MediaBerkman

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Jim Bessen, Lecturer of Law at Boston University Law School, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Bessen’s presentation is titled “Patent Failure”. Bessen analyzes 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.

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Lewis Hyde, Berkman Fellow and Professor of Creative Writing at Kenyon College was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Hyde’s presentation was entitled “Reclaiming Fair Use for Scholars and Teachers.”

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Ioannis Miaoulis, President and Director of the Museum of Science, Boston, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Dr. Miaoulis discussed curriculum content for elementary, middle school and high school level and present how engineering makes all disciplines engaging, as well as his initiative at Tufts University to increase the number of female students studying engineering.

Dr. Miaoulis is an innovative educator with a passion for both science and engineering, Miaoulis championed the introduction of engineering into the Massachusetts science and technology public school curriculum. His dream is to make everyone, both men and women, scientifically and technologically literate.

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2008-02-12_miaoulis

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Judith Donath, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and director of its Sociable Media research group, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Donath’s presentation was titled “Designing Society”. In it, she presents several design projects from the Sociable Media Group. Some are visualizations of online interactions, which reveal important but hard to perceive social patterns. Others are experimental mediated social spaces, where the goal is to balance legibility with innovative computational capabilities.

The focus will be to show how design affects identity, reputation and trust - the foundations of society.

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Beth Kolko, Berkman Fellow and Associate Professor of Technical Communication at the University of Washington, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Kolko’s presentation was entitled “User, Hacker, Builder, Thief: Creativity and Consumerism in a Digital Age.”

The not very slow but definitely steady flow of computer technology into far corners of everyday life has changed fundamental cultural processes and affected how people work, learn, and play. It’s also provided lots of cool stuff to buy. But by some measures there has also been a somewhat fundamental failure of imagination in envisioning what hardware, software and services can look like which has resulted in users from outside targeted demographics adapting technology in unexpected and creative ways. This talk is about diversity of design, the cult of expertise, why hackers are the good guys and lays out the argument that theories of subjectivity and axe grinders can be part of the same conversation. Encouraging users to become hackers, builders, and thieves may be the best way to ensure creative and diverse design.

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Fernando Rodrigues, Brazillian journalist and Harvard Nieman Fellow was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Rodrigues spoke about journalism and access to public information in Brazil.

Journalist Fernando Rodrigues assembled a database with some 25,000 records of Brazilian politicians showing electoral information and personal data –including the list of personal assets of each politician who run for office in the three past general elections in Brazil (1998, 2002 and 2006). In 2006, the day the website was last updated, it drew 1,000,000 viewers. It is a free access website and voters can check whether a particular politician has increased his or her patrimony in a compatible way with the declared income. The database has also been an endless source of news stories for media outlets all over Brazil.

Collecting all that information was not an easy task, since Brazil does not have a Freedom of Information Act. Mr. Rodrigues also works with the National Forum of Right of Access to Public Information, a new advocacy group in favor of a FoIA for Brazil. The Forum teaches people how to require public information from government agencies despite that there is no clear legislation about it.

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Judith Donath on“Designing Society” - Podcast

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Danielle Citron of the University of Maryland Law School was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Citron’s presentation dealt with how technology and computer automation are altering due process and how a new model for regularity which embraces automation without sacrificing due process.

Danielle Citron is an Assistant Professor of Law, originally joining the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor in 2004. She teaches Civil Procedure, Information Privacy Law, LAWR I, and Appellate Advocacy. She was voted the “Best Teacher of the Year” by the University of Maryland law school students in 2005.

Professor Citron’s scholarly interests include information technology’s transformative effect on law and legal theory. Her article, “Minimum Contacts in a Borderless World: Voice over Internet Protocol and the Coming Implosion of Personal Jurisdiction Theory,” appeared in the U.C. Davis Law Review in 2006. Her most recent work includes “Technological Due Process,” which will appear in the Washington University Law Review and “Open Code Governance,” which will be published by the University of Chicago Legal Forum.

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Danielle Citron on “Technological Due Process” - Podcast

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Deb Roy, director of M.I.T Media Lab’s Cognitive Machines group, and Chair of the Academic Program in Media Arts and Sciences was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Roy’s presentation discussed The Human Speechome Project, an effort to observe and computationally model the longitudinal course of language development of one child at an unprecedented scale.

The Project is “collecting audio and video recordings for the first two to three years of one child’s life, in its near entirety, as it unfolds in the child’s home. To analyze the resulting massive audio-visual corpus, we are developing new data mining technologies to help human analysts rapidly annotate and transcribe recordings using semi-automatic methods, and to detect and visualize salient patterns of behavior and interaction.”

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