SIVACRACY.NET

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:22 PM | Comments (1)

Whoa. Jezebel has the story and the clip.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:47 PM | Comments (0)

Today was a good day for you. You got endorsed by John Edwards and by NARAL. But please, stop calling women "sweetie," we don't like it. No more of this, okay?

UPDATE: Jim Chen does a better job with this than I did.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 4:37 PM | Comments (0)

Clay Shirky writes:

... If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise, I'd say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened--rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before--free time.

And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.

We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.

And it's only now, as we're waking up from that collective bender, that we're starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We're seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody's basement.

This hit me in a conversation I had about two months ago. As Jen said in the introduction, I've finished a book called Here Comes Everybody, which has recently come out, and this recognition came out of a conversation I had about the book. I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, "What are you seeing out there that's interesting?"

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus--"How should we characterize this change in Pluto's status?" And a little bit at a time they move the article--fighting offstage all the while--from, "Pluto is the ninth planet," to "Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system."

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, "Okay, we're going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever." That wasn't her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, "Where do people find the time?" That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, "No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you've been masking for 50 years."

So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project--every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in--that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it's a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it's the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, "Where do they find the time?" when they're looking at things like Wikipedia don't understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that's finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.

Now, the interesting thing about a surplus like that is that society doesn't know what to do with it at first--hence the gin, hence the sitcoms. Because if people knew what to do with a surplus with reference to the existing social institutions, then it wouldn't be a surplus, would it? It's precisely when no one has any idea how to deploy something that people have to start experimenting with it, in order for the surplus to get integrated, and the course of that integration can transform society.

The early phase for taking advantage of this cognitive surplus, the phase I think we're still in, is all special cases. The physics of participation is much more like the physics of weather than it is like the physics of gravity. We know all the forces that combine to make these kinds of things work: there's an interesting community over here, there's an interesting sharing model over there, those people are collaborating on open source software. But despite knowing the inputs, we can't predict the outputs yet because there's so much complexity. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 8:18 PM | Comments (0)

Andres Guadamuz has the story here.

Via.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 7:47 PM | Comments (0)

Submit Your Picks for Tech Policy Leaders: Nominations Open for the 2008 IP3 Awards! | Public Knowledge:

We’re now accepting nominations for our annual IP3 Awards. Each year, Public Knowledge singles out three people who have advanced the public interest in one or more of the “three IPs”: Intellectual Property, Internet Protocol, and Information Policy.

As technology advances, the roles of users, content creators, and service providers expand and blur. This year, more than ever, the areas have overlapped in debates around patents, copyright, net neutrality on the Internet and on other networks, the use of spectrum, and many others. As new questions arise at the intersection of law and technology, certain individuals come forward to advance to public interest in each of the three types of “IP”.

As always, we need your help in choosing this year’s winners. So please send your nominations to IP3nominees@publicknowledge.org, or post your picks in the comments below.

With your nomination, please send us your reason, however brief, for suggesting the individual and a means of contacting them. We will accept anonymous nominations, but we’d like to be able to contact the nominating parties in case we need further information. We need your nominations by June 1st, 2008. IP3 Award winners will be invited to attend the October 16, 2008 awards ceremony in Washington, DC.

Previous winners can be found here.

We have a distinguished panel of judges who will be selecting our winners from the list of nominees:

* Jim Burger: Member, Dow Lohnes PLLC
* Bruce Gottlieb: FCC Official
* Kathleen Wallman: President, Wallman Consulting LLC
* Jennifer Urban: Clinical Associate Professor, University of Southern California Law School; Visiting Professor, Stanford Law School
* Richard Whitt: Washington Telecom and Media Counsel, Google
* Tim Wu: Professor, Columbia Law School

Click on the link above to submit your nominations in the comments field.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:53 AM | Comments (0)

FROM HERE!

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:39 PM | Comments (0)

Above is the image Willamette Week, a previously normal seeming alternative news weekly, used to illustrate its decision to endorse Obama. I very much want Obama to win, but supporters like these make me really nervous.

Oh, no.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 6:36 PM | Comments (0)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 1:05 PM | Comments (1)

Does this mean he wants Obama to be the candidate? Or is he trying to fool people into thinking that is what he wants?

Posted by Ann Bartow at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)

Helen Thomas reports:

Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.”

The Post’s ombudsman, Deborah Howell, said about 20 readers complained about the photo, while a few readers praised the Post for publishing the stark picture on page one. ...

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:34 AM | Comments (0)

From the publisher's website:

Hidden in Plain Sight tells the tragic untold story of children's rights in America. It asks why the United States today, alone among nations, rejects the most universally embraced human-rights document in history, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. This book is a call to arms for America to again be a leader in human rights, and to join the rest of the civilized world in recognizing that the thirst for justice is not for adults alone.

