New Zealand has decided that trying to amend copyright for the digital age is like trying to adjust a horse’s carburetor. So, it’s going to start all over again.

That’s what we ought to do. Fresh piece of paper, a very big table, and an open bar. I don’t see any other way forward, really.

[Tags: copyleft copyright new_zealand ]

Joi Ito posts about whether we’ve agreed upon the syntax of retweeting: If I want to twitter one of your tweets and add my own comment, do I do it as “RT @you: your comment Me: My comment” or as “RT @you:your comment [Me: my comment]” or what? Of course, there was a bunch of twittering about this, which Joi captures.

It’s fun to watch syntax emerge. As Ethanz tweets: “Microformat development in 140 chars or less…”

[Tags: twitter standards ethan_zuckerman joi_ito everything_is_miscellaneous ]

WorldNetDaily’s article about Cass Sunstein is laughably wrong and scarily partisan. Now that Obama has nominated Sunstein to head the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, the anonymous article in WND presents suggestions and ideas in Sunstein’s nuanced and clear-eyed works as if Sunstein were putting them forward as federal policy. The weirdest is Sunstein’s thought that it’d be useful if software could tell you that a message you’re about to send is a flame, and then keep you from pressing the send button hastily. In the hands of WND, this becomes Sunstein using the power of the federal government to mandate that it read all emails and block ones it doesn’t like.

I disagree with Sunstein on many points. In particular, Sunstein famously worries that the Internet is a causing us to harden our hearts and minds, enabling us to hear only from people with whom we agree. As an overall characterization, I think that misses too much else of what the Net is doing…even as I agree that the Net undoubtedly has that effect, too. I disagree with him, but I’m thrilled to have him in the Internet conversation. At the very least, his concern should remind us that the good things that the Net does and can do won’t happen automatically; we need to be vigilant and imaginative. At the most, he’s right and we need to heed him.

So, given that a concern about polarization that has become the best-known piece of Sunstein’s powerful writings, the WorldNetDaily’s polarizing article can this morning reassure us that unintended irony remains the strongest force in the universe.

[Tags: cass_sunstein polarization conservatives free_speech fairness_doctrine ]

Ethan Zuckerman has a fun, informative post about the device being used by Census takers. It delves into the particulars, it drives toward some broader conclusions.

So, beside the pleasure of the piece itself, consider it as a piece of journalism. No, Ethan doesn’t spend the time to track down every detail. But he tracks down the details that the weight of the topic deserves. And it is a piece that it is hard to image would have made it through the editorial filters of paper-based news media.

I understand that pointing to a good post by someone who is not a trained journalist (but who has expertise in a field) does not provide reassurance that the system of journalism will survive. That system covers fields systematically that the flood-the-field approach of the Web may not reach. But, still, we can allow ourselves some hope. Some cautious, vigilant hope.

The Berkman Center has posted the raw audio of my 55 minute interview with Stephen Wolfram, about his deeply cool WolframAlpha program (which he talked about here yesterday). On the other hand, if you wait a few days, you can skip some throat-clearing on my part, as well as my driving him down an alley based on my not seeing where WolframAlpha puts links to other pieces of information. As is so often the case, the edited version will be better.

[Tags: wolfram wolframalpha metadata search google semantic_web ontologies taxonomy everything_is_miscellaneous ]

Stephen Wolfram is giving at talk at Harvard about his WolframAlpha site, which will launch in May. Aim: “Find a way to make computable the systematic knowledge we’ve accumulated.” The two big projects he’s worked on have made this possible. Mathematica (he’s worked on it for 23 yrs) makes it possible to do complex math and symbolic language manipulation. A New Kind of Science (NKS) has made it possible that it’s possible to understand much about the world computationally, often with very simple rules. So, WA uses NKS principles and the Mathematica engine. He says he’s in this project for the long term.

You type in a question and you get back in answers. You can type in math and get back plots, etc. Type in “dgp france” and get back the answer, a graph of the history of the shows histogram of GDP.

“GDP of france / italy.”

“internet users in europe” shows histogram, list of highest and lowers, etc.

