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What a PhD feels like

Itâ??s Friday. This is my last weekend before I defend. I have not been thinking a lot about what happens after Friday but I have naturally been curious about it. Previously, I have asked a people about the actual experience. Most of them seem only to have vague memories of the actual defence. This is not because they defended so long ago as not to remember. It seems to be common not to remember much of the actual defence. It might be the stress or the focus of the occasion but the result is that the audience seems to have a clearer memory than the defender.

Things get more complicated when asking people what the PhD feels like after the defence. Once the idea has sunk in, what does it change? Obviously the shiny new PhD qualifies the holder to apply for new positions, apply for research funding and opens doors within academia to rooms which were previously off-limits.

Despite this, the people I have spoken to report a range of emotions of what the PhD feels like. Everything from â??nothing changedâ?? to â??everything is differentâ??. My preference is towards â??everything changesâ??. The PhD is more than a formal exam and an entrance into the academic guild it is also a effort of great personal importance â?? at least I feel that my experience is this and I may feel a bit cheated if nothing changed.

Posted on by mklang

Down with DRM video contest

Freeculture are organising a video competition to coincide with the Down with DRM day.

Enter the Down with DRM video contest for a chance to win a Neuros OSD – a portable digital VCR!

Joining in Oct 3rd – Day Against DRM, Free Culture will select the 5 best anti-DRM video entries and award a Neuros OSD to each creator. DefectiveByDesign.org is also looking to air selected anti-DRM videos on their website during the week of October 3rd, and we want to give them a hand.

Here are the official rules to enter Free Culture’s Down with DRM video contest:

  • Deadline for submissions: Sunday, October 1 at 11:59pm EDT
  • Criteria for video:
    • Anti-DRM themed
    • Short
    • Video, animation, or remix
    • Make it catchy â?? we want these videos to be viral
  • Please submit your video to the online video sharing network(s) that you prefer. Here are some examples:
  • Please tag your video with “downwithdrm” and “dbdoct3” so that people can search for it.
  • Preference will be given to submissions under free content licenses such as Creative Commons BY-SA, BY, PD, or the Free Art license.
  • E-mail downwithdrm@freeculture.org with a link to your video by October 1 at 11:59pm EDT.
  • Free Culture will select the top 5 entries and award the winners with a Neuros OSD (one per video)
Posted on by mklang

Artifactuality and Material Culture

Here is a very cool sounding PhD seminar course: Towards a â??New Materialismâ??? Exploring Artifactuality and Material Culture in History of Science, Technology and Medicine

A monthly Ã?resund reading symposium arranged by History of Technology Division, Technical University of Denmark (DTU)/The Danish National Museum of Science and Technology, Medical Museion, University of Copenhagen, & Research Policy Institute, Lund University

Schedule & Reading:

Thursday October 5, DTU, Lyngby
Lorraine Daston, ed., Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (2004)

Thursday November 6, University of Lund, Lund
Andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (1995)
Thursday December 7, Medical Museion, Copenhagen
Sharon Macdonald, ed., Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (1997)
Thursday January 25, Museum in Copenhagen To Be Decided (TBD)
Bill Brown, ed. Things (2004)
Thursday February 22, Museum in Lund/Malmö TBD
Soraya de Chadarevian & Nick Hopwood, ed., Models: The Third Dimension of Science (2004)

Thursday March 22, Museum in Copenhagen TBD
Larsson, ed., Cultures of Creativity: Birth of a 21st Century Museum (2006)
Thursday April 19, Museum in Lund/Malmö TBD
Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (1997)
Thursday May 24, Museum in Copenhagen TBD
Tim Dant, Materiality and Society (2005)
Thursday June 21, Museum in Lund/Malmö TBD
Bruno Latour & Peter Weibel, ed., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005)

Register before 21 September – More information here. It’s very, very tempting…

(via Perfekta Tomrummet)

Posted on by mklang

NeoOffice

While sitting in a boring meeting, getting annoyed at sales reps from Microsoft enthusiastically praising trusted computing. When I questioned them why anyone would give all that power to one corporate entity they replied that they couldn’t see why not –

“so long as you trusted Microsoft everything is fine…”

Honest – I was speechless! Can you imagine me speechless?

Anyway during the meeting I downloaded the latest version of NeoOffice for mac (Download NeoOffice 2.0 Aqua Beta 3). It looks pretty good and seems to start faster too.

