environment

Seeds of Change

A scary issue which I keep meaning to look more at is the politics and technology of food production, treatment, transportation and selling. Here is a very interesting documentary about GM foods from the University of Manitoba

Everyone has heard both the positives and negatives of genetically modified crops, from biotech companies like Monsanto and from environmental and consumer groups like Greenpeace, yet no one has actually heard from those who actually grow the food we eat – the farmers.

The film can be downloaded from the film website.

The film Seeds of Change is a seventy-minute documentary film made by University of Manitoba (U of M) professor Stéphane McLachlan, U of M PhD student Ian Mauro, and independent videographer Jim Sanders, is a balanced yet hard-hitting exposé of the controversy surrounding genetically modified crops and how they have changed the face of agriculture in western Canada.

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GPLv3 Conference

On the 22nd & 23rd June its the 3rd International GPLv3 Conference which will be held in Barcelona.

The focus will be on the GPLv3 – this is from the press release

The goal of the GPL is to ensure that recipients of GPL covered software are free to examine it, to modify it, to pass on copies, and to distribute modifications. Version two of the GPL was released fifteen years ago, in 1991. The new version is being drafted to account for changes in the legal and technical environment in which software licences operate.

The main changes in version three are to minimise the harm of software patents, to prevent Digital Restrictions Management from being used against software users, and to make the licence compatible with certain classes of other Free Software licences.

Speakers will include, amongst others, Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen.

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Umeå Cool

I have been invited to visit the cool people at Humlab in Umeå in the north of Sweden, on the 28 September.

Amongst other things UmeÃ¥ is involved in workshop for doctoral students with the theme â??Interaction in Digital Environmentsâ?? (21-22 August 2006). This workshop will be arranged by a local doctoral student network (Digital Interaction Research Network â?? DIRN) at UmeÃ¥ University. The network is composed of doctoral students from various departments and faculties with a common interest in the study of interaction in digital environments.

Speakers will be

– Jill Walker, Department of Humanistic Informatics, University of Bergen
– T.L. Taylor, Center for Computer Games Research, IT University of Copenhagen
РPatrik Hernwall, School of Communication, Technology & Design, Șderțrn University College
РPatrik Svensson, HUMlab, Ume̴ University

The workshop arrangers will pay for traveling participantsâ?? costs for food and accommodations. The number of participants accepted to the workshop will be limited.

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Virtual worlds and social interaction design

They have been busy in Umeå last week (read previous post) Mikael Jakobsson defended his PhD Virtual worlds and social interaction design (fulltext)

In his abstract he writes about his explorations of the virtual worlds:

I have found that participants in virtual worlds are not anonymous and bodiless actors on a level playing field. Participants construct everything needed to create social structures such as identities and status symbols. The qualities of social interaction in virtual worlds cannot be measured against physical interaction. Doing so conceals the qualities of virtual interaction. Through the concepts of levity and proximity, I offer an alternative measure that better captures the unique properties of the medium. Levity is related to the use of avatars and the displacement into a virtual context and manifests itself as a kind of lightness in the way participants approach the interaction. Proximity is my term for the transformation of social distances that takes place in virtual worlds. While participants perceive that they are in the same place despite being physically separated, the technology can also create barriers separating participants from their physical surroundings. The gap between the participant and her avatar is also of social significance.

This is important stuff since it goes beyond the simplified perceptions of the online world. It is particularly interesting for those who intend to create regulatory systems which effect these environments.

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Street Art

Recent street art which has been appearing in Göteborg are cut out birds set in the urban environment. Here is a jackdaw on a lamppost on Vasagatan. Or how about this bird on a station measuring environmental pollution caused by cars.

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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.

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Text editing blues

Like bad tasting medicine editing is an aweful process which is only done because of its obvious benefits. Its terrifying the amount of errors that can be spotted at this late stage. Today I even found an incomplete sentence… it simply tapered off like someone losing a chain of thought.

This is the begining up until the research question. Not sure about it though…

This work begins with the thesis that there is a strong relationship between the regulation of technology and the Internet based participatory democracy. In other words, the attempts to regulate technology have an impact upon the citizenâ??s participation in democracy. This work will show what this relationship is and its effect on democratic participation.
Taking its starting points from the recent theoretical developments in regulation, disruptive technology and role of ICT in participatory democracy, this work is the application of three theoretical discussions. These theoretical discussions are used in the empirical exploration of six areas: virus writing and dissemination, civil disobedience in online environments, privacy and the role of spyware, the re-interpretation of property in online environments, software as infrastructure and finally state censorship of online information. The purpose of these studies is to explore the effects of these socio-technical innovations upon the core democratic values of Participation, Communication, Integrity, Property, Access and Autonomy. The overall research question for this thesis is therefore:
What are the effects of technology regulation on the Internet-based participatory democracy?

To connect to an earlier ongoing discussion about the text: The book is now 257 pages long and 99 479 words long. Do you think that word can handle going over 100 000 words or will it simply melt…

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23 days

Todays production was +1478 bringing the total up to 177 pages and 87 064 words. It was a good day.

And the countdown is still in the twenties. Today was lots of work on filters & censorship (Look at OpenNet iniative). On Yahoo! helping China chase cyberdissidents and Google creating a ideologically clean (Chinese style) search engine for China. Its obvious that the companies are bending over backwards to gain access to the Chinese market. Despite all the corporate retoric their actions speak louder than words.

censorship
Censorship by Eric Drooker

Reading tip for the weekend: Rosemary Coombe “Commodity Culture, Private Censorship, Branded Environments, and Global Trade Politics: Intellectual Property as a Topic of Law and Society Research“

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Theme Crash

Well this is the new look for my blog. The reason for the major change was that the old theme started doing strange things after I had updated. Isnt it wonderful how a change in one part of our comuter environment suddenly spawns a whole process of subsequent changes? Updating WordPress was quick and easy. Making it work the way I wanted to and look the way I wanted to was not.

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