MediaBerkman

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Alexander Heffner senior at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

He is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Scoop08.com, an online national student newspaper dedicated to coverage of the 2008 presidential election. Heffner discusses how scoop08 is geared towards young adults and represents political ideas across the spectrum. Presently, Scoop08 has a network of several hundred student journalists across the country and abroad, and actively continues to recruit new editors and writers. Runtime: 01:14:23, size: 320×240, 165.4MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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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.

Runtime: 53:24, size: 320×240, 144.5MB, .MOV, H.264 codec

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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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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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Victoria Stodden, a lecturer at Stanford University, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Stodden discussed the possibilities and pitfalls how the internet affects democracy.

The Internet has enormous potential: it can educate voters on issues, provide tools for self expression to both peers and to policy makers, and even spread ideas about democratic notions themselves. This talk examines the benefits and pitfalls of these aspects and argues a successful approach to understanding the phenomena will address the problems created by the Internet as well as its potential.

Victoria Stodden recently finished her Statistics Ph.D. with Professor David Donoho at Stanford University. She is currently enrolled in the Law School and is teaching two classes there (Law 374 Empirical Legal Analysis and Law 468 Statistical Inference) as a Lecturer in Law. Victoria also completed a master’s degree in statistics at Stanford University, as well as a master’s degree in economics from the University of British Columbia.
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This week, Colin Rhinesmith speaks with Sam Bayard about copyright and fair use issues involved in a recent lawsuit against the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

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Music used in this podcast was sampled and remixed from a track titled “Jazz House” by the Wicked Allstars, available on Magnatune.

This is our last podcast for 2007. We’ll be back in January with episode #7. In the meantime, stay tuned on our blog at citmedialaw.org. To subscribe to the Citizen Media Law Podcast, visit our Subscriptions page or go directly to the podcast feed.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

This week, David Ardia talks about a recent lawsuit against iBrattleboro.com and Colin Rhinesmith speaks with Sam Bayard about an important decision on anonymity.

Download the MP3 (time: 8:20)

Music used in this podcast was sampled and remixed from a track titled “Jazz House” by the Wicked Allstars, available on Magnatune.

To subscribe to the Citizen Media Law Podcast, visit our Subscriptions page or go directly to the podcast feed. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Michael Anti, New York Times Beijing bureau researcher and fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Anti discussed how the recent surge in blogging has changed the state-run media landscape of China and altered the centralized control the ruling party holds over free expression in the world’s most populace nation.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Follow at Harvard, is a journalism researcher with the Beijing Bureau of New York Times. He runs several political columns on Chinese top newspapers and magazines. He was a war reporter for a Chinese newspaper in Baghdad in March 2003. His well-known Chinese political blog was shutdown by Microsoft in December 2005. In the wake of this case, he turned to run a collaborative online weekly magazine on International politics. He is an international jury member of Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
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Michael Anti, New York Times Beijing bureau reporter and fellow at Harvard University’s Nieman Foundation, was the guest speaker this week at the Berkman Center’s Luncheon Series.

Download the MP3 (time: 1:08:17)

Anti discussed how the recent surge in blogging has changed the state-run media landscape of China and altered the centralized control the ruling party holds over free expression in the world’s most populace nation.

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Follow at Harvard, is a journalism researcher with the Beijing Bureau of New York Times. He runs several political columns on Chinese top newspapers and magazines. He was a war reporter for a Chinese newspaper in Baghdad in March 2003. His well-known Chinese political blog was shutdown by Microsoft in December 2005. In the wake of this case, he turned to run a collaborative online weekly magazine on International politics. He is an international jury member of Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007.