This fall, I will almost certainly be going to grad school in computer science. My options are Rice (where I’d be working with Dan Wallach), Princeton (with Ed Felten), and CMU (with Jim Herbsleb). Felten and Wallach both do research on computer security, with an emphasis on e-voting. Herbsleb studies open source software from a software engineering and economics perspective. I’ve now had a chance to talk to all three of them, and all three of them sound like they’d be great fun to work with. All three of them are interested in the kind of interdisciplinary CS/public policy research I’m hoping to do, although Princeton’s IT Policy Center probably gives it an edge in that respect.
I’ve got a few more weeks to make my decision. If you’ve got first-hand experience with any of these CS programs and would be willing to share your thoughts, I’d love to hear from you: leex1008 (at) umn.edu.
Back in December, I wrote about a good article in Democracy by Beth Simone Noveck, director of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. Her article highlighted the Peer-to-Patent experiment being conducted with the Patent and Trademark Office.
A response has now been published by Andrew Keen, a critic of all things 2.0 heretofore unknown to me – and for good reason. Keen’s response is drivel.
Continue reading →
Over at Business Week, I take the “con” side of the question: “When considering job applicants, prospective employers have no business poking around their profiles on social networking sites.” My conclusion:
the bottom line is that a public Facebook page is just that: public. People are responsible for what they post. It’s unreasonable to make personal information available to the whole world and not expect employers to look at it.
Facebook gives users the option of keeping their profiles private, and so does blogging software such as LiveJournal. Users should take advantage of these options for information they don’t want considered by potential employers. But if applicants choose to make information about themselves available to the world, they can hardly object when employers take that information into account in hiring decisions.
My worthy opponent, Greg Fish, seems to have interpreted the question in a slightly strange way. If the question had been “should employers take inaccurate or irrelevant information into account in hiring decisions,” I’d obviously agree with him. But the solution is to take online information with a grain of salt, not to avoid looking at it altogether.
This week over at Net Family News, my friend Anne Collier interviews Dr. Jerald Block, a psychiatrist in Portland, Ore., who has worked with patients suffering from Internet or video game addiction. Dr. Block has developed this mnemonic to identify the ‘SIGNS’ that kids or adults may be on the road to Net or gaming addiction. “If one or more of these questions are answered ‘yes’ AND the person is having interpersonal problems, he/she is at risk,” says Dr. Block. Sadly, I find I am clearly suffering from several of these symptoms. Are you?
S = Sleep cycle is consistently advanced. Goes to sleep later and wakes later or is tired in the morning.
I = Irritable when not on the computer. Preoccupied thinking about the computer and their activities there (sex, gaming, browsing, tuning the system up, etc.). Can become enraged if told to stop using.
G = Guilty about his/her computer use so tries to hide evidence of 1) game/porn purchases, 2) online activities (deletes cache, uses encryption/passwords, etc.), and 3) logs on secretly, etc.; 4) defensive when confronted.
N = Nightmares. Dreams about his or her gaming/computer use.
S = Social dropouts – people who become more isolated by their computer use. This is seen when there is a consistent pattern of sacrificing real-life relationships to preserve virtual ones. Alternatively, seems to prefer living in virtual worlds more than their real one. These people become NEETs: ‘Not in Employment, Education, or Training.’
Here is the third and (blessedly) final installment of Dan Mitchell’s Laffer Curve videos. (Here’s the first and here’s the second.)
This one is really exciting – hey, it’s all relative – because he takes the Joint Committee on Taxation to task about how they score changes in tax rates.
http://www.youtube.com/v/ATDzKSOQCi8&hl=en
One sometimes wonders if the drive to return to a less massive state (let alone a minimal one) is worth it, given the low odds of success in the face of what someone (de Toqueville?) warned of: That democracy would last until the voters discovered they could vote themselves a bounty from the Treasury. As Jonathan Rauch adds, we have met the special interests, and they are us.
Another tactic? Hope that the private economy grows fast enough that the size of government remains relatively tolerable? Alas, that government was conceived of as a necessary evil, and thus tinkers around with the foundation of things, the money supply–potentially derailing the whole economic enterprise. There are more problems than spending. John Rutledge presents “the Fed Giveth and the Fed Taketh Away.”
I love these opening lines in Jose Antonio Vargas’s article this morning about the vigorous online conversation that has been taking place about race, Barack Obama, and the controversy regarding past remarks made by his friend, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
In the church of the Internet, call him the preacher heard all around our YouTubing world, where believers not only watch the videos of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s controversial and racially charged sermons but also edit them, comment on them, pass them around. And make them their own.
Wright’s homilies — including the one where he says “God damn America” — have taken on a new life,
opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it. It’s about race, Sen. Barack Obama, the presidential campaign, us.
Think about that line for a moment: “opening up a conversation so kaleidoscopic only the vastness of the Internet has room for it.” In a few of my recent essays about the annual State of the News Media report as well as Andrew Keen’s rants against “amateur” media, I have argued that we should appreciate just how much better our deliberative democracy is today thanks to the Internet, new media technologies, and user-generated content. Some critics bemoan the fact that we no longer have a handful of media intermediaries moderating or filtering that conversation, but this Obama-Wright issue provides us with a wonderful case study about why that thinking is so utterly misguided. As Vargas suggests, a conversation about race and politics is a conversation about us as a people; as a society. Shouldn’t, therefore, “we the people” all be able to have our voices heard in that conversation in one way or another? The Internet enables that, and we are better off for it. Thirty years ago, 3 big networks and a few newspapers would have determined the confines and duration of this discussion. Today, we do.
I’m seeing more and more people joining Twitter and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it. My initial reaction to Twitter was skepticism, but I became a convert after I subscribed to Clay Shirky’s feed and received a tweet from him a couple hours later about his talk in D.C. that I would have never known about. That was useful, and since then I’ve found Twitter more and more useful.
First of, I’d like to explain what it is for the sake of those who don’t know. I’ll do so by way of video:
http://www.youtube.com/v/ddO9idmax0o&hl=en
The first thing to note is that Twitter is a classic example of network effects because its usefulness increases relative to the number of users on it. Its usefulness also increases exponentially when people you know and care about make there way onto it. The network seems to be growing in concentric circles and while it’s been dominated by the elite digerati in Silicon Valley so far, it seems to be making its way to DC now.
The video presents Twitter as a way to let people know what you’re doing at the moment. In fact, Twitter itself suggests that you use the service to answer the question, “What are you doing?” But if we took that literally, like some do, Twitter would truly be dull: “Going to the bank,” “Eating ice cream,” “Going to sleep.” Alex King suggests that the “what are you doing” question be replaced with the imperative, “Say something interesting.” In practice that’s what most people have done.
My friend Julian Sanchez uses Twitter mostly to announce at which bar he is currently so that anyone nearby who gets his tweet on a mobile phone can drop in an join him for a drink. I’m sure people join him who otherwise wouldn’t have. Blogger Robert Scoble uses it to crowdsource. Recently he was scheduled to interview the CFO of Amazon on stage before a conference. He’s got about 13,000 people in his network and he asked them what he should ask the CFO. He got back many insightful questions he would never have thought up himself. (As an aside, I’m curious if you know of other innovative uses. Post in the comments.)
Ultimately the best thing about Twitter is that it’s a different experience for each user. You only see the tweets of the people you follow. If someone’s not your cup of tea, you can silently boot them. The result is a stream of interesting stuff that only gets more useful as more people you know get on it. In the short while I’ve been on it I’ve been pointed to more interesting article, sites, and videos than I could have imagined. Give it a whirl… and follow me!
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.