Academia

So long, Pluto

Not every lifetime has the privilege of experiencing the discovery of new planets â?? in particular in our own solar system. But we are now living in an exiting time. Today a major decision will be made that will effect our solar system. We are going to remove some planets from the solar system.

So how many planets will there be in the solar system tomorrow? If you are a betting person then the safe money is on the number eight. This means that Pluto is out. Even though it has been accepted as a planet since its discovery in 1840 1930.

The reason (New Scientist) for the loss of Pluto is the acceptance of a new planetary definition that a planet must be the dominant body in its orbital zone, clearing out any little neighbours. Pluto does not qualify because its orbit crosses that of the vastly larger Neptune.

The other Pluto

Pluto may become either a “dwarf-planet” or planetoid. But even though the safe money is on the adoption of the new definition there is always the chance that the long shot will win and the pro-Pluto-as-planet lobby will succeed! Ok so I have no idea whether there is a pro-Pluto-as-planet lobby but can you picture the whole decision making body: the politics, the lobbying, the intrigueâ?¦ Being an astronomer must be exiting stuff right now.

Or maybe the whole thing is a ruse to be able to reprint all the astronomy booksâ?¦
Take a look at the cool BBC astronomy website.

Posted on by mklang

What, Me Worry?

Swedish universities have an old tradition of nailing the PhD thesis in the main university building. The act of nailing has both a formal and traditional element. The physical hammering a nail through the thesis is naturally a traditional element. But the formal part of the ceremony concerns making the thesis available for the general public three weeks before the thesis defence.


Photographer unknown ca. 1850

The thesis that is nailed to the notice board is naturally not intended to be read â?? or at least not read easily (imagine trying to read a thick book which has been nailed to the wall). Therefore the author provides copies to the university library. The idea is that the thesis will be defended publicly which naturally means that the public must have the opportunity to read and prepare their questions and criticism.

Before being able to nail a thick book to the wall â?? it has to be printed. The printer wants 1 day for making proofs and 5-8 workdays for printing. Between these days I need to check the proofs.

24th August â?? Files to printer
26-27th August â?? Check proofs
28th August â?? Printing begins
11th September â?? Nail the thesis (three weeks before defence)
2nd October â?? My defence

Nervous, me? No! Whatever gave you that idea? I just remember the wise words of Alfred E. Neuman: What, Me Worry?

For those of you who cannot wait and want the sneak preview. The most updated version is online here. This is the most current version will continue to be updated until its time to send it to the printer…

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Blog for Credits

Rainy Saturday mornings are made for being lazy. But unfortunately I am wasting mine by catching up on work. Since the office has moved location at the same time that I am completing my thesis and at the beginning of term real day-to-day work seems to have been pushed aside. But it will not wait. New students are approaching fast!

My main teaching this term will be in two main areas
(1)    A distance-learning course on the theory and philosophy of Free Software.
(2)    A technology ethics course.

Neither of these courses are new but I am re-vamping the technology ethics course in a big way. The main problem is helping students understand that the technology they take for granted also carries with it problems. Admitting to these problems is not the same as the Luddite impulse to abolish technology but it is the first step at improvement. We need to understand what the problem is if we are to be able to address it.

Previous attempts have been a varying degree of success. Even if the students pass the course I still have a sneaking feeling that some of them just donâ??t get â??itâ??. So this term I am trying something new. The students are going to blog!

Apart from the traditional course material, lectures and seminars the students will be required to set up individual blogs where they will be required to write posts relevant to the different themes of the course. Therefore when the course discusses areas such as privacy or intellectual property the students will be required to post their thoughts and/or other material on the subject.

The course starts with an introduction to the technology and social impact of blogs. Then they will have to go out and start their own (new) blogs. We will also be discussing the importance of visibility, ways in which traffic can be increased and the purpose of blogs either as citizen journalism or entertainment.

This will be followed by a section on basic ethics before the course really begins with applying ethics on questions of technology. The course will end as it usually does with an essay.

Hopefully blogging will enable the students to explore the questions we are looking at on their own terms â?? forcing them to evolve from passive consumers of information to active producers. The students will be graded on their essays but also on their blogs (have not decided upon the criteria for this yet).

In Swedish when things go very wrong we say that it all became pancake â?? so right now I hope that the whole thing does not go pancake.

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Glowing Review

I came across a glowing review on Amazon for Human Rights in the Digital Age (edited by Andrew Murray and myself). Getting a glowing review is a very nice feeling! So good that I naturally feel the need to reprint it here!

I read this book following Conor Gearty’s advice in his 2005 Hamlyn Lecture Series “Can Human Rights Survive?” that this book “should be required reading for all those interested in the future good health of our subject”. Although it drew on a wide variety of contributors, some better than others, overall I found the book filled a void in the current literature and for this reason alone it would be a must read. That aside though I found the contributions to be thought provoking and useful. Some of the better chapters come from Mathias Klang who discusses Cyber-activism and online civil disobedience, Douglas Vick who puts US and European views of free expression to the test and Andrew Murray who challenges the orthodox views that government should look after itself – at least when it comes to controlling the information flow about itself.

