writing

bye bye blogburst

This news (below) gives me the push I needed to quit blogburst. The idea of syndication in this way interested me in that it might increase my readership but it annoyed me as it made me think about my readers. In other words the question of what my readers would think occurred to me. I did not change the content of my work in any way. But the appearance of the question in my mind was enough to annoy me.

A writer wants to be read. This is the reason I signed up to the blogburst service. This may have been a bad idea. Posts from Living the Scientific Life and Bitch Ph.D. present some valid arguments for not joining such syndication services.

The blogburst license states that bloggers who sign up agree to:

… a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual license to reproduce, distribute, make derivative works of, perform, display, disclose, and otherwise dispose of the Work (and derivative works thereof) for the purposes ofâ?¦

When I read this I first thought that this could not be wrong. My thinking was that increasing the reach of my writing would be a good thing. But as Bitch Ph.D. explains this is flawed thinking in a couple of ways.

First: If material is published somewhere through blogburst it is very unlikely that the eventual reader will click through to my blog. Therefore I add to the value of someone elseâ??s work without increasing the popularity of my own.

Second: Since the pictures remain on my local server the popularity of my work somewhere else means that my bandwidth is supporting this popularity. Economically this does not effect me too much as blog on the university resources but the principle is that I pay in work and technology and do not get much (or anything in return).

Posted on by mklang

Blogging in the private/public divide

Part of blogging is attempting to figure out why we blog? Not all blogs pose this question but it appears often enough* to be recognised as being a common question. This question becomes even more relevant when the blogger takes active risks by blogging.

In an earlier post (blogging revisited 21/1105) I reported about an article concerned with the risks being taken by job-seeking academics who blog. The author of the article wrote that their blogs prevented the potential employer from hiring since they revealed a different side to the applicant than that presented at the formal interview.

A temporary prosecutor in San Francisco blogged about a case he was prosecuting:
Karnow didn’t find the postings prejudicial enough to throw out the entire case, as the defense wanted. But in turning down that motion to dismiss this week, the judge still came down hard on ex-prosecutor Jay Kuo, calling his conduct “juvenile, obnoxious and unprofessional.” … (via Lunda Wright)

Other bloggers take greater risks as whistleblowers or reporting on corrupt and/or repressive governments. While some bloggers and blogs are well protected using different means many are open and tracing the authors is a (relatively) easy task.

Organisations such as the EFF have created documents to help those who need to blog anonymously â??How to Blog Safely (About Work or Anything Else)â?? but these are either not widely known or widely used.
There seems to be something special about the blog and its place in the private/public divide. The blog is a private diary and yet it is open to the world.  The privacy promotes the sharing of secrets while the public the desire to communicate.

Why take the risks? Are they really risks or is blogging perceived to be a private act? Even though most bloggers are aware of their publicâ?¦

*Some examples from Google on the search â??why I blogâ??
Watermark – Jacobsen – Under the sun – Media Metamorphosis –

Posted on by mklang

Rainy Sundays

Its almost a cliché. Its a rainy Sunday afternoon! The good news is that a large second hand bookstore nearby (Röde Orm in Haga) was having a major sale 10 kr per book. Most of the good stuff was gone but I came away with Lars-Ingvar Sörenson licenciate thesis from 1997 entitled Naturrätt, egendomsrätt och praxis (Natural rights, Property rights
and praxis). I am looking forward to reading it.

It begins with a quote from Sitting Bull’s speech 1875 where he speaks about his enemy and says, amongs other things:

They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own use, and fence their neighbors away from her, and deface her with their buildings and their refuse. They compel her to produce out of season, and when sterile she is made to take medicine in order to produce again. All this is sacrilege. This nation is like a spring freshet; it overruns its banks and destroys all who are in its path. We cannot dwell side by side. (online version included here)

What can be better on a rainy sunday?
Posted on by mklang

Scientific & personal revolutions

The problem with the development of science is our need to draw straight lines. We want to believe that science is the incremental, linear, progressive, growth of knowledge in society. We know it isn’t true but we do so all the same.
In 1935 Ludwik Fleck wrote on the development of science (Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact). According to him one of the major stumbling blocks in scientific development was the ruling ideas (thought styles) which have been established within the totality of scientific thought (thought collective). The thought collective was made up of individual members but was greater than the sum of individuals since the ideas remained strong even if members left the collective.

