Reading and writing are 6000 years old, but punctuation took almost 4000 years to develop and empty spaces between words are only 1000 years old. What we see here is that communication is a code that evolves, it gets hacked and improved. Despite its accessibility it retains several bugs for millennia.

The invention of writing is a paradigm shift. But its taken for granted. printing on the other hand is seen as an amazing shift. In my view Gutenberg was the Steve Jobs of his day, Gutenberg built on the earlier major shifts and worked on packaging – he gets much more credit for revolution than he deserves.

Tweet: Gutenberg

Communication evolves nicely (telegraphs, radio, television) but the really exciting and cool stuff occurs with digitalization. This major shift is today easily overlooked, together with the Internet, and we focus on the way in which communication is packaged rather than the infrastructure that makes it possible.

The WWW is one on these incredible packages that was created with an openness ideal. We should transmit whatever we liked as long as we followed the protocol for communication. So far so good. Our communications follow the Four Freedoms of Free Software, Communication is accessible, hackable and usable.

Tweet: Stallman

Unfortunately this total freedom inevitably creates the environment that invites convenience. Here corporations provide this convenience but at the cost of individual freedom and, in the long run, maybe at the cost of the WWW.

The risk to the WWW emerges from the paradox of our increasing use of the Web. Our increased use has brought with it a subtle shift in our linking habits. We are sending links to each other via social media on an unimaginable level. Sharing is the point of social media. The early discussion on blogging was all about user generated content. This is still important, but the focus of social media today is not on content generation but on sharing.

Focusing on sharing rather than content creation means we are creating less and linking less. Additionally the links we share are all stored in social media sites. These are impermanent and virtually unsearchable – they are virtually unhistoric. Without the links of the past there is no web “out in the wild” – the web of the future will exist only within the manicured and tamed versions within social network nature preserves (read more Will the web fail?)

On an individual level the sharing has created a performance lifestyle. This is the need to publicize elements of your life in order to enhance the quality of it. (Read more Performance Lifestyle & Coffee Sadism).

Tweet: coffee

This love of tech is built on the ideology that technology creates freedom, openness and democracy – in truth technology does not automatically do this. Give people technology and in all probability what will be created is more porn.

The problem is not that social media cannot be used for deeper things, but rather that the desire of the corporations controlling social media is to enable shallow sharing as opposed to deep interaction. Freedom without access to the code is useless. Without access to the code what we have is the TiVo-ization of everyday life. If you want a picture then this is a park bench that cannot be used by homeless people.

image from Yumiko Hayakawa essay Public Benches Turn ‘Anti-Homeless’ (also recommend Design with Intent)

Park benches which are specifically designed to prevent people from sleeping on benches. In order to exclude an undesirable group of people from a public area the democratic process must first define a group as undesirable and then obtain a consensus that this group is unwelcome. All this must be done while maintaining the air of democratic inclusion – it’s a tricky, almost impossible task. But by buying a bench which you cannot sleep on, you exclude those who need to sleep on park benches (the homeless) without even needing to enter into a democratic discussion.Only homeless people are affected. This is the TiVo-iztion of everyday life.

The more technology we embed into our lives the less freedom we have. The devices are dependent on our interaction as we are dependent upon them. All to often we adapt our lives to suit technology rather than the other way around.

In relation to social media the situation becomes worse when government money is spent trying to increase participation via social networks. The problem is that there is little or no discussion concerning the downsides or consequences of technologies on society . We no longer ask IF we should use laptops/tablets/social media in eduction but only HOW.

Partly this is due to the fear of exclusion. Democracy is all about inclusion, and pointing out that millions of users are “on” Facebook seems to be about inclusion. This is naturally a con. Being on/in social media is not democratic participation and will not democratize society. Why would you want to be Facebook friends with the tax authority. And how does this increase democracy?

The fear of lack of inclusion has led to schools teaching social media and devices instead of teaching Code and Consequences. By doing this, we are being sold the con that connection is democracy.

Tweet: Gadgets

So what can we do about it?

We need to hack society to protect openness. Not openness without real function (TiVo-ization) but openness that cannot be subverted. This is done by forcing social media to follow law and democratic principles. If they cannot be profitable within this scenario – tough.

