Reminded today of Epicurus – in particular the “Epicurean paradox” which attempts to deal with why there is evil in the world when there is such a thing as an omnipotent god:
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
Tis the season to re-read the classics.
The idea of property is a social construct and it varies both in places and in history. But is there a point where property is a given? In an interesting study at Yale Kristina Olson and Alex Shaw have been studying at what age children recognise that plagiarism is wrong?
By contrast, three- to four-year-olds did not rate characters who copied as any less likeable or any more bad than characters who came up with their own ideas. In a control condition, children of this age gave negative ratings to characters who stole physical property, thus showing that the the null result for stealing ideas wasn’t because the children didn’t understand the rating scale or weren’t paying attention.
Obviously it is important to try to understand where their values come from. But this is an interesting starting point in the discussion. Read more Olson, K., and Shaw, A. (2010). ‘No fair, copycat!’: what children’s response to plagiarism tells us about their understanding of ideas. Developmental Science DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-7687.2010.00993.x
As both a fan of Creative Commons and XKCD the combination is almost impossible to resist. Right now XKCD t-shirts “doing science” t-shirts are available at the Creative Commons store. This is from the CC blog:
The icing on the cake is the most recent addition to our CC Store: this super-cool science-themed CC shirt, for which the world-famous XKCD was gracious enough to let us re-use a variation on a classic cartoon. Many of you may already read and enjoy the delightful webcomic of “romance, sarcasm, math, and language” which is under a CC BY-NC license. Now you can show your love for Creative Commons and science at the same time by buying one of these t-shirts, available for $20 over at the CC store.
Huge thanks to XKCD for being such a wonderful and creative member of the CC community, and for freely sharing that creativity with the world.
Science@creativecommons by Creative Commons / CC BY
Doing a bit of reading on the Creative Commons criticism and came across this notice by Nina Paley
Nina released the film Sita Sings the Blues under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and quickly realized that people do not understand or follow the license terms
This is a real problem. Some artists have re-released Sita remixes under Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses. Many bloggers and journalists assume the non-commercial restrictions…
This means that she has two choice: to ignore what is going on or to react. While ignoring makes her wishes and control moot reacting is not always fun:
Initially I tried to explain what “ShareAlike” means to CC-NC remixers of “Sita”, and asked them to please switch to ShareAlike, per the terms of the ShareAlike license under which I released it. I felt like an ass; I don’t want to be a licensing cop. After a while, mis-identifications of the project’s license became so widespread I gave up trying to correct them. “Creative Commons” means “Non-Commercial” to most people. Fighting it is a sisyphean task.
This is an interesting problem. Many creators do not want to police their licenses (nor do they have the funds to do so) additionally any attempts to police the licenses reduces their gesture of sharing. The creators become less nice people since enforcers are less nice than people who give us what we want. Also it is a thankless task to attempt to educate a world who has no intention of listening.
A couple of days ago Alberto Cottica (author of the interesting Wikicrazia – unfortunately for me in Italian) announced a major step in Open Data in Italy
A few weeks ago, after a happy hour in Rome, people started spontaneously to share links on Italian open data and tools to crunch them with. With a few others, I thought it would be nice to collect these links in one place, a sort of one stop shop for people interested in transparency not just in theory, but in the practice of extracting information from public data. One thing led to another, and today Spaghetti Open Data is born.
In the English text about Spaghetti Open Data acknowledges the importance of making open data available:
Consider it a gift. For all its shortcomings, our democracy is a great gift from the past generations: the least we can do is take care of it as best as we can.
Among the gifts of democracy is the theory of openness. Without openness and free speech democracy is somewhere between handicapped and useless. While we now have the technology to increase openness & make transparency viable on a level previously impossible this has not translated automatically into a citizen friendly approach to government data. Initiative like Spaghetti Open Data provide us with excellent examples of steps in the right direction.
Using technology in communication is probably the norm for most of us. For some of us it is even preferable to face2face (what an ugly term for meeting people!) When you have bad news do you meet physically, use the phone, text or tweet? As usual XKCD sums up our reliance on technology mediated dialogues beautifully
For the last couple of weeks the AOIR Internet Research Conference has been a major part of my life. The climax came when more than 250 internet researchers descended on Göteborg to meet, discuss, argue & present their ideas. In the 48 hours prior to the conference twitter began buzzing with messages of people leaving distant locations and/or arriving in the exotic conference city. At this stage the main goal seem coordination: where & how were the two main questions passed around on twitter and as in most cases the participants used a mixture of online information & communication to self-organize gatherings prior to the conference.
