MediaBerkman

The DiY Book Scanner community has produced a diverse ecosystem of book scanning hardware and software to address a wide range of human needs since it was founded in June 2009. Daniel Reetz- an artist and a Ph.D student studying visual neuroscience – recently developed a high-speed book scanning system using open source technology, cheap cameras, and garbage. In this talk he presents case studies from the DiY community, and fosters discussion on how the future of digital books can address unmet needs.

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CC photo courtesy of flickr user pugno_muliebriter

Vermont is currently the least connected state in the country and has been ranked among the bottom three states for government transparency and use of the Internet to deliver services. Matt Dunne – former State Senator, Head of Community Affairs for Google and current candidate for Vermont Governor – gives some suggestions on how states like Vermont can leapfrog a technology generation and lead the nation in connectivity, transparency and innovation.

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From pervasive doubtable usage of copyright works in Chinese web-sphere to Google’s latest dilemma in China, it seems the Internet as an open, universal and single network is still an “ought to” imagination but not a truth.

Donnie Dong (Hao Dong) – a Fellow at the Berkman Center and a Fulbright Junior Scholar – presents new developments about China’s IP (Intellectual Property), IG (Internet Governance) and IB (Internet Business), and discusses a possible new perspective from which to observe the Internet: Cyber-pluralism.

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Millions of people are now interacting in virtual worlds like Second Life and World of Warcraft using the guise of avatars. In these spaces, users can actually design their avatars to be subtly or radically different from who they are in real life.

And it turns out how people interact through their avatars – the signals they give one another through conversation and appearance – can tell us a lot about the choices and biases that inform our behavior in the real world.

Jeremy Bailenson of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab has been doing a number of experiments with people, avatars, and virtual worlds. As avatars become more common and more useful outside of gaming – people are already using avatars for virtual workplaces, customer service, and advertising – questions of ethics, trust, and honesty become significantly more important.

After all, it’s one thing if your avatar is casually conversing with, battling, or dating another avatar who might not be what he or she seems in real life. It’s quite another when corporations or political candidates realize that they can handcraft an avatar to take advantage of your biases and earn your trust for their own purposes.

Jeremy sat down with Judith Donath – who leads the Berkman Center’s Law Lab Spring 2010 Speaker Series: The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty – to talk more about this fascinating topic.

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Reference Section:
Watch the segment featuring the work of Jeremy and the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford
Watch Jeremy’s recent talk at the Berkman Center
Notes from the talk from Judith Donath

CC Music:
Jaspertine: “Pling”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user bettinatizzy

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Scientific research has been resistant to adopt the kinds of “generative” effects we’ve seen in networks and culture. John Wilbanks – Vice President of Science Commons – discusses the systemic sources of this resistance, and some of the interventions from free culture and free software world that are helping a generative system to emerge.

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Scientific research has been resistant to adopt the kinds of “generative” effects we’ve seen in networks and culture. John Wilbanks – Vice President of Science Commons – discusses the systemic sources of this resistance, and some of the interventions from free culture and free software world that are helping a generative system to emerge.

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Look out for a full quality archive of this video (with Q & A) soon!

Rebecca Bliege Bird tested a conventional hypothesis of cooperative hunting – that working together will yield higher returns than working alone – among female hunters of the Martu Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. She found that cooperation only provides increased returns to poorer hunters while disadvantaging better hunters. Rebecca tests a signaling model of benefit, which proposes that better hunters share a greater proportion of their catch than poorer hunters as a way to signal a commitment to public goods provisioning and egalitarianism through their ‘pecuniary disinterest’.

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…or download the OGG video format!

Rebecca Bliege Bird tested a conventional hypothesis of cooperative hunting – that working together will yield higher returns than working alone – among female hunters of the Martu Aboriginal communities in Western Australia. She found that cooperation only provides increased returns to poorer hunters while disadvantaging better hunters. Rebecca tests a signaling model of benefit, which proposes that better hunters share a greater proportion of their catch than poorer hunters as a way to signal a commitment to public goods provisioning and egalitarianism through their ‘pecuniary disinterest’.

Download the MP3

…or download the OGG audio format!

Transparency challenges the very existence of the Rule of Law.

That is the very provocative thesis of today’s guest, who suggests that there is a tragedy behind the web’s powerful lubricative effect on the flow of information. Data about your address, purchases, academic performance, travel itineraries, likes and dislikes are all quite simple to track down these days at little or no cost. We often give up this information voluntarily, in the interests of cultural participation, or obliviously when we simply skip a privacy notice.

And where it once took teams of archivists and researchers to dig up and collate dirt on people and institutions, today’s powerful automated online databases wield personal data over their subjects almost tyrannically, voiding the engineered obscurity of the past, and rendering anonymity obsolete.

Joel Reidenberg is the academic director of the Center on Law and Information Policy at Fordham University. We sat down with him to ask how we could re-engineer the web to fight transparency’s most dangerous effects.

Listen:
or download
…also in Ogg!

Reference Section:
Joel Reidenberg’s recent talk on this topic
John Palfrey’s notes from the talk
Adventures in Anonymity, Part I

CC Music this week:
Stefsax: “I Like it Like That (s.thaens)”
State Shirt: “Computer”

Photo courtesy of Flickr user watchcaddy

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