What you understand about technology is intimately related to the way in which you tend to use technology. This is why it always concerns me when non-tech users are put to regulate technology use. It’s a question of understanding.
President-elect Obama is on Flickr and uses a Creative Commons license for his photographs. Naturally this may be someone who works for him but at least he has the knowledge to hire people who “get” technology use.
Most people seem to really want to believe in the peaceful co-existance among academics. Most of these people tend not to be in academia. Within this guild there are more political manouverings, illegal moves, moral scandals, alliances formed and broken, betrayals and the occaissional sunshine story to fill a mass of juicy thriller mysteries. And still people want to believe that nothing happens within the ivory tower.
One such affair which stems from my own university is the Gillberg affair which deserves a book of its own. While most of the reporting on this has been in Sweden I was pointed to a well written summary of the affair in the British Medical Journal (BMJ). The open lines of the article are worthy of any thriller:
Over one weekend in May 2004, three researchers in the University of Gothenburg’s department of child and adolescent psychiatry shredded tens of thousands of documents, destroying all data from a 15 year longitudinal study following 60 Swedish children with severe attention deficit disorders.
What became known as the Gillberg affair began in 1996, at a community summer party on the Swedish island of Resö. Among the guests were Leif Elinder, a paediatrician recently returned to Sweden after several years spent working abroad, and Christopher Gillberg, professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at Gothenburg University.
The article Hyperactivity in children: the Gillberg affair (BMJ 2007;335:370-373, 25 August) by Jonathan Gornall is well written and shows how research politics can get down right dirty and end up in the courts.
One of the main issues was the desire of Professor Gillberg to maintain the anonymity of his data. The reason for this depends upon which camp you follow. Gillberg (and his supporters) claim that the promise of anonymity the researcher gives (and often must give in order to get access) is valid. While the opponents felt that this was a convenient way of hiding possibly bad research.
The legal system, however, paid no heed to Professor Gillberg’s dilemma. Twice in 2003 the Supreme Administrative Court rejected his applications to appeal the decisions allowing Professor Kärfve and Dr Elinder access to the data on the ground that “he lacked any interest in the case that could be acknowledged in law as entitling him to apply for a rehearing of the issue.”
Most people involved in the affair have had their reputations damaged. The group that helped Gillberg, the professor and the Vice Chancellor of the university have all lost court cases and been fined. And yet the view of the Swedish research council speaks volumes:
Professor Gillberg’s work continues. Research funds have continued to flow his way, and in November the Swedish Research Council awarded him a record sum for three years of study into autism.
Professor Gillberg’s words close the article:
“In my view,” wrote Professor Gillberg, “it is unreasonable that I am first obliged to give strict promises of confidentiality by the State in order to conduct medical research, then . . . I am ordered by the State to break hundreds of promises of confidentiality . . . then I am indicted by the State and, ultimately, am sentenced as a criminal by the State because I had not broken those promises of confidentiality that I had the State’s instruction to give.
The whole affair has been a real shocker and the article is well worth reading. There is very little peace and tranquility in the ivory tower of academia a fact that some researchers find out at their peril. Most of the stories are of course not as high profile and the number of people who simply quit their academic carreers along the way would make an interesting research topic in of itself.
Before becoming an atheist I looked at many religions and I am still fascinated by the complexities of belief systems. Within Sufism (a mystical form of Islam) I came across a counter-intuitive aphorism which has often proven to be true: Freedom is the absence of choice.
The ability of autonomous individuals to chose stands in the center of most freedom discourses so at first glance the Sufi thought seems to be dead wrong. Lack of choice cannot be a form of freedom. This is of course until you have to pick a new mobile provider.
Yesterday I spent way too much time in the trivial decision of picking a mobile phone service. The method was relatively simple. First I ignored the smaller providers. This is a form of arrogance since it is built on the untested premise that they will not be good enough, but it is also a time saving device since a complete comparison between providers would have taken even longer.