These ideas dove-tail very nicely into Thomas Kuhnâ??s ideas (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) that science passes through revolutions (paradigm shifts) were first new ideas are resisted until the normative thought style no longer fits the understanding of the results being brought forward by scientists.
Its easy to giggle at the stupidity of past knowledge – sometimes my students have a hard time understanding how people in the past could have been so ignorant (as opposed to our enlightened state). Sometimes I try to compare this scientific development to individual development and ask them to think about the last time they had a paradigm shift of their own.

Two doctoral thesis’ on/connected to Fleck
One in archeology by David Loeffler â??Contested Landscapes/Contested Heritageâ?? from 2005 (uses Fleck’s ideas) and one in philosophy by Bengt Liliequist â??Ludwik Flecks jämförande kunskapsteoriâ?? (in Swedish).

Posted on by mklang

Define disaster?

What is a disaster and how does it compare to a catastrophe or a tragedy? A few months ago I began thinking about this. I wanted to use this as part of a future lecture on the effects of technology (and probably an advanced form of procrastination). The basic idea is that most of us have short memories. We trust technology implicitly and we see the failure of technology as a brief, unfortunate anomaly.

While writing about the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl accident these thoughts came back and I began to dig for a suitable list of man-made disasters. The man-made is an easy criterion since all technology is man-made (this is a specie-ist argument where I am brutally discounting tools made by animals and aliens). But what other criteria should be involved when attempting to demonstrate the failures of technology and their connection to trust?

  • War is a disaster but it is for the most part intentional.
  • The slow erosion of the ozone layer may be a disaster but â?? do we include it?
  • How does one differentiate between extinction and natural selection in relation to the disaster?
  • What about â??naturalâ?? disasters which have been triggered or aggravated by technology?

Therefore for the purpose of a lecture on trust in technology events can have disastrous consequences without being disasters.

Feel free to add comments on this! To be continuedâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Chernobyl twenty years later

Its today twenty years since the accident at Chernobyl (Uranium Information Centre briefing paper #22 & IAEA Chernobyl FAQ) an example of how our reliance on technology can go wrong. The accident was brought about by the mixture of over-confidence in technology, fear of criticising the own organisation and the desire to increase production by conducting dangerous of questionable value.

According to the IAEA Chernobyl FAQ the disaster was the equivalent of 400 Hiroshima size bombs but they also add

However, the atomic bomb testing conducted by several countries around the world during the 1960s and 1970s contributed 100 to 1,000 times more radioactive material to the environment than Chernobyl.

Comforting news.

Caesium-137 fallout. Source: J.Smith and N.A. Beresford, “Chernobyl: Catastrophe and Consequences” (Praxis, Chichester, 2005) (via wikipedia).

While Chernobyl is the icon of technological disasters it is important not to forget many â??smallerâ?? disasters that have occurred (and will continue to do so). There is a need to be vigilant of technology rather than to believe the infallibility of technical experts. The failure of Chernobyl did not occur because of a lack of experts but rather through the hubris of the experts in place and the lack of infrastructure available for â??lesserâ?? experts (or laymen if there had been any) to point out the dangers of the actions leading up to the steam explosion that destroyed the reactor core (Chernobyl sequence of events).

Since the disaster a 30km zone around the reactor has been evacuated. A side effect of this has been a resurgence of wildlife in the area (BBC story)

In a macabre form of tourism a motorcyclist has travelled within this zone and put a photojournal online this is part of a growing tourism into the dead zone to visit the abandoned towns.

Posted on by mklang

On minor annoyances

Train travel is great! I like sitting and working on trains. Its like an office with a view. Today the Swedish trains have wifi (not very good but still wifi) which means that even online work can be done (unless it demands heavy bandwidth). The main problem is battery time. I try to book seats next to the power outlets (sad â?? isnâ??t it?) but on this trip I could not. Usually this can be fixed on the train.

