OLPC News: Confessions of a Fundamentalist
For the past 30 months, I have been part of an effort to bring about a global transformation of education through the provision of connected “ultra-low-cost” laptop computers; computers that will provide an agency through which to positively impact learning, and consequently, everything that learning impacts, in particular, economic development.
Wondering about status messages amongst other things
Status messages with a difference. Not aggregated, not summarised, but built around a capillary-action publish-subscribe model. Truly personalised.
Neato.
One of Dopplr’s founding principles was to give travellers a way to understand
the carbon impact of their travels. Now we’ve launched a tool that can
calculate the carbon you use on every trip you make.Click here to see it:
http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/me/carbon
The calculator uses technology from AMEE, an organisation that provides “a
neutral, open platform for measuring the ‘Carbon-Footprint’ of anything,”. You
can find out more about AMEE here:
Things that have been sitting in my inbox for too long. In the spirit of 10:
10 years of design, notes, and more.
Negroponte’s 4 predictions for the future (in 1984)
In excerpts from his 2-hour talk (this was before TED’s 18-minute time limit), he foreshadowed web interfaces, touchscreen kiosks, the multitouch interface of the iPhone, and his own One Laptop per Child project. Oh, and there’s also a fascinating project called Lip Service, which … well, let’s just say it’s still ahead of us.
VHS Tapes about the internet from the early 90s (via waxy)
On search engines:
“To get started, we have to sift through the vast amounts of information on the Internet and find what we need. The best way to do this is by using one of the many Search Engines available. These sites gather the information that is out there and categorize it so we can narrow our search. One popular site to do this is called Yahoo!”
The list of search engines on the slide is a great flashback. “Web Crawler, Lycos, Einet, WWW Worm, Yahoo, Info Seek, Savvy Search… and More”
“Normally, these sites would take a few seconds to load to your computer, but in the interest of time, we’re cutting to them through editing for the purposes of this video.”
Later, they cover a long-lost site called “The Weatherman,” where you email your trip profile and a nice guy named George Gatto emails you a weather forecast by hand. I can’t imagine that’d scale very well.
Special Berkman Webcast Event with Jesse Dylan and Rob Holzer, Thursday 3/6 at 10:30AM
Jesse Dylan, the director behind will.i.am‘s Yes We Can video, and Rob Holzer, CEO of Syrup NYC, will discuss the next stage of their attempt to build a movement geared around the Hope|Act|Change web site (hopeactchange.com) in a special Berkman webcast event this Thursday (3/6) at 10:30AM ET. This is meant to be a discussion on how they can further develop their website, and through the Net, engage Americans in the process of political change. (The Hope|Act|Change site is not affiliated with the Obama Campaign and does not promote the candidate.)
This event will be webcast live at 10:30 AM ET on this page. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life on Berkman Island.
Links
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Video from Clay’s book talk has been posted here.
Yesterday, internet luminary and writer Clay Shirky joined us for a special day of Berkman@10 events at the Berkman Center and Harvard Law School. In the afternoon, Clay lead an intimate conversation at the Berkman Center on “protest culture,” which we’ll be releasing the video of through MediaBerkman in the upcoming weeks. Clay also gave a book talk at Harvard Law School, on the very first day his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations was released, and shot to the #1 for the Computers and Internet category on Amazon.com. David Weinberger liveblogged by the afternoon as well as the evening talks. Mary Joyce of the Internet & Democracy project offers her thoughts on the book talk as well. Cory Doctrow calls the book a “masterpiece” and reviews the book for boingboing.
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations is now available at your local bookseller and online, so be sure to buy your copy today! To learn more about Clay Shirky’s work, visit his homepage.
More pictures have been posted to our flickr stream.
Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Jim Bessen, Lecturer in Law at Boston University School of Law
Topic: Patent Failure
Tuesday, March 4, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA
Is the U.S. patent system broken? Recently, business leaders, policymakers, and inventors have complained to the media and to Congress that today’s patent system stifles innovation instead of fostering it. James Bessen will discuss a broad range of evidence on the economic performance of the patent system. He finds that patents provide strong incentives for firms in a few industries, but for most firms today, patents actually discourage innovation because they fail to perform as well-defined property rights. This analysis provides a guide to policy reform.
About Jim
James Bessen is recognized as an innovator in the electronic publishing industry, having developed one of the first commercially-successful desktop publishing programs. As both an economics researcher and a hands-on industry participant at different levels, he brings a unique perspective to the study of innovation.
Bessen wrote the first WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) PC publishing software in 1983 and founded a company, Bestinfo, in 1984 to market desktop publishing solutions to commercial publishers. Over the next few years, Bestinfo developed the first system to support PC publishing networks and the first single-source system for commercial-quality page makeup and color imaging. Over 1,000 commercial publishers purchased Bestinfo systems ranging from the Sears Catalogue to Prosveshcheniye (the largest Russian book publisher), from Cahners and Reed (the largest trade magazine publishers in the U.S. and U.K.) to Inc. magazine and TV Guide.
