MediaBerkman

Say the idea is to re-awaken our feelings for plants even at our hyper-networked speed — do we want digital tools to do the re-wiring or are we convinced their auto-brightness and push notifications divert us from the living, breathing nonhuman sensorium?

Kyle Parry — a Researcher at metaLAB and a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies and Critical Media Practice at Harvard — initiates a conversation along these lines by way of a discussion of Digital Ecologies, metaLAB’s work-in-progress collaboration with Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum.

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Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is a collaborative effort founded by Vint Cerf and a large body of network researchers, dedicated to creating an Internet-scale ecosystem for truly open network measurement.

Measurement Lab allows researchers the ability to run open source broadband measurement tools on well-managed, near global infrastructure. WIth this data, made publicly available, M-Lab is creating a paradigm for collaborative science as the foundation for good, data-based policy.

Meredith Whittaker — Program Manager for Google Research — and Thomas Gideon — technical director for the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation — discuss the M-Lab’s network measurement architecture, and what is (and can be) done with the data it collects.

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What happens when a movie maker looks to the Web to work around the traditional entertainment system in which he is one of the leading figures?

In this panel, Rob Burnett — executive producer of “The Late Show with David Letterman” and creator of the much admired series “Ed” — discusses what he has learned as an entertainment industry insider trying to use the Web to let his newest project, “We Made This Movie,” find its audience.

Rob is joined by independent documentary storyteller Elaine McMillion (Hollow: An Interactive Documentary), and the Berkman Center’s David Weinberger and Jonathan Zittrain.

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Marc Abrahams — editor of the Annals of Improbable Research, host of the annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, and author of several books (including his latest, This is Improbable: Cheese String Theory, Magnetic Chickens and Other WTF Research) — leads a lively exploration of weird science, off-beat research, and things that go bump in the lab. Members of the Berkman Center community along with a group of special guests perform dramatic readings from bizarre studies discussed in Marc’s new book, and answer questions about what they have read based on no special knowledge whatsoever. Does it sound odd? Yes. Does it actually work? Surprisingly well.

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What if you could witness a crime taking place from space, and even step in to prevent it?

A group of researchers at Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative are trying to do exactly that.

As the nation of Sudan faced a complex crisis — a secession of the southern region that threatened to boil over into a civil war in 2011 — Nathaniel Raymond and his team at The Signal Program were carefully monitoring the conflict.

Their methods were uncommon. Using donated satellite imagery — the kind normally used to observe environmental conditions or create maps — the team tracked the movements of troops, military vehicles, and resources in near real-time, and used that information to alert humanitarian groups on the ground.

But it’s a process fraught with challenges, from imperfect imagery (imagine a cloud passing by just as you’re trying to spot tank movements), to the ethical questions that come with intervening in a conflict remotely.

So how does a group of civilians at Harvard go about monitoring an unfolding humanitarian disaster from space?

Our producer Frances Harlow spent a day with the team at the Signal Program to find out how they work.

(Click to find other episodes in our Drone Humanitarianism series!)

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Simply put, when it comes to information and access and use in a networked world, laws are imperfectly suited to deal with the diversity and fluidity of human behavior. The mixture of freedom and control that human beings require to flourish is achieved most effectively when regulatory architectures are characterized by operational transparency — by access to the underlying logic of information systems — and by semantic discontinuity — by gaps and inconsistencies within systems of meaning that leave room for the play of everyday practice.

In this talk, Georgetown Professor of Law Julie Cohen, highlights points from her new book “Configuring the Networked Self” that seek to remedy deficits in the law, and in the process to develop a unified framework for conceptualizing the social and cultural effects of legal and technical regimes that govern information access and use.

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How have politically engaged organizations used the web to fundamentally change how people organize and engage politically? Why are left wing organizations more likely to succeed in organization online? Why are conservatives less funny than liberals?

David Karpf chronicles the dozens of Netroots political organizations, both progressive and conservative, that have sprouted up with the mass adoption of the internet in his new book The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy.

On this 2012 election-themed episode of Radio Berkman he speaks with our host David Weinberger about how these organizations are having an impact on politics.

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Over the past year, the public has started to learn about the shadowy trade in software security exploits. Rather than disclosing these flaws to software vendors like Google and Microsoft who will then fix them, security researchers can now sell them for six figures to governments who then use them for interception, espionage and cyber war.

Are researchers who sell exploits simply engaging in legitimate free speech that should be protected? Or, are they engaging in the sale of digital arms in a global market that should be regulated?

In this talk, Chris Sogohian — Principal Technologist and a Senior Policy Analyst with the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union — discusses what should be done, if anything, about this part of the security industry.

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How do you make your own work Open Access (OA)? The question comes up from researchers at schools with good OA policies (like Harvard and MIT) and at schools with no OA policies at all.

In recognition of Open Access Week, Peter Suber — Director of the Harvard Open Access Project — and Stuart Shieber — Professor of Computer Science in the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences — discuss the Harvard Open Access Project, and suggest concrete steps for making your research OA.

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Under conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. But intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods; IP law governs the abilities of human beings to make and share culture, and to profit from this enterprise in a global knowledge economy.

In this talk, Madhavi Sunder — Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law and author of the new book From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice — calls for a richer understanding of intellectual property law’s effects on social and cultural life.

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