Society

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

"We see you" protest today

Sweden has been erratic in moving into the surveillance society. While the bureaucratic tools such as personal identity numbers and identity cards have been used (and abused) for a long time the icon of the surveillance age â?? the camera has not.

This may be due to the Swedish trust in government. State surveillance and control is in place to make society efficient for all therefore it is to be tolerated. Private surveillance is however suspicious â?? or at least it has been.

Legal changes in camera surveillance rules in 1998 began a trend of privatised surveillance which is today causing the massive use of surveillance cameras. Amongst the more unusual uses â?? which are novel in Sweden â?? are camera surveillance of schools and workplaces.

So with the late development of the surveillance state, Swedes are also slowly developing a reaction to it. Today an organisation called Vi Ser Dig (We See You) based at the University of Linköping will stand in a central square in Stockholm take pictures of passers by in an attempt to awaken interest in the almost dead surveillance debate.

Sergels Torg – picture from D. Kolb’s cool site Sprawling Places

So if you are anywhere near Sergels Torg (between 2pm-7pm) â?? bring a camera and become part of the protest.

VISERDIG.SE Uppmanar Allmänheten/Medier/Politiker att Närvara vid Manifestationen den 27/4 kl 14-19 med Syfte att Personifiera �vervakningen!

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

Scientific Publication in Europe

In the report Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets in Europe (full report here), Commissioned by Directorate-General for Research (January 2006) the following recommendations are made:

A1. Guarantee public access to publicly-funded research results shortly after publication.
A2. Aim at a ‘level-playing field’ in terms of business models in publishing
A3. ‘Extended Quality’ rankings of scientific journals
A4. Guarantee perennial access to scholarly journal digital archives
A5. Foster interoperable tools to improve knowledge, visibility, accessibility and dissemination
B1. Promote pro-competitive pricing strategies
B2. Scrutinize future significant mergers
B3. Promote the development of electronic publications
C1. Setting-up an advisory committee
C2. Further investigation

The market for scientific publications has been under development for a long time. Now the situation we have arrived at is warped. The writers apply for grants (often government grants) to research and write. Sometimes the writers even apply for grants to publish their material. When the material is published the libraries (often funded by public money) then pay to buy back the books or subscribe to the journals.

Very often the system implies that public funding pays for access to the same knowledge several times over. This is a subvention of the scientific publishing industry.

In addition to this the university text book industry has grown into a virutal monopoly where the major players control almost entire markets depending upon subject area. Mergers between the companies have created massive media companies that control the publication of university text books. This is reflected in the price of the litterature.

Posted on by mklang

22 days

Another 501 words added to the list. Making the total 87 565 spread over 178 pages. Today the work was on the Foucault & the Panopticon (Foucault Power/Knowledge 1980):

There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end up by interiorising to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be a minimal cost.

The reading tip of the day is “Panoptic Power and the Pathologisation of Vision” by Majid Yar.

Posted on by mklang

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“

Posted on by mklang

The patent myth

An important myth in our society is: Inventors make important stuff, Important stuff is patented and Patents equal money. Through Slashdot I came across this article in USA today

“Search for the most prolific inventors is a patent struggle Tuesday December 6, 8:44 pm ET

What living person holds the most U.S. patents? In this era of information and lightning searches – when patents are both more valuable than ever and a source of raging controversy – you’d think such a simple question would be easy to answer.”

The thing is what is it the most prolific US inventor was doing? Apparently floral related patents.

“Weder…has his name on 1,321 patents. Almost all have to do with items you’d find at a florist. Weder’s most recent patent – No. 6,962,021, granted Nov. 8 – is for a sleeve for holding a group of flowers. Before that, on Oct. 11, Weder was issued a patent titled, “Method of covering a flower pot.” On Sept. 20, he was issued a patent titled, “Method of covering a flower pot or floral grouping.””

While I am sure tha this is important stuff in Mr Weder’s business is it really the stuff that patent mythology should be about? Another example among the top patent holders was Mr Yamazaki

“…the USPTO database turns up 1,432 patents bearing his name, whupping both Edison and Weder. Yamazaki’s most recent patent, granted Nov. 22, was titled, “Reflective liquid crystal display panel and device using same.” His first patent, for a computer chip design, was granted in 1980. Yamazaki has averaged about a patent a week for 25 years.”

Can it be possible to invent something worth patenting every week for 25 years? The ideal of the patent as the icon of the industrial age seems to have moved along to another dimension…

Ok so I am not sure what this means. But it just seems strange. Not wrong, but strange. That patents are granted so readily. In the case of the floral patents – do all these patents really qualify as inventions? In the case of Mr Yamazaki, does an patentable increase of knowledge in society occur every week? For 25 years? Either we should interprete this to mean that the rest of us are bone idle, totally intellectually worthless or both. Or people like Mr Yamzaki and Mr Weder are their fields equivalents of Mozart.