This left three main players. All of them provide a relatively adequate technological base for my needs but the pricing systems vary incredibly.The simplest form of analysis was the cost for calls. But even this can be subdivided into three groups: (1) Calls to other mobiles with the same provider, (2) Calls to other mobiles with other providers, and (3) Calls to land lines. This is also made more nuanced since in addition to the cost for the calls there is the opening cost for each call.
The next unit of analysis is the cost for text messages this is thankfully simple since it offers a straight comparison. This was followed by the costs for international calls since I often call to and from Norway. This last one can be made more complex by analysing whether additional services with other telecom providers can make for a cheaper choice. The final main unit of analysis was the cost of data since I occaissionally (but not too often) rely on my phone as a modem.
This is all wrapped up with a bunch of silly but not insignificant sundry costs like billing expenses, startup costs, add-on costs for various services and so on.
Now all this was just to pick a mobile phone provider. If we were to be serious about our economies we would have to do the same for our energy providers, land line providers, Internet providers, cable tv providers, insurance providers etc etc etc…
So the Sufi were actually on to something… Freedom may actually be the absence of choices.
Sampling and remixing, mash-ups and appropriation, wikis and podcasts are part of the digital creative milieu of the twenty-first century. Sites such as YouTube, Flickr and deviantART have offered new outlets for creativity and become hubs for innovative forms of collaboration thus playing their part in challenging modernist notions of what it means to be a creator as well as a consumer. User-generated content has draw upon the reuse of existing texts as well as new creations, bringing forward possibilities for new audiences and meanings while also raising questions about how digital texts are controlled through copyright and how intellectual property is managed.
Drawing on this background, papers are invited for the two-day workshop – Mashing-up Culture: The Rise of User-generated Content – which will take place at Uppsala University, Sweden on May 13th-14th, 2009. The event will be the first organised by the European research project COUNTER which explores the socio-economic and cultural impacts of the consumption of counterfeit goods and will bring together COUNTER researchers with scholars and stakeholders to explore the current state and dilemmas surrounding copyright and the production, consumption and distribution of culture.
Papers are invited which explore the possibilities and pitfalls surrounding the creative use of copyrighted materials with possible themes including but not limited to:
The aim of the workshop is to provide a creative and stimulating forum for an interdisciplinary and international discussion. We especially invite researchers at the earlier stages of their career to submit proposals coming from across the humanities and social sciences. Accepted papers will be published in the workshop proceedings and further publishing outlets will be explored following the workshop.
Abstracts must be no longer than 1000 words and should consider key questions addressed in the paper, data used, theoretical perspective, as well as key findings and/or contribution to the field. The title, author(s) names, email contact(s), institutional affiliation(s) and references cited must be clearly given in the submission but is not included in the 1000 word limit. Further a 200 word biography of each author should also be appended to the abstract.
Abstracts must be submitted as word processing files (not PDFs) to Eva Hemmungs Wirtén – ehw@abm.uu.se – no later than Wednesday 7th January 2009.
Proposals will be evaluated on the basis of originality, quality of research, theoretical innovation and relevance to the central themes of the COUNTER project. Accepted authors will be notified by email by 30th January 2009. Successful applicants will be invited to attend the workshop at no fee and receive significant reimbursement of travel costs and workshop accommodation.
Delegates are expected to participate in the whole of the two-day event.
A document picturing some of the venues to be used for the workshop and the social events is available online. For further information on the workshop please cotact the workshop chair, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén – ehw@abm.uu.se.
In 1786 King Gustav III founded the Swedish Academy to preserve the purity, strength, and sublimity of the Swedish language” (Svenska Språkets renhet, styrka och höghet). The Swedish Academy is most famous for decideding who will be the laureate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded in memory of the donor Alfred Nobel. A task it has been carrying out since 1901.
The motto of the Academy is “Talent and Taste” (Snille och Smak) and apparently neither talent nor taste have anything to do with any form of courage.
In connection with the Rushdie affair when the Iranian mullahs pronounced the fatwa against him. The Swedish academy decided not to make a statement in favor of Rushdie and denouncing the death threat he now faced. The academy naturally could comfortably rely on old principles that they should not make political statements. Two of the members of the academy left in protest (Kerstin Ekman and Lars Gyllensten).