Barbara Bennett Woodhouse explores the meaning of children's rights throughout American history, interweaving the childhood stories of iconic figures such as Benjamin Franklin with those of children less known but no less courageous, like the heroic youngsters who marched for civil rights. How did America become a place where twelve-year-old Lionel Tate could be sentenced to life in prison without parole for the 1999 death of a young playmate? In answering questions like this, Woodhouse challenges those who misguidedly believe that America's children already have more rights than they need, or that children's rights pose a threat to parental autonomy or family values. She reveals why fundamental human rights and principles of dignity, equality, privacy, protection, and voice are essential to a child's journey into adulthood, and why understanding rights for children leads to a better understanding of human rights for all.

Compassionate, wise, and deeply moving, Hidden in Plain Sight will force an examination of our national resistance--and moral responsibility--to recognize children's rights.

HIghly recommended!

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 7:33 PM | Comments (0)

Read Tomasky.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 7:09 PM | Comments (0)

Mike Madison has the details.

Posted by Siva Vaidhyanathan at 6:51 PM | Comments (1)

Michael Madison passes on some great news:

Berkman Center Executive Director John Palfrey will become the new Director of the Harvard Law Library (the appointment is actually “Vice Dean of Library and Information Resources“).

Congrats to John for this position!

Michael asks whether this means that other folks without formal library training should be considered for such positions. He writes:

I’m guessing that John Palfrey persuaded Elena Kagan, the HLS Dean, that the substantive and methodological challenges that librarians confront these days are not significantly different than the substantive and methodological challenges that any manager of a complex information environment confronts. Not anyone can manage the Harvard Law Library, but there may no longer be anything distinctively “library-ish” about the position.

Frankly, almost all jobs in a university library demand the skills, knowledge, and networks that a good library school provides.

But director or dean may be the most obvious exception. Harvard University recently appointed historian Bob Darnton as its library dean. And Michigan has former provost Paul Courant -- an economist -- as its library dean. By all accounts both of them have leveraged their vast experience working with and in libraries to improve those already excellent systems. Of course, much of what they have to do is raise money. But they also have to set agendas, make policy, and lobby the administration for resources.

So being a trained librarian is nice, but not necessary.

I would, however, argue that only the exceptional non-librarian should do such a job. Loving libraries and valuing the professional skills of the staff is just as important as any status or knowledge one brings to such a position.

In the case of John Palfrey's new job, he is exceptional. So it's a great move. John has been in the trenches of the open-access movement as much as anyone. He provides energy, knowledge, experience, and contacts that few others could offer.

To turn the question around: Should law schools consider hiring librarians or other non-lawyer academics to be their deans, even if they lack the three-year degree? After all, it's just the management of a complex information and labor environment, right? :)

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:11 PM | Comments (0)

Info/Law has the scoop. Here's an excerpt:

I’ve been sitting on this post for what seems like an eternity, but the news embargo has been lifted, and we’re all free to share the fantastic news from Harvard Law School, where the faculty voted unanimously to provide open access to faculty scholarship in an online repository. This makes Harvard the nation’s first law school to make a public commitment to principles of open access (although such policies are well known in the scientific and engineering communities, where they have been driven by astronomical [and still rising] journal subscription fees).

“Each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows of Harvard College permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. More specifically, each Faculty member grants to the President and Fellows a nonexclusive, irrevocable, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit. The policy will apply to all scholarly articles authored or co-authored while the person is a member of the Faculty except for any articles completed before the adoption of this policy and any articles for which the Faculty member entered into an incompatible licensing or assignment agreement before the adoption of this policy.”

This is great news for anyone with Internet access and a thirst for legal erudition. I hope many law schools follow suit.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 3:03 PM | Comments (0)

Law Prof John Duffy says so, in this article. For an overview, check out Jim Chen's post at Jurisdynamics.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 2:52 PM | Comments (0)

EFF reports:

The FBI has withdrawn an unconstitutional national security letter (NSL) issued to the Internet Archive after a legal challenge from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). As the result of a settlement agreement, the FBI withdrew the NSL and agreed to the unsealing of the case, finally allowing the Archive's founder to speak out for the first time about his battle against the record demand.

The NSL was served on the Archive -- a digital library recognized by the state of California -- and its attorneys in November of 2007. The letter asked for personal information about one of the Archive's users, including the individual's name, address, and any electronic communication transactional records pertaining to the user. Kahle, who is also a member of EFF's Board of Directors, decided to fight the NSL because it exceeded the FBI's limited authority to issue such demands to libraries.

Deven Desai has some relevant obseravtions here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:50 PM | Comments (0)

Those of us who prefer Obama but still like Clinton (or vice versa, hi Catherine!) can take heart from posts like this one from Obama supporter Jason Chervokas and Clinton blogger Tom Watson.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:39 PM | Comments (0)

Anyone know? Some information is here.

Posted by Ann Bartow at 9:13 PM | Comments (0)

It's fun.