NeoOffice is a fully-featured set of office applications (including word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing programs) for Mac OS X. It is based on the OpenOffice.org office suite.

Posted on by mklang

Free Software & Microsoft Sales Reps

Due to a colleague calling in sick I jumped in and gave a short presentation on Free Software & Open Standards to IT technicians at my university. Following my presentation two salesmen from Microsoft presented the corporate visions of the future and a short demo of the coming Vista and Office software.

The first salesman after hearing my presentation insisted on talking about how “Free Software” microsoft was. Since they were involved in several projects intended to define open standards this made, according to him, Microsoft – Free Software.

Should someone tell Balmer?

I bit my tongue when he spoke about all this and about trusted computing. It was all too much. He was so positive that the inconsistencies were only embarrasing.
He also was lyrical about schools without books and the fact that many university students are not able to use basic excel – something he felt the university should teach them. So I shut up while he praised the dumming down of universities.

I will get him during the break… Or maybe not… it’s just too embarassing to listen to.

Posted on by mklang

Broadcast & Podcast Rights

This is straight from Cory Doctrow at Boing Boing – not even going to edit it. Copyright is under fire from almost every angle imagineable. This is about the aweful Broadcast Treaty.

The Broadcast Treaty is an attempt to force the world’s governments to give a new right to broadcasters, a right to control the use of works they don’t own. The Broadcast Right will allow broadcasters to stop you from copying or re-using the programs they transmit, even if those programs are in the public domain, Creative Commons licensed or composed of uncopyrightable facts.

Fair use doesn’t apply to the broadcast right. It will have its own rules for fair use, separate from copyright. You’ll have to pay your lawyer twice, once to make sure you’ve got a fair copyright use, and again to make sure you’ve got a fair broadcast right use. And you might get sued twice — once for violating copyright and again for broadcast right violations.

Worse yet, they want this to apply to the Internet. A few US corporations — Microsoft, Yahoo — have hijacked the US position on the Broadcast Treaty and now the US is using every trick in the book to get the world’s governments (who roundly reject the idea) to create a “webcasting right” at the same time as the broadcast right.

This is deadly to podcasters. The webcasting right will break podcasters’ ability to quote and re-use each others’ work (even CC-licensed works), and other video found on the net. It will allow podcast-hosting companies like Yahoo to tell people how they can use your podcasts, even if you want to permit retransmissions. And it will hurt organizations that are tying to find novel ways to use podcasts, like

The webcasting stuff has been “narrowed” to try to make it apply only to “professional” webcasts and not podcasts, but this is a short-sighted view of the future of podcasting. The term podcasting was only coined 20-some months ago. The idea that we can predict what a podcast will look like tomorrow is ridiculous — it’s like designing a copyright for printed books ten seconds before the photocopier comes along and changes everything.

Luckily, the webcasting stuff is on the ropes. Mark Cuban, who founded Yahoo’s Broadcast.com, has signed onto an open letter from 20 technology organizations that reject the webcasting right. Last week, dozens of companies, libraries and public interest groups signed an open letter rejecting the treaty altogether.

Now it’s the podcasters’ turn. EFF has created an open letter on behalf of podcasters everywhere, rejecting the webcasting right. WIPO is supposed to be making treaties that protect creators. We podcasters are the Internet’s native creators. WIPO has no business trying to break the Internet so that it is better-suited to the business-models of yesterday’s broadcasters.

If you are a podcaster — or better yet, a podcasting organization — sign onto this letter now! It will be presented Monday morning to the WIPO committee that’s creating the Broadcast Treaty in Geneva. This is your best-ever chance to be heard. Link

Posted on by mklang

I Nailed Yesterday

Yesterday was an amazing day. The printers delivered 75 copies of my thesis as quickly as they could. They were so quick that when I opened the box the books were still warm â?? so now I know what â??hot of the pressesâ?? really means.

I took 51 books with me to the main university library. In return for 50 of my books I got a receipt. I took the last book with me to find the Dean of my faculty. He kindly interrupted a meeting to sign my book. Without his signature I cannot continue the process.

So with a signed copy of my thesis I returned to the office packed up my stuff, handed out a few copies to friends and colleagues before rushing home. From there the family followed me to the main university building to a notice board where I presented myself, my thesis and the documentation that I was allowed to proceed.

The women in charge gave me a hammer and nail which I used to hammer my thesis to the notice board. It was a very satisfying experience.

