There is an interesting discussion on Panos Ipeirotis’s blog about open-access publishing, and the ACM. He argues that the ACM should grant open access to its digital library because ACM’s stated goal is “Advancing Computing as a Science and a Profession,” and that this would be an effective way to do so. I’ve always thought that the ACM digital library fees were unnecessary. Like Panos, I don’t know what ACM’s expenses are, but I do know that conferences are profit centers, and that too many non-profitable years can lead to trouble for the sponsoring SIGs. Given that

• conferences make money from attendees,
• all typesetting costs are borne by authors these days,
• conferences are starting to abandon print proceedings (or to charge extra for them)

what is the rationale for charging for subsequent access to these papers? Continue Reading

A while ago I wrote about Evgeny Morozov’s Stanford talk (“Authoritarian Governments in Cyberspace”) about the use of social networking and other technology by authoritarian governments. While the Stanford talk was in some ways similar to his TED talk, it had more content and a slightly different focus. For those interested in the details, here’s a link to the slides.

While the slides were meant to illustrate rather than to echo the talk, they draw considerably on sources available on the web that could be followed up with a simple search.  It will be interesting to watch this space over the next few years as technology evolves and as governments get even more sophisticated.  While much of the effort that Morozov documents is aimed at controlling citizens of these regimes, the core competencies involved are also central to cyber-warfare.

Social media: a bigger game-changer than the Gutenberg press? More popular than porn on the Internet?

Socialnomics has collected some very persuasive stats into this beautifully designed dynamic-text video, “Social Media Revolution.” It’s worth watching in HD, full-screen mode (you’ll need to click through to YouTube for that though). Also, some YouTube commenters take issue with a few of the stats – so I wouldn’t necessarily use this for source material. I think it’s true in essence, however.

Yesterday, I attended a talk by Evgeny Morozov about the way that governments (but particularly authoritarian ones) have embraced social media for the purposes of disinformation and control. The typical assumption that the availability of communication technology increases dissenters’ ability to communicate and  to organize is rooted in the example of the fax machine and copier that were used in the USSR to distribute Samizdat (self-published) works. The devices are different these days, but the same equation is assumed to hold: connectivity x devices = democracy. Last summer’s post-election riots in Tehran, with the attendant Twitter narration, were taken in the same spirit.

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OK, it’s a sonnet, not an ode, but still. Making Light is one of my favorite blogs, run by science fiction editors Teresa and Patrick Nielsen Hayden; it has a rich subject range and a great community of commenters. I also enjoy its commenters’ tendency to break into verse at the least provocation. Google Wave (which Jeremy discussed here) was the topic of a recent post titled “Panhandling for invites” in which Abi Sutherland offers this delight:

The sea has depths in which no net is cast,
With trackless kelpine forests where great squid,
Like Sasquatch in his mountains safely hid,
Dance dreaming with the fishes swimming past.
And human interaction is the same.
Beneath an email surface lies the deep:
Unmodeled work and social patterns creep
And spread in ways existing tools don’t frame.

Go here to see the whole sonnet.

Almost 10 years ago, L. Sweeny published an analysis of summary census data that was used to identify 87% of respondents based only on their ZIP code, gender, and date of birth, data that we all think of (and the census treats as) relatively anonymous. At about the same time, I visited a friend at a large consulting firm who demonstrated data mining software that combined data from multiple sources and was able to discover many facts about people, that while not particularly revealing individually, painted a much more complete picture when federated. Now comes the news (thanks Daniel) that a group at MIT was able to make better-than-chance predictions about people’s sexual orientation using Facebook friends as training data. Whereas the census analysis and the data mining tools could be considered academic exercises on datasets to which most people don’t have access, the MIT results have much more immediate and potentially damaging implications.

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Recently, I had an opportunity to see the Babbage Difference Engine No. 2 (serial #2) in action. It’s an impressive piece of machinery, weighing in at about five tons, consisting of 25,000 parts. Mostly metal. It’s on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View through December, when Nathan Myhrvold takes it home and installs it in his living room, next to the T-Rex. Babbage built a few smaller models, but never saw the completion of the project after a falling out with his master builder and subsequent loss of funding from the government. Still, he had something like 12 years of funding to attempt to build the device. (He also made money on other inventions such as the cowcatcher at the front of steam engines.)

The Science Museum in London built Difference Engine No. 2 serial #1 in the late 1980s to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Babbage’s birth.

Front view showing the registers

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I recall from my youth in the Soviet Union a series of jokes structured around a fake talk radio call-in show. One example stuck with me:

Q: Is it possible to create a Communist regime in an arbitrary country? Say France, for example.

A: In principle, yes. But what has France ever done to deserve that?

I was reminded of this joke by a recent article describing how a school would be replacing its library with electronic devices. The plan is to replace the stacks with three large monitors, “laptop-friendly” study carrels, and 18 e-book readers (Amazon Kindles and Sony eReaders). They are also planning to replace textbooks with electronic versions, at least in math, and possibly in other subjects as well.

I can see many problems with this vision of the future of reading based on the notion that books are an outdated technology. I’ve written about e-books before (and I am still fond of the research we did in this space), and I find myself wondering about the wisdom of this venture by the headmaster of Cushing Academy.

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Preservation is a branch of library science dedicated to the maintenance of physical artifacts. Digital preservation, its modern offspring, concerns itself with the preservation of digital artifacts such as documents, movies, audio recordings, etc. But the challenges of digital preservation are complicated by interactivity characteristic of many digital artifacts. It’s not enough to save the bits, if the goal is to understand the experience of using something in its original form. I have in mind such things as interactive fiction, video and computer games, and other similar artifacts.

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In “The Library of Babel“, Jorge Luis Borges describes a library “…composed of an indefinite, perhaps an infinite, number of hexagonal galleries… ” lined with shelves of books. Unfortunately, the books are not organized in any predictable manner, causing librarians to travel “… in search of a book, perhaps of the catalogue of catalogues…” The searches, though, are in vain, given the improbability of finding what you seek in an infinite collection.

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