On Wednesday 20/11 the day was mainly about making sure that the venue actually worked in a live situation so I missed the pre-conference workshops which were:
But, I did get inspirational glimpses both afk & via twitter. Among the quotes I would have liked to follow up was from Michael Zimmer : Some people publish texts online (blog posts, tweets) having a ‘presumption of obscurity’. The good news is that I got to meet plenty of people. It is quite fun – and often totally impossible – trying to recognize people from their twitter photos. The evening held a social event which was a great way to meet old and new friends. As a local I was pleased that many liked the city and intrigued by a delegate who had managed to find both a mountain and a labyrinth in central Göteborg – I never could figure out where she had been.
Day two was the conference proper. Which began with registration and organization. The morning went in a flash of practical matters. The biggest disappointment was the fact that keynote speaker Jon Bing had canceled late and the delegates attempted to self-organize a twitterwall based discussion in plenum it was enjoyable and sociable but maybe not successful as a directed discussion.
In the afternoon I attended the panel on networking and social sites where, amongst other things Zimmer presented his work on privacy and Facebook (also showing the historical changes to privacy settings). When referring to the fact/excuse that the user has the “possibility” to protect her identity he referred to privacy controls on Facebook as similar to the controls of a Boeing 747 claiming: “anyone can fly a 747 cause the controls are there!” He also added that he was optimistic but ultimately skeptical of the Diaspora project.
After this I attended Sustainable Communities: Cultural Expressions on Facebook where I listened to Paul Baker present on Representing disability on social media & Jan Fernback gave a great presentation on FB sousveillance where she introduced me to the term Equiveillance which is an equilibrium between surveillance & sousveillance. In the same session I think it was Jaurice Hanson talking about Facebook and “Friends who deliberately showed her age – and gained common ground – by using the quotes “Never trust anyone over 30” & “who loves ya, baby?” The long day came to an end and discussions continued at the conference reception where the Mayor of Göteborg proved to be welcoming and very amusing.
Starting at 8:20 on day two proved challenging but attendance remain enthusiastic. My choice was the paper session on Digital Democracy and Participation where papers discussed social work in Austria (Myriam Cecile Antinori), Technological (in)Justice (Kathi R. Kitner) and a critical evaluation of the Techno-Social Policies in Turkey (Ferruh Mutlu Binark).
The session was closed by Ingrid Erickson who presented inspiring and simple projects focused on neighborhoods as context for youth citizen engagement (my favorite was Urban Biodiversity Network). She argued that youths must “be agents of their own learning” which I find both a most positive & depressing quote simultaneously. On the whole it was very interesting even if the nagging question of access to technology being equated with providing justice remained.
My next session was Tweeting it out: Twitter & sociality which attempted to look into twitter as a form discourse in the public sphere.
Axel Maireder spoke of the potentials for microblogging for transnational European public discourses. Andrew Long looked at elementary narrative structures on Twitter and David Houghton presented his research on self-disclosure on twitter with examples like secret tweet. The final presentation was by Theo Plothe who does some very interesting work on twitter use among NFL players who are using the medium to increase their cultural capital. During the presentation he not only quote MC Hammer but made it a point “Thats right, I just quoted MC Hammer”. I also got to learn what #smfh means (shaking my f**ing head).
Missing the keynote by Peter Arnfalk available here I returned to the conference to hear the presentation by Florence Chee @cheeflo about licensing, eulas and consent which took its starting point from the fact that users are unaware that game providers legally collect & share a great deal of information. Her research confirmed that users do not read ANY part of the Eula. (which reminded me of Izzard’s take on this).
Unfortunately this session was extremely depopulated without the chair or other speakers showing up but Florence Chee managed to turn the session into a keynote with discussions. Most memorable among the discussions was when Jean Burgess & Jeremy Hunsinger attempted to argue a point by discussing across the width of the large auditorium.
By the end of the day my mind was getting numb from all the presentations but I still battled on listening to discussions in the panel on The Internet as a Tool for Religious Cultural Formation where I was particularly interested in the discussions of mega-churches and the work of who is now on a post doc at HUMlab.
The final day began with a flurry of admin work, changes to schedules, rooms and making sure everything would still work. After this I walked in to listen to the Approaches to Internet Research panel where Daphne Ruth Raban explored the Information Society as a concept in an attempt to answer: Do we have a paradigm, field, area or what? Katja Prevodnik on measuring the digital divide. And Jeffrey Keefer presented his fascinating studies of developing researchers use of social media to express and understand their identities.
The mood was expectant of Nancy Bayms keynote where she talked about the internet, Swedish music and the changes occurring in the music industry. Among the memorable was “What we have is not market failure, we have imagination failure”
After the keynote there was an interesting session on Sharing and manipulating video and images. Here Stacey Greenaway videotagging game at the session on Sharing & manipulating videos & images and Gordon Fletcher presented on Photobombing (eg photobomb.net) as a social phen0menon – amusing, interesting and disturbing all at once. Meghan Peirce presented on tv shows online with the talk Television and Online Video: Adapting ‘Sex and the City’ for a Digital Environment.
