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Non-musical iPod

Admitting that I use my iPod a lot is not really surprising. Many people walk around with different versions of players connected to their ears. Even though I use my iPod every day I rarely listen to music on it. Almost everything I listen to is lectures and the occasional audio book. Sad, isnâ??t it?

Right now I am re-listening to the Garret Faganâ??s course of 48 lectures on the History of Ancient Rome, produced by the Teaching Company – this is a very good lecture series.

The problem with listening to non-fiction audio is that there is not enough free stuff! Thatâ??s why its nice to find sites like LibriVox were volunteers record themselves reading books and the results are posted into the public domain.

A word of caution â?? the rules and traditions for the public domain vary so LibriVox has the following disclaimer:

LibriVox recordings are Public Domain in the USA. If you are not in the USA, please verify the copyright status of these works in your own country before downloading, otherwise you may be violating copyright laws.

LibriVox also has some nice links to other sources of spoken word online. So between the commercial sites, free sites and podcasts I will never have to listen to music on my iPodâ?¦

(via New York Times)

Posted on by mklang

Creative Commons Launch Colombia

If you happen to be in Colombia on the 22 August then you are invited to go to the Creative Commons launch party in Bogota.

There will be two separate events, in the morning at the Polictecnico Grancolombiano University we will present several speakers that will include: Proffesor Laurence Lessig, the ccColombia team, SIB (Colombian Biodiversity Information System), Eltiempo.com (an important nationwide newspaper that will begin to offer their citizen journalists the opportunity to use Creative Commons licenses in its online portal) and The Free Software Community.

This venue will be webcast here and here at 14:30 GMT.

In the afternoon we will be having an open content session in one of Bogota’s most vibrant public space: The Biblioteca Publica Virgilio Barco with a live performance by Silvia O and several DJs, VJs and Bloggers that will be displaying their CC work. This venue will be webcast here at 23:00 GMT.

Be sure the check the visual memories of the launch by searching the tag: cccolanzamiento on flickr.

If you do go please say Hi from CC-Sweden to your host – Jaime Rojas

Posted on by mklang

What, Me Worry?

Swedish universities have an old tradition of nailing the PhD thesis in the main university building. The act of nailing has both a formal and traditional element. The physical hammering a nail through the thesis is naturally a traditional element. But the formal part of the ceremony concerns making the thesis available for the general public three weeks before the thesis defence.


Photographer unknown ca. 1850

The thesis that is nailed to the notice board is naturally not intended to be read â?? or at least not read easily (imagine trying to read a thick book which has been nailed to the wall). Therefore the author provides copies to the university library. The idea is that the thesis will be defended publicly which naturally means that the public must have the opportunity to read and prepare their questions and criticism.

Before being able to nail a thick book to the wall â?? it has to be printed. The printer wants 1 day for making proofs and 5-8 workdays for printing. Between these days I need to check the proofs.

24th August â?? Files to printer
26-27th August â?? Check proofs
28th August â?? Printing begins
11th September â?? Nail the thesis (three weeks before defence)
2nd October â?? My defence

Nervous, me? No! Whatever gave you that idea? I just remember the wise words of Alfred E. Neuman: What, Me Worry?

For those of you who cannot wait and want the sneak preview. The most updated version is online here. This is the most current version will continue to be updated until its time to send it to the printer…

Posted on by mklang

End of an Era

Today marks the end of an era. Despite this there were no bands playing, no speeches from visiting dignitaries, no public announcements. I didnâ??t really expect any of these things but it was a sad affair when the whole office packed all their stuff into boxes. Today we had our last morning coffee at the old workplace.

The boxes were collected today and tomorrow we will be unpacking all our belongings in the new office. We have not moved far â?? only across the harbour entrance to Gothenburg. The new department is all wifi (for staff and students) and new furniture â?? despite this there is a pang of nostalgia for the old place which I have experienced, worked in and complained about for the last eight years.

Posted on by mklang

Creating the Information Commons

Who created the term Information Commons? Today we use it and expect most people to understand what it means – even if it is a term used in a relatively specific group discussion.

