multicast

(or: When Systems Are Engineered, Who Gets the Best Addresses?)

In a project I’ve been working on about addressing systems in communication infrastructure (excited yet?), I’ve been telling people that early phone numbers were organized in part around the time it took to dial them on rotary telephones.

[a rotary dial -- click to enlarge -- photo by zen on flickr]

You see, youngsters, the weighted dial on a rotary telephone requires a fixed amount of time to dial each number.  It’s about one second per ten values so that the amount of time goes up as the number goes up, with one being the fastest number to dial (about a tenth of a second or 1 click) and zero being the slowest (about one second or 10 clicks).  These time estimates don’t include moving your fingers around, mind you.

You could say, who cares?  But if you add up all of the seconds required to dial and multiply by all of the phone calls, that’s a lot of seconds people spend dialing those nines and zeroes.

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(or: Inadvertently Illegal Programming, A Primer)

Earlier this month, Google’s official engineering blog confessed that the company’s Street View cars and bikes have “inadvertently” gathered personal data in transit on unencrypted Wi-Fi networks for the past three years (see the post: Wi-Fi Data Collection).  As chronicled in major news stories in the past three weeks, Google’s actions are under scrutiny by government regulators everywhere (see links to news stories at the end of this post).

[One of Google's Ominous-Looking Spy Cars
photo by byrion -- click to enlarge]

This is a topic close to my heart because my research group has been conducting similar surveys of wireless signals for the past five years as part of a project funded by the US National Science Foundation.  Here’s a picture of our own slightly less obtrusive Wi-Fi sampling car in South Central Los Angeles in 2005.  (On second thought, we shouldn’t have chosen a black SUV.  Too scary.)

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(or: Methods Quotes Without Any Context)

I recently participated in an invigorating conversation about the future of research methods and digital media.  As an experiment, instead of my usual note-taking at this event I wrote down complete quotations that I thought were interesting and compiled them into the list below.  As a form of note-taking it’s a little strange as it lacks all context–but still I enjoyed reading through these again after the event.  Maybe you will, too. I found that my notes ended up being a kind of list of provocations about research methods.  Thanks to those quoted for giving me permission to quote.

[Rainbow over Vierwaldstättersee;
photo by silvertje on flickr, click to enlarge]

Our conversation was so successful it may have caused this rainbow outside the window of the room where we were meeting.  Before the provocations, two brief notes:

First, in case you like this sort of thing, I have also archived four more pages of interesting quotes about research methods by Einstein, Tarde,  Camus, Feyerabend, and people like that elsewhere on mismethodology.info (pardon the strange Drupal theme of that site — it needs UI work).  I may move some or all of these over there at some point.

Second, I’m using quotation marks here because I tried for accurate quotations and I checked with the people quoted after the fact, but indeed I could still have misquoted someone as I was trying to write this stuff down very fast.

My co-presenter at this event, Anne Helmond, also blogged about this in a more normal prose style.

And now, to the provocations!

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(or: The Wonderful World of the Electromagnetic Spectrum)

(click to go to the podcast)

“It sounds like the most boring topic in existence…”  producer Dan Jones playfully used this quote (from me) to lead this week’s Radio Berkman podcast.  Our topic is the future of the electromagnetic spectrum.  David Weinberger skillfully interviews me about wireless.  As you may have noticed as you squint at this blog post on your smartphone, the future of the Internet is wireless.  My goal in the conversation was to try to talk about some of the most exciting and revolutionary ideas in wireless today without acronyms and jargon.  Hopefully I can prove it is not the most boring topic in existence.

Here’s a link to the audio (downloadable and playable from the browser): http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/6109 (~42 minutes)

Below I’ve typed up a summary of the big points in the podcast.

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(or: Now I’m a video blogger [sort of])

Here are my notes from our session at HASTAC 2010.  It was a pleasure to convene a virtual panel “there” this weekend with Alison Powell, Richard Rogers, Bodó Balázs, and David Phillips.  The whole thing is online (as a set of linked YouTube shorts, organized here).  These notes include notes on what I said and what everyone else said.

Future Social Science On and With Digital Media

Saturday, April 17, 2010 – 6:15 – 6:45 p.m. — location: cyberspace? (heh.)

ABSTRACT

What it means to study society is profoundly changing as we are increasingly surrounded by and incorporated into a pervasive network of digital media (Lazer et al, 2009).  In this panel, five scholars will comment for five minutes each on emerging research problems, opportunities, and methods in social science both with and about digital media.  Topics will include computational (or e-) social science, new forms and genres of social media, new methods and tactics, legal obstacles to transformative research, and challenges for future graduate education in the social sciences.

Here are the notes…

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