For the final session of the conference I attended “All our Relations”: Playing with Networks. Where among the presentations I really enjoyed a very interesting talk by Nick Taylor on his video-based fieldwork in e-sports. By this time my brain was truly fried and the conference was over.
The best part of this conference was the people. I doubt that I have met a more open, enthusiastic, inquisitive group of researchers. They came early to everything and stayed late. Everyone was eager to talk about the research of others and not only their own. My only regret is not being able to attend more sessions and speak to even more people. So all I can say is next time Seattle!
My first trip to Berlin is drawing to a close and have discovered a really wonderful European city. How is it that I have not been here earlier?
One of the things that struck me was the many empty spaces in the city – these spaces could be everything from gravel, to cared lawns to something resembling a summer field in the countryside. Some had remains of concrete structures giving them the appearance of some half-hearted archeological dig.
But one thing that got me thinking (and linking to other research) was the lingering presence of the Berlin Wall. Not the fact that Checkpoint Charlie has been turned into a tourist carnival where people can stand on the balcony of McDonalds and take pictures of fake GIs who want money for this.
No what struck me was the section of wall remaining on Niederkirchnerstraße where cartloads of tourists going to the amazing outdoor Topographie des Terrors exhibition – despite the crowds its very silent there, everyone there reads the texts in thoughtful silence.
Most of the visitors took pictures of this sad old concrete wall. It is “the Berlin Wall” but it is just mass produced concrete. What is it that makes this gray concrete more memorable, more worthy of interest and photography than the equally gray wall opposite? Both walls are equally original as neither was created as a copy of the other. But the difference lies in the purpose of the object – the intent of its creator. This is what differentiates to similar pieces of concrete.
In addition to the intent – we the consumers must place some form of value (economic or emotional or ?) in the “original” (the word original is wrong in this context but you know what I mean). Maybe this is something closer to a trademark? Luxury trademark items produce endless amounts of “originals” without necessarily effecting the market – the demand-ability is kept high by maintaining a high price for the good… but I digress…
One of the arguments in the digital discussion is the complex copy/original problem – which basically states that in the digital environment everything is copy. But this is equally true of pieces of concrete. They are equal and the same. They are dissimilar only in the intention of the creator.
And if this is so could this situation be re-created with digital products? Or have I missed something? Need more thought here.
After the pope made some idiot and untrue claims about how atheism causes the holocaust Richard Dawkins politely corrected the fool. Naturally many of us could not be there to listen to him but thanks to GrrlScientist the links to the speech and a youtube version of Richard Dawkins’ unedited speech at ‘Protest the Pope’ march in London – Richard Dawkins takes the piss out of Pope Ratzinger in London on Saturday are available. She writes:
If you, like I, could not attend the “Protest the Pope” rally in London this past weekend, you’ll want to see this. This amateur video captures Richard Dawkins’ short but empassioned response to Pope Ratzinger’s weak attempt to confuse the public by claiming that Hitler was an atheist, and it was his supposed atheism that led to the Holocaust. Of course, Ratzinger conveniently ignores the fact that Hitler made no secret of his Roman Catholicism and in fact, Hitler used remarkably Catholic-sounding arguments to defend his indefensible actions.
The pope lands in Scotland and makes some strange claims
The Pope also praised Britain’s fight against Hitler’s “atheist extremism”, saying that “Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live”.
Richard Dawkins promptly replies (via Humanistbloggen):
This statement by the pope, on his arrival in Edinburgh, is a despicable outrage. Even if Hitler had been an atheist, his political philosophy was not based upon atheism and had no connection with atheism. Hitler was arguably (and by his own account) a Roman Catholic. In any case he enjoyed the open support of many of the most senior catholic clergy in Germany and the less demonstrative support of Pope Pius XII. Even if Hitler had been an atheist (he certainly was not), the rank and file Germans who carried out the attempted extermination of the Jews were Christians, almost to a man: either Catholic or Lutheran, primed to their anti-Semitism by centuries of Catholic propaganda about ‘Christ-killers’ and by Martin Luther’s own seething hatred of the Jews. To mention Ratzinger’s membership of the Hitler Youth might be thought to be fighting dirty, but my feeling is that the gloves are off after this disgraceful paragraph by the pope.
I am incandescent with rage at the sycophantic BBC coverage, and the sight of British toadies bowing and scraping to this odious man. I thought he was bad before. This puts the lid on it.
Richard