The process of hammering your thesis is the traditional form of publicising that the thesis has been made public. This is done three weeks before the actual defence so that unknown opponents have a chance to arrive at the defence armed to the teeth… Naturally the act of nailing is not as important as it used to be since the real publication of the date and time is done digitally. But it remains a very satisfying experience for the PhD student.

Update: I am officially on the list of upcoming defences.

Posted on by mklang

The ungood system of academic publishing

Another text on Free Software that I have written has been accepted for publication. This is good news. But then I read the rather draconian copyright and licensing rules which the publisher wants to apply to my text.

Basically the ideas remain mine but if I want to present them I have to re-write the ideas from scratch.

The author retains the rights to any intellectual property developed â?¦While the author may use any and all thoughts and research results developed or accumulated while working on a manuscript, and may rewrite, update, and re-title them for use in other publications, â?¦ the author CANNOT use the verbatim text of the manuscript or any part thereofâ?¦without first obtaining the written permissionâ?¦

From my limited experience this wording is pretty standard. From the academics point of view I â??needâ?? publications. But the situation becomes strange when the topic I am writing about is Free Software which has a large focus on openness and the freedom of ideas.

Let me just point out from the start â?? there is no limitation on the reader to read and develop the ideas. They just cannot slavishly copy the text.

My niggling concern is the fact that I am paid by an organisation to do research (and teach). So I spend my time gathering information and thinking about the implications of what is occurring in my particular field. I may even have applied for public grants to do this work.

Once I write down my thoughts the only way for the others to gain access to them is for my library to buy the book so that others can read it. Which basically means my university is paying twice for this information. First for me to think/write and then to obtain physical access to the information.

Even though I dislike the contents of the copyright agreement I have just signed it did not prevent me from signing it. The problem is one of incentive structures. Had I written the work and then just posted it to my website â?? it would not have been worth anything to my academic peers and therefore to my academic career.

The academic text only becomes valuable after it passes through the quality control system which is in the hands of the publisher. Without a publishing house behind the text the information contained therein is not seen as knowledgeâ?¦

Posted on by mklang

Steal This Film

Steal This Film is more than a website that seems to scream out its message! It is also the first part of a documentary series on filesharing. This first part focuses on The Pirate Bay and in particular on the raid on their servers. The documentary seems interesting â?? natural bias towards pro-filesharing but the creators are open about this:

In 2006, a group of friends decided to make a film about filesharing that *we* would recognise. There have been a few documentaries by ‘old media’ crews who don’t understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods. They have no reason to represent the filesharing movement positively, and no capacity to represent it lucidly. We wanted to make a film that would explore this huge popular movement in a way that excited us, engaged us, and most importantly, focussed on what we know to be the positive and optimistic vision many filesharers and artists (they are often one) have for the future of creativity.

Posted on by mklang

Hope or Hoax

Based upon the principle â?? if something seems to be too good to be true it often is. What can one say about a free energy technology which could power everything from mobile phones to cars.

From their website:

Steornâ??s technology produces free, clean and constant energy. This provides a significant range of benefits, from the convenience of never having to refuel your car or recharge your mobile phone, to a genuine solution to the need for zero emission energy production. It also provides a secure supply of energy, since the components of the technology are readily available.

The technology is in a constant state of development. The company has focused for the past three years on increasing power output and the development of test systems that allow detailed analysis to be performed.

Steornâ??s technology appears to violate the â??Principle of the Conservation of Energyâ??, considered by many to be the most fundamental principle in our current understanding of the universe. This principle is stated simply as â??energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only change formâ??.

Steorn is making three claims for its technology:

  1. The technology has a coefficient of performance greater than 100%.
  2. The operation of the technology (i.e. the creation of energy) is not derived from the degradation of its component parts.
  3. There is no identifiable environmental source of the energy (as might be witnessed by a cooling of ambient air temperature).

The sum of these claims is that our technology creates free energy.

The question of whether this is a hoax or a new hope.

This comment on the news comes from Collision Detect: But as Kieran Healy at Crooked Timber notes, Steorn hews perfectly to the “seven warning signs of bogus science” laid out in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago. To wit:

1. The discoverer pitches the claim directly to the media.
2. The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.
3. The scientific effect involved is always at the very limit of detection.
4. Evidence for a discovery is anecdotal.
5. The discoverer says a belief is credible because it has endured for centuries.
6. The discoverer has worked in isolation.
7. The discoverer must propose new laws of nature to explain an observation.

Posted on by mklang