Posted on by mklang

Gouranga, Be Happy

On the 2 December I recieved this spam.

Call out Gouranga be happy
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga!
That which brings the highest happiness…

The subject was “Gouranga” (naturally!). Now I get lots of spam but this one got me curious. Gauranga (Gouranga) is one of the names of an Indian monk Sri Caitanya Mahaprabhu. He founded the branch of Hinduism that was brought to the west during the 20th century by ISKCON (International Society for Krishna Consciousness) aka the Hare Krishna.

The word has also been used as graffitti on stickers and on moterway bridges in north west UK. The Urban Dictionary write: “It’s only purpose to annoy drivers who are left with a nagging curiosity for the rest of their day until the next day when it ceases to become important ever again.”

Another variation of Gouranga is an easter egg which appears in Grand Theft Auto where if you ran over a line of Hare Krishna the word Gouranga appeared. As in Dude!! I just ran over all those Hare Krishnas and got a GOURANGA!

Posted on by mklang

Thesis abstract

Strange as it may seem I have never actually written an abstract for my thesis. The title is Regulating Disruptive Technologies…the rattling you hear is the dried up remnants of a brain which seem to shake inside my skull when I write.

Different groups claim to be superstitous. I think deep down inside all Phd students are superstitious (a bit like Pascal’s gambit – the odds are better on believing!). So I will say that the date is closing fast but I will not utter the actual calender date.

Abstract
The main point of this thesis is to show that the regulation of technology is the regulation of democracy. To understand how the regulation of technology effects the regulation of democracy this thesis will study the regulatory activities of the regulator and the reactions of those being regulated. The driving force is the understanding of the effect of technological change upon social institutions. This work will examine the technological challenges to central social institutions and show that the technological change has far outpaced the evolution of the social concepts in these areas and as a result the technology can be viewed as being a disruptive force in society.

The understanding of the concept of disruption within this work is important. Disruption is as an agent of change in society. Change is a semi-autonomous driving force in society brought about by disruption. Therefore, disruption is the motor of change, change is what pushes, or pulls, society forward. Therefore the basis of this thesis is that disruption is good.

The locus of this work is the Internet. The study is on the regulation and over-regulation of Internet based activities. The measure of whether a technology has been regulated or over-regulated will depend upon the democratic effects of the regulation. If the implemented regulation tends to not only regulate unwanted/undesirable behaviour but regularly criminalises or frustrates many types of legitimate behaviour then the situation is one of over-regulation.

It is therefore the purpose of this thesis to look at the use of power through the regulatory structures. While the study of the creation and adaptation of regulation shows the movements and flows within structures, the reactions towards regulation shows the human actors desires to adapt and negotiate the new social orders being created. To better understand these processes it is necessary to look at the way in which technology can be seen as a disruptive force and the way in which technology and democracy are being linked together in rhetoric and practice. This thesis will exemplify, discuss and analyse the democratic effects of the disruptive effects being brought about by technology and the attempts to regulate information and communications technology (ICT).

The development of understanding of the way in which we regulate disruptive technology helps us to understand the regulation of that which is new and which threatens that which is established. The results of such a study can then be applied to all domains where regulation of disruptive technology may occur. This may be within an organisation, a family group, a multi-national corporation or a state.

Posted on by mklang

WSIS, Internet Governance and Human Rights

Time: Monday, October 3, 2005, 09.00 – 17.00
Venue: Hammarskog Conference Centre, Uppsala

Registration: johan.hellstrom@kus.uu.se
More practical information Background material

Why is there no debate or no media reports in Sweden about the emerging and existing information society and Internet governance issues? Internationally, the discussion is at its peak, with the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) coming up in November in Tunis. Sweden, being one of the countries with the highest Internet access rates and with the ambition to be a leading nation on information and communication technology (ICT) usage and development, should be more involved in the international debate and also more concerned about the implications of Internet governance and Internet usage for society at large.

One reason for the absent debate is the existing intellectual divide between ICT and Internet management experts on the one hand, and democracy and human rights experts on the other. Technologists know how information technology can be managed and manipulated – but show little interest in or do not understand the implications for democracy and human rights.
More background

Keynote Speakers
Avri Doria (USA/Israel). Member of the UN Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG). Technical Consultant, Providence, Rhode Island, USA. Researcher at the School of Technoculture, Humanities and Planning, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden.

Astrid Dufborg (Sweden). Special ICT Adviser, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Sweden. Convenor of the UN ICT Task Force Working Group on Enabling Environment.

Mathias Klang (Sweden). Researcher in the field of access to technology and technology rights at the Department of Informatics, University of Göteborg. Responsible for Creative Commons in Sweden. Editor of the book “Human Rights in the Digital Age” (Glasshouse Press, 2005).

Website
http://www.kus.uu.se/en/activities/activities/20051003e.shtml

Posted on by mklang