In part the term owes a lot to those who did not even use it. Writers such as Hardin (Tragedy of Commons 1968), Rose (Comedy of Commons 1986) and Ostrom (Governing the Commons 1990) have all created the term commons and formed the discussion to what it is today. The act of adding their term to the concept of information was, in reality, an obvious step. But who took this step?

Here are a few candidates to the early use of information or informational commons – please let me know if someone is missing…

Felsenstein, Lee. “The Commons of Information.” Dr. Dobbs Journal, (May 1993): 18-24. http://opencollector.org/history/homebrew/commons.html

Peter Jaszi & Martha Woodmansee, The Construction of Authorship 11 (1994) includes the quote: â??creeping enclosure of the informational commonsâ??

Alok Gupta, Dale O. Stahl & Andrew B. Whinston, The Internet: A Future Tragedy of the Commons?, Paper Presented at the Conference on Interoperability and the Economics of Information Infrastructure July 6-7, 1995

Andrews, William. “Nurturing the Global Information Commons: Public Access, Public Infrastructure.” Presentation at the 4th Annual B.C. Information Policy Conference Vancouver, B.C., October 28, 1995. http://www.wcel.org/wcelpub/present/ipc95t.html

Scott R. Lundgren â??A Tragedy in the Information Commons?â?? Fall 1997 http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~humae105/fall97/slund01.htm

Onsrud, H.J., “The Tragedy of the Information Commons” in Policy Issues in Modern Cartography (Elsevier Science) 1998, pp. 141-158. Online draft http://www.spatial.maine.edu/~onsrud/pubs/tragedy42.pdf

Brin, David. “The Internet as a Commons.” in Milton T. Wolf, et. al. Information Imagineering: Meeting at the Interface. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1998: 240-245.

Halbert, M (1999) ‘Lessons from the information commons frontier’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp.

Beagle, D (1999) ‘Conceptualizing an information commons’, The Journal of Academic Librarianship , vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 82-89.

Posted on by mklang

Anti-RFID designs

RFID chips have been around for some time without really taking off. The main discussions have been in specialised privacy or technology discussions. This changed when the plans were launched to add RFID to passports. These plans have raised many concerns from privacy activists. These concerns have only increased now that the planned passports have been demonstrated as not being particularly secure. They have already been both hacked and cloned.

For the security aware: companies are now beginning to offer wallets, or a DIY version made from duct tape. Or why not special designs for clothes. All of which prevent RFID products from being read. The fundamental principal is to create a Faraday Cage effect around the RFID antenna to block the readers.

This is the same principle (as used by the stereotypical crazy-man) of wearing a tin-foil hat to prevent aliens/government from scanning the brain… here is a research article showing the inefficiency of the tin-foil hat.

Background material:

Ari Juels “RFID Security and Privacy: A Research Survey” Research Report, RSA Laboratories, September 2005.

Matt Ward & Rob van Kranenburg “RFID: Frequency, standards, adoption and innovation” JISC Technology and Standards Watch, May 2006.

Ann Cavoukian “Tag, Youâ??re It: Privacy Implications of RadioFrequency Identification (RFID)Technology” Information and Privacy Commissioner Ontario, February 2004.

Posted on by mklang

Book Mooch

I am particularly fond of ideas where old ideas can be supported by new technology. If you add to this ideas which include books then I am sold. An example of this is Book Crossings whose idea was to share books with strangers by leaving them in public spaces a clear notice of the Book Crossing idea.

The Book Mooch is another of these great ideas.

Itâ??s a community for exchanging used books. It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want. It is many other features but in its simplest forms the idea is:

Give & receive: Every time you give someone a book, you earn a point and can get any book you want from anyone else at BookMooch. Once you’ve read a book, you can keep it forever or put it back into BookMooch for someone else, as you wish.

(via Boing Boing)

Posted on by mklang

Evolution of a Social Contract (the GPLv3 process)

OK so the GPL is a copyright license. But in part it has also evolved into something larger than life. It has become one of those rare things among legal documents – an icon.

Naturally it is not alone in this position. But what is interesting is that other icons tend to be “larger”. The US constitution is an icon, the declaration of rights is an icon. Very few contracts and licenses can be called iconic since few or none ever make it outside their small community. So what happens when the process of technological development forces the “evolution” of a license?