This is done by being very, very annoying:
1. Tell people what the consequences of their information habits will have.
2. Always ask who controls the ways in which our gadgets affect our lives. Are they accountable?
3. Read ALL your EULA… Yes, I’m talking to you!
4. Always ask what your code will do to the lives of others. Always ask what your technology use will do to the lives of others…

 

The slides are here:

Expressions in Code and Freedom

View more PowerPoint from Mathias Klang
Posted on by mklang

Hiding culture: Google Books & Snippets

In May 2006 I was overjoyed with Google books. I retold an anecdote where I was able to find a book after watching a documentary

[It] was mentioned briefly in a documentary tonight and it sparked my curiousity. So I looked for the book, searching the online databases of second hand bookstores. No luck. Then, almost as a joke, I googled it. And there it was on google books. Cool but it was not like I was going to read it online. Then I saw the download button. Within minutes of hearing of the book for the first time I had a pdf of it on my computer – Google books is too cool!

Amazing, fantastic, brilliant… but. There is a tendency to forget that Google is not a neutral infrastructure and therefore has no real desire to preserve and make available books – even when they have scanned them.

Dingodog led me to this problem via the PD-discussion list

Googlebooks has scanned tons of PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS, but not all PUBLIC
DOMAIN BOOKS are accessible

there are a tons of PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS that Goglebooks non only has
left in snippet view, but that refuses to UNLOCK for full view (and they
are in PUBLIC DOMAIN!!!)

I have a sad story to tell, about these public domain books left in
snippet view:

since 2009 I’m complaining about a same set of PUBLIC DOMAIN BOOKS whose
copyright expired since more than 10-20 years

I sent a mail every month, then every week, and all this during last
three years to report the erroneous classification of public domain
books as snippet view. Now I’m considering to send a mail every day, but
I’m not confident about effects; I think Googlebooks will ignore my
complaints, as it has ignored during these years

it seems, in fact, that Googlebooks has absolutely no will to unlock,
even if user (as I have done) provides well documented biographical info
and cites the laws regulating the status of book in different countries

People complained about public domain books left in snippet view and
googlebooks user forum was full of these complaints with google
employees not only unable to unlock (maybe google not provided this
ability to employees, or it simply ignored requests), but seriously
lacking in knowledge of googlebooks structure

The discussion continues on the list but it is terribly important to know that scanning is not preservation and does not mean access. Additionally when Google makes these choices it is increasingly important to know this.

Another question I find interesting is the question of multiple copies. Will Google care enough to make multiple scanned copies available? Will we be able to see the errors and additions in certain volumes or not?

Sure the originals are still around but the problem is that with the convenience of Google people will forget this and focus on what is available online. Also the availability of Google books will prevent more rigorous projects from being carried out.

Posted on by mklang

Will the web fail?

To create a web what is needed is links. The explosion of links and growth of the web show how extremely effective users have been at creating a system of seemingly unlimited linked knowledge.

But is this still growing? Are we still linking items freely together? I dont have any data so this is pure speculation (what else is new here).

My linking practice has changed radically. Sure I send tons of links out via Twitter and quite a few via Facebook and even a few via Google+.

Occasional blogging includes a few links but nowhere as many as before, and my blog includes few permanent links to other blogs & sites. Part of this is because of the annoyance with dead links but mostly its because of the growth in social media.

What will the changes in linking habits mean for the open web outside the walled gardens of social media sites? Could it be that the wild web is slowly slipping into obscurity and all that is left will be the controlled versions – or will we see a revival?

These thoughts began when I read Do people still see blogs as networks? – does adding a link to this post defy the original question?

Posted on by mklang

Why is plagiarism wrong?

Plagiarism is fascinating. One of the reasons it holds my interest is trying to figure out why we get so worked up about it. On a basic level there seems to be a connection between creators and their creations, but why is this connection given so much importance?

In recent years a German Defence Minister and a Hungarian President lost their jobs because of scandals surrounding plagiarized PhDs. Surely their jobs had nothing to do with their ability to complete a PhD without plagiarism. They lost their jobs because of the perceived dishonesty plagiarism entails. But politicians are held up to strange standards of behavior.

When the author Helene Hegemann was accused of plagiarizing sections of her debut novel Axolotl Roadkill she countered with: “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

There is something interesting with this position – but it would have been stronger if she had put it forward before being found out.

Plagiarism has a strong place within academia but this can be explained by the internal social rules that exist there. Academia is a strange place where science is produced according to an odd set of norms and internal rules that are necessary in that context but are these norms even interesting outside academia?

The academic position on plagiarism is absolute. It is so strong that it is even applied to students in a way that may be harmful to teaching and learning. Here, I do not mean the rare cases where take someone’s work and simply change the name. What I mean here is the case when someone does not adequately use a reference system or when they practice the art of synonyms and re-writing the works of others.