In 1986 Bestinfo received funding from Sevin Rosen Venture Capital with Ben Rosen and Dennis Gorman serving on the Board. In 1993 Bestinfo was acquired by Intergraph.
Bessen is currently Lecturer in Law at Boston University School of Law and he contributes to the Technological Innovation and Intellectual Property newsletter/blog.
Links
+ Bio
+ Book Page (includes several chapters)
Webcast
This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. For information about our event webcasts and remote participation, see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/webcas…. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman, at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkma….
RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to Amar Ashar at rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu by March 3 at 12:00PM
Berkman@10: Clay Shirky on “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations” 
Thursday, February 28, 6:00 PM
Austin West Classroom, Austin Hall
Harvard Law School
No RSVP Required – This Event is Free and Open to The Public
“Here Comes Everybody” is about the social changes coming as a result of the internet’s power to support group action. Sharing, conversation, collaboration, collective action; all of these forms of group effort have been hampered by the myriad real-world difficulties of finding and coordinating with others. Our new group-forming media have removed many of those difficulties, and we are in the middle of a transformation of all kinds of group action.
About Clay
Clay Shirky studies the way communications tools alter or amplify social life; his current work is on large-scale collaborative n
etworks. Mr. Shirky is on the faculty at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program, and has worked as an advisor or consultant to many organizations, including Yahoo, Microsoft, the U.S. Navy, the BBC, and Lego. He has also been an advisor to many social startups, including Meetup, Social Text, del.icio.us, Flickr, and Dodgeball. Mr. Shirky is the author of the forthcoming book, “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations”, which examines the ways in which new forms of social media are allowing for new kinds of collaborative action.
Links
Berkman@10
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Through research, events, and discussion, Berkman@10 considers “The Future of the Internet” – to celebrate the work we have done together over the past decade, and to look ahead to what we hope to accomplish collectively in the next. Visit http://www.berkmanat10.org for more information.
(Image via Joi Ito and licensed under Creative Commons)
Today at 12:30pm, we’ll have an open lunch at the Berkman Center. Please feel free to bring topics for discussion and/or questions. We’ll be running the question tool and the IRC Chat, as well. Please note that today’s scheduled luncheon guest, Alex Heffner, will not be presenting today, and will be rescheduled for a later date this semester. If you plan to attend the lunch in person today, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu
David Weinberger is liveblogging the event.
Kevin Parker is liveblogging the event.
Wendy Seltzer is liveblogging the event.
Drew Clark is liveblogging the event.
Join the live IRC Chat in the room.
Post a question for discussion here.
Listen to the live webcast here.
FCCBoston08 Del.icio.us Tag Stream
Statement from Adelstein (PDF)
(These notes are by no means complete and comprehensive – and represent a summary, not a transcript, of the event)
4:00: Kevin Parker writes:
“Back to questions…
C. Martin: Should we investigate usage caps over time? P. Clark: Yes, you need to be careful, but we should recognize that there are costs associated with usage. This allows ISPs to have a postive engagement with customers instead of a negative one. This is simillar to the way things work in wireless.
P. Clark: The models don’t work very well. How do we quantify what is acceptable congestion? This is hard and Comcast has tried to say that it is what doesn’t interfere with others. How do we impose fairness among users? Nobody can send bits faster than anyone else at the same time (this is the historical approach). There has to be some way to deal with congestion.”
3:50: Playback of submitted selected video comments from the public
3:30: Via David Weinberger:
“Daniel Weitzner of MIT says the entire Web is peer-to-peer, although not technically. People use the Net in a synchronous, P2P manner. E.g., pages are pulled together from info all over. We depend on the open nature of the Web to enable that.
Richard Bennett (network architect): Does free speech require abandoning the active mgt of net traffic? If so, then we have to shut down the Internet. Is it legit to manage the Net by discriminating by application? The Net and its constituent nets serve different apps. E.g., VOIP needs to avoid jitter. It makes sense to move apps that don’t care about jitter (e.g., email) to the back of the queue. BitTorrent is insensitive to jitter; you care about the time between first and last packet, but not jitter of individual packets….except for apps like Vuze, but RB doubts Vuze’s business viability. If we abandon app discriminatory we have to get rid of IP because it includes info about the app in the packets. Get rid of Wifi because QoS discriminates among apps. Get rid of difference between UDP and TCP. We have to get rid of discrimination within their own homes. Even on Ethernet we have to discriminate among apps, e.g., WoS for audio systems to avoid lipsynching issues If you add capacity to a network, you’ve only moved the bottleneck from the first hop to the second hop. NN would inhibit rural delivery since it depends on wifi. So, sit back. We’ll solve it with more bandwidth and with revisions of the apps that use it, like BitTorrent.
David Clark says that TV is central here because it increases the traffic and it’s a collision of pricing models. We should be partnering, not fighting. Let’s talk about business model. The usage cost to Comcast for a month of user usage might be around $0.50. TV usage is 40 times as much (taking reasonable estimates), i.e., $20/month to cover your user costs. What’s going to give is the all you can eat flat rate pricing. We have to find a way that will be acceptable to the user. David likes selling tiers of consumption.”