This is an excellent collection of essays and I simply echo Conor Gearty’s words – buy it if you are interested in the future good health of the discourse on human rights.

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Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

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Subtitles

Today I saw a book in my colleagues office. The cool title was interesting enough to make me pick it up. Book is Peter Morvilleâ??s Ambient Findability which is a thoughtful approach to searching, finding and dealing with information (in particular information overload). It didnâ??t take long for me to convince myself that I needed to read this book.

Now me buying a book is not really the point of this post â?? even if book recommendations are worth posting. What I wanted to write about came out of the very cool subtitle to the book in question â?? â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??

Read that slowly again – â??What We Find Changes Who We Becomeâ??.

Very cool subtitle. Many non-fiction books include subtitles but few, in my opinion, (well it is my blog) actually seem to spend time on the subtitle but tend to be more explanatory. The model seems to be think of a snappy, catchy title then add subtitle so people will understand the title. Even though Morville follows this model I still think his subtitle is great. It has become my instant favourite.

Whatâ??s your favourite subtitle? Oh no â?? itâ??s a new memeâ?¦

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CC Books Wiki

Looking for books distributed under a CC license? Then here is a wiki for you. Actually these kinds of pages are really good unless they become too popular and all of a sudden they implode because of their own success â?? information overload, too many books make the search for the book you want impossible.

But letâ??s not get carried away with early Sunday morning pessimism. If you know of a book which belongs on this wiki â?? add it. If the concept of book confuses you (which all concepts have done since the great Plato/Aristotle disagreement on the theory of forms) then you might be helped by the wiki definition.

By “book” we generally mean works over 35,000 words that are or have been commercially available in hardcopy and have an ISBN. We’ve expanded the definition in two added sections below, however, to include the most popular books published through do-it-yourself press Lulu, and “books” published on websites of established organizations or notable blogs.

(via Open Access News)

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No Laptops for India

The much publicised MIT project about the100$ laptop received an interesting setback last week. India has decided not to place orders. In an article in the Register (26th July 2006) The Indian Ministry of Education called the whole project â??pedagogically suspectâ??. Nigeria, on the other hand, has ordered and paid for 1 million of the MIT laptops.

This is an interesting challenge to the idea that technology will fix problems. The fundamental philosophy behind the MIT project was that by providing a cheap, robust machine which communicates and shares easily with others there will be gains in learning, literacy and computer skills.

Not everyone agrees with this view. Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said:

â??We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.â??

Because the focus is on the tools and its costs the focus of what the problem is and how it should be addressed has been on the technology. With questions of what platform should be used and whether 100$ per laptop is achievable or even if it is desirable.

In the rush to discuss the number of USB ports the questions which have been forgotten is â?? how many teachers can be hired for 100$? Or in the worst case scenario â?? how many teachers will poor countries not be able to hire because they have bought cheap laptops?

(via Question Technology)

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Offline in London

If you have noticed that it has been quite from this corner of the Internet its because I have been offline in London. Partly I was there lecturing about Copyleft, Free Software and Creative Commons on an intellectual property course organised by Andrew Murray at the LSE. I naturally found time for shopping and culture.

The main cultural event was the Victoria and Albert Museum in general and the Che Guevara exhibition in particular. In addition to graffiti spotting (results will be online on flickr soon).

The shopping was mainly books (I really should try to cut down a little). I frequented mainly second hand stores and ended up with a dozen booksâ?¦ here are some highlights: Fareed Zakaria’s The Future of Freedom, Loretta Napoleoni’s Terror Inc, Peter Drahos & John Braithwaite â?? Information Feudalism. Two books by Paul Virilio (The Information Bomb and Negative Horizon) and Val Dusekâ??s The Philosophy of Technology.

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Web 2.0 Licentiate thesis

Does the term Web 2.0 confuse or annoy you? Is there anything beyond the flashy buzzword? Well I guess the best way to begin to understand Web 2.0 is to experience it (insert your Matrix jokes here!) but if you prefer to be guided by someone else then I can recommend Peter Gigerâ??s (2006) Licentiate Thesis on the topic. The title is â??Participation Literacyâ?? and it is an interesting exploration in the termâ??s growth and meaning.

From the abstract:

The thesis concerns the Web 2.0 concept construction. Web 2.0 is a new mindset on the Internet. The main characteristics include â??Web as a Platformâ??, Collective Intelligence, Folksonomy and interfaces build with lightweight technologiesâ?¦Web 2.0 is not only a technique, but also an ideology â?? an ideology of participation. A Web 2.0 service is completely web based and generally draws on open access. It includes tools for people to interact within areas such as encyclopaedias, bookmarks, photos, books or research articles. All Web 2.0 services are web communities. A web community is a group of individuals, linked together by a network of social relations with some degree of continuity. Community members learn from each other and the knowledge base of the community grows for every interaction. The core values of Web 2.0 are democracy and participation.

Download it here or visit Peter’s research blog.

Posted on by mklang