Across the aisle from me a policeman (the gold braid suggests an officer) had a seat with the power outlet so I asked politely if he was going to use the outlet or if he could consider changing seats. He gruffly stated that he needed the outlet, drank his complementary coffee and fell asleep.

I worked fast and now I feel that I wanted to blog this on the last dregs of my battery life while the policeman snores gently to the rocking of the train.

Nobody likes to exchange seats, but most often do. Am I more annoyed by this man because of his occupation? Was his gruff response due to a need to command the situation? Did he ever intend to use the outlet?

Technology based life is driven by lots of small annoyances – the search for power being among the foremost. But our appliances demand more care and attention from us. Their control over our behaviour can be seen in the way in which we are reminded by the appliances to do their bidding. Washing machines, tumble dryers and microwaves annoyingly remind us to empty them â?? they will not be silent until we react. Most mobile devices remind us of their battery status, cars remind us when doors are open or seatbelts are unused.

The tyranny of these devices is for our comfort and security â?? but at the cost of our annoyance. They police use by their presence and remind us of their needs. The same can be said of the sleeping policeman across the aisle. He rests in full knowledge that his occupation is vital to society â?? something he takes advantage of â?? this is symbolised by non-use of the power outlet. He is like the tumble dryer I filled before leaving home that will beep noisily, annoyingly, in futility until I return.

Posted on by mklang

To Do Lists

What a great idea for a book. A collection of lists!

Sasha Cagen is the founding editor of To-Do List: a magazine of meaningful minutiae, and the author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics.

She is collecting to-do lists to be published in a book by Simon & Schuster in October 2007.

“To-do” is interpreted broadly: the lists could be boys/girls I have kissed, movies to see, lifelong goals, etc.

I have a couple of old post-it notes to send!

More info here.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

War and Peace

In an article entitled You and the Atom Bomb, George Orwell wrote about the relationship between military technology and democratic development. National self-determination is, according to Orwell’s technologically deterministic argument, a product of the ability to develop efficient arms.

The great age of democracy and of national self-determination was the age of the musket and the rifle…Even the most backward nation could always get hold of rifles from one source or another, so that Boers, Bulgars, Abyssinians, Moroccansâ??even Tibetansâ??could put up a fight for their independence, sometimes with success. But thereafter every development in military technique has favoured the State as against the individual, and the industrialised country as against the backward one. There are fewer and fewer foci of power. Already, in 1939, there were only five states capable of waging war on the grand scale, and now there are only threeâ??ultimately, perhaps, only two. This trend has been obvious for years, and was pointed out by a few observers even before 1914. The one thing that might reverse it is the discovery of a weaponâ??or, to put it more broadly, of a method of fightingâ??not dependent on huge concentrations of industrial plant. (full article here)

The concept of war and peace has changed since Orwell published this article in Tribune (19 October 1945). Those old enough to have experienced the world wars (either as participants or spectators) claim that we have had peace. This is strange to as I cannot remember a single period in my life when we were not at war with some nation (echoes of Orwell’s 1984?)

This peace is therefore an illusion, a consensual hallucination, if the interpretation of reality claims that we are at war then we are at war. If the claim is that we are at peace then we are at peace. Naturally this does not effect the fact that people are being killed, or that military forces are attacking each other. It just does not mean that we are not living in peacetime.

The atom bomb nicknamed Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki exploded at 11:02 A.M on August 9.
It left an estimated 70,000 dead by the end of 1945.

While living in this myth of peace the threat of all out war remains a threat but in reality war remains based in the use of the rifle or rifle-like weaponry. Since there is no real war in (or with) Afganistan, Iraq, India/Pakistan (Kashmir) or Indonesia (For lists of ongoing conflicts look here and here) but only ‘conflicts’ the struggle remains focused around the rifle.

This is not, as Orwell thought, the technical ability to mass-produce this relatively simple technology but rather the ability to obtain cash or credits to be able to buy small arms (estimated black market trade in small arms range from US$2-10 billion a year). In conflicts such as these it is not the posession of advanced technology that resolves the conflict but rather the money and determination to accept heavy losses.

Posted on by mklang