So now when the Italian author Roberto Saviano is revieving death threats for writing a book about the Camorra and several notables (amongst others: Michail Gorbatjov, Desmond Tutu, Orhan Pamuk, Dario Fo, Günter Grass & Salman Rushdie) have shown their support, the academy when asked formally to show support replies (my translation)
It is extremely sad that a writer in an European country is in mortal danger because of something he published but it seems to me [Horace Engdahl the academy secretary] to be a police errand and not a question of protecting principles of freedom of expression.
The people of talent and taste are hiding behind their non-political stance to avoid taking formal moral stances. Everything a body like the Swedish Academy does is political. Every time they make a choice in litterature concerning the most author most deserving of the Nobel prize – it is a political choice.
Therefore the decision not to stand up for freedom of expression or, at the very least, to condem death threats is moral cowardice.
The venerable blog Blackadder Hall (as an important bearer of pre-Bean culture it deserves the venerable title) has put the documentary The Whole Rotten Saga online. The 1,5 hour documentary has been split into seven parts. They write:
This documentary looks back at the hilarious historical saga of Blackadder, the enduring comic creation of Rowan Atkinson and Richard Curtis now celebrating its 25th anniversary. The programme charts the behind-the-scenes story of the show, from early development to its rise as one of Britain’s best loved sitcoms. Featuring rare rehearsal footage of the team at work and in-depth interviews with key cast and crew such as Richard Curtis, Ben Elton and Stephen Fry.
This is not a time to think of copyright. Just sit back and enjoy!
After MissPrism set the pace with her list Ten books you’re supposed to like but I didn’t several lists began popping up. I wrote mine here and “Reading at Naptime” linked to mine and added the suggestion that the next assignment for the overeducated blogosphere is a list of books we love that nobody else is reading.
This is an interesting challenge since it is not about being highbrow it is just a list of favorite books which few others seem to read or have heard of. Being difficult would be easy, these are books I return to on a regular basis (or in some cases certainly will return to).
Tales of Protection by Erik Fosnes Hansen. Norwegian writers are not often put in focus but there are several contemporary Norwegians writing some really good stuff. Superficially the book hinges on four unrelated stories which are seamlessly joined together and illustrates that seemingly random and unimportant events play an important part in creating meaning and movement in our lives.
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke. This work consists of a compilation of 10 letters written to a young admirer and budding poet. The letters both give a insight into the reason and method for writing as well as a growth of a postal correspondance. The letters are well written full of insightful advice and anecdotes.
Notebooks 1935-1942, Notebooks 1943-1951 & Notebooks 1951-1959 by Albert Camus. Yeah, so this is actually three books at once. The final notebooks have recently been translated and I have yet to read them. The earlier notebooks were fantastic not for Camus’ telling of the history through which he lived but rather the “notes to self” which he filled his notebooks with. Pointers on writing, ideas for future work, the need revise and revise. These are disjointed and offer wonderful advice.
The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzo. The zen of tea and teaism have effected every aspect of Japanese society. This book is not about zen but it is about the how and why of tea and the tea ceremony. It is a beatiful book.
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes by
The Pigeon by Patrick Süskind. An old man in Paris has created a very simple lonely life for himself. When a pigeon sits outside the door to his room his world is turned upside down. The world we organise is brittle and can be turned upside down when challenged by the simplest of things. A sad and tragic story of the day when the sedentary life of an old man is changed forever.
The Kappillan of Malta by Nicholas Monsarrat. This is a bit of nostaligia since I grew up on Malta. This is a story of a humble priest serving the poor in Valetta. The bombings of the WWII force the people into catacombs. The story is about six days during this siege when the priest offers inspiration to enable the people to survive the challenges they face.
Silence by Shusaku Endo. A young Jesuit is sent to Japan in 1638 to succor the local Church and investigate reports that his mentor has committed apostasy. The Christian community is suppressed and those who are not killed for their faith are ashamed for their lack of faith. In the end the young Jesuit is betrayed…
What Am I Doing Here by Bruce Chatwin. A collection of essays, profiles and travel stories from the life of Bruce Chatwin.
