Academia

Narcissistic Personality

Believe it or not teachers are concerned. At our faculty the students all have laptops and the whole building is connected via wifi (for a discussion on laptops in universities look here). In a discussion earlier today the faculty was discussing why it is so difficult for students to “get” that they need to do more than stare at the computer screen. They need to actually read the litterature. One of the more unnerving comments (by the faculty) was that the students seem to actually think that it is better to “know” stuff than to learn it. This means that reading is not an appreciated way of learning.

Via AlanC I was sent a link to an article from today’s LA Times Gen Y’s ego trip takes a nasty turn. The article is based upon a report of a study conducted by researchers from San Diego State, University of Michigan, University of Georgia and University of South Alabama. Their findings appear to show that students had elevated levels of narcissism. One of the conclusions drawn by those conducting the study was that this affected the way in which students understand their role at university

“The old model was a collegial one in which students and professors alike sought knowledge for knowledge’s sake. The new model is ‘I paid my money, give me my grade and degree.’ It makes me want to ask [students], ‘Want fries with that order?’ “

I don’t really know whether I should be releived or horrified that it is not only here that students are like this…

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Last Lines

The opening lines to any work are obviously of great importance. Many writers spend a lot of time and effort to get the line just right. One of my favourite opening lines is from Camus “The Stranger”. The confusion and sadness in the opening lines both sets the stage and sums up the confusion of the character.

Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I donâ??t know. I had a telegram from home: â??mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.â?? That doesnâ??t mean anything. It may have been yesterday.

Closing lines rarely recieve the same amount of attention – which is strange. The importance of opening and closing is not limited to fictional works. Academic works also attempt lift their work with opening and closing lines. Here are a few examples:

Democracy and its critics (Dahl 1989): Yet the vision of people governing themselves as political equals, and possessing all the resources and institutions necessary to do so, will I believe remain a compelling if always demanding guide in the search for a society in which people may live together in peace, respect each other’s intristic equality, and jointly seek the best possible life”

Water Wars (Shiva 2002): The struggle over the kumbh, between gods and demons, between those who protect and those who destroy, between those who nurture and those who exploit, is ongoing. Each of us has a role in shaping the creation of the future. Each of us is responsible for the kumbh – the sacred water pot.

A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971): Purity of heart, if one could attain it, would be to see clearly and to act with grace and self-command from this point of view.

Free Speech: A philosophical enquiry (Schauer 1982): There will always remain some hard cases, but many of them are not as hard as they may at first sight appear.

My own last line: Discarding the technology entails a limited, regulated use but will fail to recognise the full potential of disruptive technologies as an agent of change within the participatory democracy.

Some last lines attempt to sum up the whole work, some attempt to sum up the last chapter, others simply finish of the final chapter. Obviously there must be a last line in a book and this line need not have any particular function in itself – but it seems a bit of an anti-climax when the last line of a good book has no other desire than to end the book.

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Never complain, never explain

The title of this post comes from the 19th century English prime minister. It is a very macho kind of sentiment and I sometime attempt to adhere to it. Not becuase of it’s tedious macho overtones but more becuase of the fact that complaining and explaining are rarely of any use since nobody really wants to hear about it.

On the other hand I believe that there is a real theraputic function in both complaining and explaining. Right now I have just finished what may be called a week of teaching hell. Not that the workload has been excessively heavy (even if it has been a lot) but I have been stuck in some kind of ennui, boredom, tristess – a blue funk which has been difficult or hard to shake off.

The result is that the pointlessness of work and life have become all too apparent. Usually the pointlessness  should not be enough to make life less important. In fact the pointlessness can be seen as being its own reward. Or to follow the words of Camus who writes at the end of his magnificent essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” that “The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” The task of life should not be valued by the rewards.

On the other hand maybe it is just the fact that its cold, snowing and windy outside. I want less students, more sunshine, more distractions, a better mind, more original ideas, time to explore these ideas and the artfulness to express them well.

The good news is that it’s the weekend soon and the fact that I am complaining should indicate that I am heading in the right direction…

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Defence and Environment

What do the Minister of Defence and the Minister of the Environmnet have in common – besides politics? Well today I recieved a letter from the Minister of Defence thanking me for sending my PhD to him three months ago. The Minister of the Environment thanked me in January. Therefore they both have good manners. All the other ministers (including the Prime Minister) either have no manners, no staff or both – since they have not said thank you.

Actually since they were all part of a new cabinett selected close after the election and my thesis defence I sent all the newbies copies of my thesis  Disruptive Technology: Effects of Technology Regulation on Democracy. I didn’t expect a reply from any of them but it’s nice to see that at least two ministers are polite.

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Technology and Human Rights

On Friday it’s time for me to give a lecture on Technology and Human Rights for the local masters course on human rights. The nice part about this lecture is that it gives me the opportunity to collect and explore different strands of my work and present them to a new audience. My interest in this area began some time ago and resulted in 2005 in the collected edition Human Rights in the Digital Age which I edited together with Andrew Murray.

Discussing technology and rights can at times feel a bit banal. Human rights activists struggle to free people from torture and death so isn’t technology a small waste of time? There is no way in which it would be fair to compare technology and rights to the work of activists against the death penalty. But there is a major problem if all issues must be resolved in the order of magnitude. Speech rights may be less important to someone facing the death penalty but this does not mean that we should ignore speech rights until we have managed to abolish the death penalty.

For the lecture on Friday I am planning to look at three different areas.