Unlike nature we cannot expect a natural selection. The development must be moved by an outside force. It can be done either dictatorially or democratically. In one way dictatorially is easier – you don’t have to ask all the people what they think. But using this process does not work with software licenses since the dissatisfaction of users will only lead to the demise of the license. Democracy also has its advantages. It allows for participation and the ability of smart people to bring forward comments and ideas that the dictator may not have recognised. The GPL has chosen a democratic process.
The formal system can best be seen in the overview of the process, which begins with the initial release and presentation of the draft of the GPLv3 with additional documentation such as the overview of the review system and the explanatory documents. In addition to the more formal structure the information needs to be communicated out to the users and to ensure an equality of information transfers was established. The latter was accomplished primarily through the use of the Internet as a distribution method of all texts and additional audio and video material.

The essence of the drafting process here described is to make it possible for the Free Software Foundation to decide the contents of the GPL through the fullest possible discussion with the most diverse possible community of drafters and users. Ideally, we would identify every issue affecting every user of the license and resolve these issues with a full consideration of their risks and benefits. In order to accomplish such a large task, the discussion process involves individual community members and Discussion Committees that represent different types of users and distributors.

The process was formally commenced with the release of the first Discussion Draft of version 3 of the GPL (including additional explanatory material) at the first International Public Conference in January 2006, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The two day event at MIT was recorded and the audio video material was also made available online. The second draft has recently been released.

To ensure that comments on the GPL are collected and dealt with Discussion Committees have been formed. The members of the committees were chosen to represent diverse users groups such as â??â?¦large and small enterprises, both public and private; vendors, commercial and noncommercial redistributors; development projects that use the GPL as a license for their programs; development projects that use other free software licenses, but are invested in the contents of the GPL; and unaffiliated individual developers and people who use softwareâ??. The role of these committees is to organise and analyse the received comments and propose solutions.

The FSF invited the initial members of the Discussion Committees but granted the committees the power to invite further members and to autonomously organise their work process. The committees work to encourage commentary on the license from the sectors they represent. Once the comments have been collected, organised and analysed the committee is responsible for presenting its results of the deliberations to the FSF.

Aside from this organisational method of soliciting and analysing comments from a wider public the FSF have created an online method of allowing anyone to comment directly on the license draft. This is done by creating a software based commenting system, which works in this way. The draft text of the GPLv3 is online and users can mark a section of text, which they wish to comment, and then type â??câ??. Doing this opens a comment box, which allows the user to add a comment.

Once a user has commented on a section of text that section becomes highlighted. If no-one has commented on the text the background colour is white. After a comment the background is light yellow. The colour of the background becomes progressively darker for each comment added. This colour system allows users to see at a glance which sections of the draft are the most commented.

By holding the cursor over highlighted text the user is informed how many comments have been made on that section. By clicking on highlighted text the comments that have been made appear and can be read. The latter feature has the added benefit of reducing the amount of duplicated comments since the commentator can see the commentary of others.
So what are you waiting for? Participate in the democracy!

Posted on by mklang

No Laptops for India

The much publicised MIT project about the100$ laptop received an interesting setback last week. India has decided not to place orders. In an article in the Register (26th July 2006) The Indian Ministry of Education called the whole project â??pedagogically suspectâ??. Nigeria, on the other hand, has ordered and paid for 1 million of the MIT laptops.

This is an interesting challenge to the idea that technology will fix problems. The fundamental philosophy behind the MIT project was that by providing a cheap, robust machine which communicates and shares easily with others there will be gains in learning, literacy and computer skills.

Not everyone agrees with this view. Indian Education Secretary Sudeep Banerjee said:

â??We cannot visualise a situation for decades when we can go beyond the pilot stage. We need classrooms and teachers more urgently than fancy tools.â??

Because the focus is on the tools and its costs the focus of what the problem is and how it should be addressed has been on the technology. With questions of what platform should be used and whether 100$ per laptop is achievable or even if it is desirable.

In the rush to discuss the number of USB ports the questions which have been forgotten is â?? how many teachers can be hired for 100$? Or in the worst case scenario â?? how many teachers will poor countries not be able to hire because they have bought cheap laptops?

(via Question Technology)

Posted on by mklang