The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. A wonderful mix of gossip and history as Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus writes the biographies of twelve caesars of the Roman Empire. The biographies go from Julius Caesar to Domitian and are perhaps not the most historically accurate but do make for interesting reading.
So that’s my list. The books among my favorites that don’t get enough attention generally. Can there be a better thing to do on a rainy Saturday afternoon? Mmm, I feel like reading a book…
Leonard Cohen performed in Göteborg yesterday and played to a packed stadium. The man is amazing so understated and humble, so moving. Most of my music discussions have been way to focused in the mud of the “original – copy” or “illegal download” discussions. What a waste… Listening to Cohen live was an effective reminder that music is done best live.
photo: IMG_4294.JPG by Fauxmantic
The man is brilliant at 73 with no special effects he spellbinds the audience with his repertoire and his sense of humor and ability to make a personal contact. The last time he was in Göteborg he “was a mere boy of 60” despite the time that has passed he still managed to wow 6700 fans for 3,5 hours and all I can say is that I hope that I will see him again soon.
There is a very interesting article by Chris Colin over at SFgate called Nasty as they wanna be? Policing Flickr.com it’s about the group that attempts to maintain order and rules among Fickrs thirty million members who have posted 2.8 billion images.
At first glance this parallel society has been made, quite literally, in the image of our own. But in truth it’s more like a Photoshopped image — the nice parts accentuated, the inappropriate bits cropped away. So it goes with any online community, of course. Behavior must be moderated and a communal ethos must be preserved; Wild West cliches aside, total freedom at any entity like this would sink it in a storm of lawsuits, flame wars and gridlocked cacophony. So directors of community exist. And while the job of nurturing and policing any online realm would make for a fascinating study, I was particularly curious about how it worked at Flickr.
The interesting part of the article on regulation of social content is the fact that no matter how far along we have come, no matter how many articles are written and read, the state of regulation of social matter will not be resolved in a final manner.
Guidelines such as Flickr’s community guidlines, as vague and inadequate as they may seem, are probably the best way to go. My favorite rule among the guidelines is: “Don’t be creepy. You know the guy. Don’t be that guy.” It’s not the way in which laws can be written but as the rule itself says we know what they mean. These types of rules and a certain level of benevolent dictatorship by an adequate superuser, owner or group.
Champ, for her part, has no qualms defending “the Flickrness of Flickr.” A while back a group calling itself “Islam is Hell on Earth” was removed. Champ is unapologetic: “We don’t need to be the photo-sharing site for all people. We don’t need to take all comers. It’s important to me that Flickr was built on certain principles.”
Not everyone is going to be happy but it is important to remember what we often forget and that is that Flickr is not there for a community. They are there because their customers pay them. If any small group of customers threaten Flickr’s income then they will be removed. This is not democracy – it is business. Unfortunately some users forget this point.
Intellectual property tends to be taught by and to lawyers which is a shame since they tend to focus on addressing the questions of how the law works. This handyman approach is necessary since most of the students are going to go out an apply the law – the idea is that they do not really need to understand the law beyond its application. We do not educate law students we simply fill them with facts.
So when law courses are taught outside the auspices of the law department it’s time to sit up and listen.
The course Intellectual Property and Digital Information: Law, Politics, and Culture is being offered by the section for ABM (Archive, Library, Information and Museum Science) of the Department of Cultural Sciences. Here is part of the course description:
The course is intended to deal with these issues from a number of different perspectives, specifically considering cultural, political, legal, but also economical aspects, including those relevant outside a Western context. It will provide an overview of the legal situation in a national, European, and international setting and also look at some hotly debated disputes and international agreements. We will gain an understanding of the various forms of intellectual property (copyright, patent, trademark, etc.) as well as concern ourselves with alternative concepts including the creative commons, open access, open source, and also file-sharing and piracy, and anchor them in a cultural and political context.
See what I mean? Lawyers would hardly be interested in the wider perspective in this manner. I wonder if I should apply to the course…