The first area is going to be the use of the Internet as a “place” for political participation. I want to discuss the Internet as an area of political discourse and in particular show its possibilities and its fundamental flaws and limitations. This area should include freedom of speech and freedom of association.

The second area is privacy. In particular I want to focus on the merging of online and offline data. Or to put it another way the combination of spatial information (where you are) with the information traces stored in databases (who you are) to show the advanced control mechanism being created.

The final area is the aggregate use of technology. In this section I want to show the audience that with each piece of technology we may implement for our comfort we also form and shape our lives. In particular we also shape the way in which our lives may be controlled by others. This incremental implementation of technology does not bring large protests since no large rights are threatened overall. However the net long term result is darker than anything Orwell would have dreamed about.

Eric Drooker

The overall goal is to make the audience a bit paranoid about technology – to make them question the choices we are all making in our rush towards a more convenient way of life. Not bad for a Friday…

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Sweden to criminalise DoS attacks

It does not come as a surprise to read (in Swedish here) that Sweden is on it’s way to criminalise denial of service attacks. This is unsurprising since it is simply another step in the obvious direction of EU harmonisation following the framework decision on attacks against information systems. The latter framework decision is part of a general scheme to fight against terrorism and organised crime within the information society.

The problem is that criminalising DoS attacks in this way makes all DoS attacks illegal. Even if an attack is carried out in the form of political protest, in other words, not terrorism, not organised crime. For example, in a case settled in 2006 where the Frankfurt Appelate Court found the groups â??Libertadâ?? and â??Kein Mensch ist illegalâ?? (No Human is Illegal) had carried out a legitimate form of political protest when they organised 13000 people in an online blockade (With a script- client- based distributed denial of service attack) of the airline Lufthansa. The protest was against the companies part in the deportation of asylum seekers (for more see links below).

When states now criminalise the act of DoS they also make sure that this tool cannot be used as a form of political protest. Therefore the regulators go far beyond their intention and scope of preventing terrorism and organised crime.

A more paranoid person may suspect that the regulator is using the label of terrorism to create rules which limit our ability to use technology in political communications… Read more about the “unintended” negative consequences for democracy, which occur when regulators attempt to control technology in my thesis: Disruptive Technology.

—

Decision by the Frankfurt Appellate Court (in German only, 22.05.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/service/downloads/pdf/olg220506.pdf

Statement by Libertad on the ruling (in German only, 1.06.2006)
http://www.libertad.de/inhalt/projekte/depclass/verfahren/libpe010606.shtml

In German (1.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/73755
In English (2.06.2006)
http://www.heise.de/english/newsticker/news/73827

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Writing a masters thesis

The lecture I am preparing for today is on how to write a Masters Thesis. The lecture is in part a discussion on how to structure a thesis and what parts need to be there (and which things not to include) but the lecture also contains practical elements such as how to plan your time and being prepared to be sick to death with your own work. Recent additions to this lecture include a larger focus on plagiarism and how to avoid it â?? or at least not to get caught.

Aside from the plagiarism part many of the students become reasonably fascinated with their essay as a cultural artifact rather than a scientific report. This means that they tend to become more poetic and flowery in their language and presentation. In some creative cases students try to rework their essays to a fictional whodunit format. Trying to create an air of suspense rather than telling the reader from the go that this is scientific report â?? no surprises, not too much esthetic work, just keep it simple and straightforward.

Many students have not read a thesis before they try to create on of their own â?? this leads to a slight problem since they do not really know what the end product is. In addition to this they often get confused about who their readers are. The latter is particularly common when they are collaborating with industry and they feel a need to produce something that their industrial partners find acceptable.

Then there is the whole area of argumentation that seems at times to be totally misunderstood. I usually recommend Anthony Weston’s Rulebook for Arguments (the second edition used to be online but I cannot find it) and for those who cannot read there is always the amusing Monty Python “Argument sketch”

So I guess that I have my hands full after lunchâ?¦

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More free books

Books that are free (as in beer) are simply irresistible and these two seem particularly relevant to my interests thats a big additional bonus! They are available online for free download or the old fashioned dead-tree version. Actually I shouldn’t be like that – I prefer the dead tree versions…

A collection of essays (edited by Joseph Feller and others) called: Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software some of it is familiar but it is nice to have it all collected in one place. It can be downloaded all at once here or chapter by chapter here.

The second one is John Logieâ??s book Peers, Pirates and Persuasion which is about the rhetoric of the peer-to-peer debates. A good analysis of the rhetorics of file sharing has been missing so I am really looking forward to reading this book. Download if here.

(Via Lex Ferenda)

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Selling University

Umeå Center for Interaction Technology (UCIT) have moved beyond the boring ads for education. Not content with advertising in the local paper the UCIT have created movies and posted them on YouTube. This is so much more fun than ordinary advertising done by universities.

One movie is a play on the great film “The Usual Suspects” and is called “The Usual Systemvetare” (bonus points for the No Rights Reserved sign at the end) and the second is a parody of the MTV show Cribs called “DMP Cribs“.

This is so much more fun than reading a formal ad in the local paper. Definitely a university that knows its own subject matter.

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Open Access Petition

Have you signed the “Petition for guaranteed public access to publicly-funded research results”? No? Well there is still time. The purpose of the petition is to register support for free and open access to European research and for the recommendations proposed in the EU’s ‘Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe‘.

Read more about the petition and sign it here. Over 18000 have already signed but there is always room for more.

Posted on by mklang