A student work that does not use adequate sources is seen as plagiarism but can consist actually be an example of independent thought. Conversely a work that re-writes and synonymises and references properly is usually not judged as plagiarism – even if it in reality has no independent thought.

The anxiety of the system has led to investments into anti-plagiarism software. But this software does not stop plagiarism. It only teaches students to ensure that they have re-written and referenced enough. The focus is no longer on independent thought but on ensuring deniability and not getting caught.

Ultimately plagiarism and students tends to demand too much of a professionalism of the students and forgets the basic premise that much of learning is derived from copying. Professional academics should still be held to the system of plagiarism today – but should this still apply to students? We need to redefine student plagiarism in some form.

Posted on by mklang

Tolerance is Law

The good news today is that the revision to the article “Tolerance is Law: Remixing Homage Parodying Plagiarism” (written with Jan Nolin) are done and its been sent in to SCRIPTed

As its not been published yet all I can provide is the abstract and this wordle doodle of the text. The good news is that SCRIPTed provides its articles freely and openly online.

 

Three centuries have passed since copyright was developed to stimulate creativity and promote learning. The fundamental principles still apply, despite radical developments in the technology of production and distribution of cultural material. In particular the last decades’ developments and adoption of ICT’s have drastically lowered barriers, which previously prevented entry into the production and distribution side of the cultural marketplace, and led to a widening of the base at which cultural production occurs and is disseminated.  Additionally, digitalization has made it economically and technically feasible for users to appropriate and manipulate earlier works as method of production.

The renegotiation of barriers and the increased number of creators who publish their works has led to an increase in copyright violations and a pressure on copyright legislation. Many of these potential violations are tolerated, in some cases have become common practice, and created social norms. Others have not been so fortunate and the law has been rigidly enforced. This arbitrary application decreases the predictability of law and creates a situation where creation relies on the tolerance of the other copyright holders. This article analyses different cases of reuse that test boundaries of copyright. Some of these are tolerated, others not. When regulation fails to capture the rich variation of creative reuse, it becomes difficult to predict which works will be tolerated. The analysis suggests that as copyright becomes prohibitive, social norms, power and the values of the copyright holder dominate and not law.

 

Posted on by mklang

Killing humanites: A rage against the machine

Its painful to admit, but it seems that my own University of Göteborg (GU) is anti-humanities. Last year GU axed nine languages (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Dutch, Polish, Slovenian and Czech). This year they added Italian, Russian, Greek and Old Church Slavonic.

Surely this is no real big thing you may argue – many universities are killing the humanities and besides what’s the loss of dropping Old Church Slavonic? Well first off I would like to begin with an emotional argument by Heinrich Heine: “That was but a prelude; where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” When we begin to cut, we will cut to the bone and bleed to death.

But more importantly the thoughts that the humanities are unnecessary, or even more stupidly, unprofitable is so obviously foolish that it pains me to see when it is used as an argument.

What are universities for? Most seem to think that they are there to get people jobs. A strange illusion but quite prevalent, the problem is that we have no idea what will be needed in the future so designing universities for this purpose is obviously silly.

But don’t take my ineloquent word for it. Listen to the humorous and thoughtful Ken Robinson (author of The Element: How finding your passion changes everything)

There is an additional problem by streamline, focusing on core competencies and cutting the fat – it’s that we create armies of reasonably identical people who have the same backgrounds and thoughts. And from this we expect them to be innovative and new-thinking. Seriously, could you believe that??

The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum develops these arguments in her wonderful and thoughtful book: Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.

But please don’t get the impression that all of Sweden is a wasteland of real thought and culture. There are several deep and interesting researchers and thinkers. Specifically, I would like to point to the shining example of Ola Wikander, a fantastic example of a young scholar he has eight books (his own and translations) ranging from Canaanite myths to popularizing theories and developments of language. His focus is the epitome of “useless” humanities research (seriously its even called  dead languages). But in reality his works affects more people than a whole pile of average MBAs… Yet, he is the odd one.

The problem is that the MBA’s – with their incredible lack of knowledge – believe that they can create more by eliminating that which is not attractive to everyone. Popularity is the order of the day. Unfortunately the MBA’s are the ones who are running the universities right now. Hopefully, this will change before we have pushed our mental gene pool to the point of extinction. In the meantime my university just became a tad more irrelevant, less competitive and more redundant. Thanks guys! How efficiently you create our demise.

In the meantime, while the mental gene pool at my university shrinks, all we can do is rage against the machine.

Posted on by mklang