“Weather in Lexington, MA” “Weather lexington,ma 11/17/92″ “Weather lexington, MA moscow” shows comparison of weather and location.

“5 miles/sec” returns useful conversions and comparisons.

“$17/hr” converts to per week, per month, etc., plus conversion to other currencies.

“4000 words” gives a list of typical typing speeds, the length in characters, etc.

“333 gm gold” gives the mass, the commodity price, the heat capacity, etc.

“H2S04″ gives an illustration of the molecule, as well as the expected info about mass, etc.

“Caffeine mol wt/ water” gives a result of moelcular weights divided.

“decane 2 atm 50 C” shows what decane is like at two atmosphers and at 50 C, e.g., phase, density, boiling point, etc.

“LDL 180″: Where your cholesterol level is against the rest of the population.

“life expctancy male age 40 italy”: distribution of survival curve, history of that life expectancy over time. Add “1933″ and adds specificity.

“5′8″ 160 lbs”: Where in the distribution of body mass index

“ATTGTATACTAA”: Where that sequence matches the human genome

“MSFT”: Real time Microsoft quote and other financial performance info. “MSFT sun” assumes that “sun” refers to stock info about Sun Microsystems. [how?]

“ARM 20 yr mortgage”: payment of monthly tables, etc. Let’s you input the loan amount.

“D# minor”: Musical notation, plays the D# minor scale

“red + yellow”: Color swatch, html notation

“www.apple.com”: Info about Apple, history of page views

“lawyers”: Number employed, average wage

“France fish production”: How many metric tons produced, pounds per second which is 1/5 the rate trash is produced in NYC

“france fish production vs. poland”: charts and diagrams

“2 c orange juice”: nutritional info

“2 c orange juice + 1 slice cheddar cheese”: nutritional label

“a__a__n”: English words that match

“alan turing kurt godel”: Table of info about them

“weather princeton, nuy when kurt godel died”: the answer

“uncle’s uncle’s grandson’s grandson”: family tree, probabiilty of those two sharing genetic material

“5th largest country in europe”

“gdp vs. railway length in europe”:

“hurricane andrew”: Data, map

“andrew”: Popularity of the name, diagrammed.

“president of brazil in 1922″

“tide NYC 11/5/2015″

“ten flips 4 heads”: probability

“3,7,15,31,63…”: Figures out and plots next in the sequence and possible generating function

“4,1 knot”: diagram of knot

“next total solar eclipse chicago”: Next one visible in Chicago

“ISS”: International Space Station info and map

It lets you select alternatives in case of ambiguities.

“We’re trying to computer things.” We have tools that let us find things. But when you have a particular question, it’s unlikely that you’ll find that specific answer written down. WA therefore tries to compute answers. “The objective is to reach expert level knowledge across a very wide range of domains.”

Four big pieces to WA:

1. Data curation. WA has trillions of people of curated data. It gets it from free data or licensed data. Partially human partially automated system cleans it up and tries to correlate it. “A lot can be done automatically…At some point, you need a human domain expert in the middle of it.” There are people inside the company and a network of others who do the curation.

2. The algorithms. Take equations, etc., from all over. “There are finite numbers of methods that have been discovered in the history of science.” There are 5-6 millions lines of Mathematica code at work.

3. Linguistic analysis to understand the inputs. “There’s no manual, no documentation. You get to interact it with just how you think about things.” They’re doing the opposite of natural language processing which usually tries to understand millions of pages. WA’s problem is mapping a relatively small set of short human inputs to what the system knows about. NKS helps with this. It turns out that ambiguity is not nearly as big a problem as we thought.

4. Automated presentation. What do yo show people so they can cognitively grasp it? “Algorithmic presentation technology … tries to pick out what is important.” Mathematica has worked on “computational aesthetics” for years.

He says that have at least a reasonable start on about 90% of the shelves in a typical reference library.

Q: (andy orem) What do you do about the inconsistencies of data? We don’t know how inconsistent it was and what algorithms you used.
A: We give source info. “We’re trying to create an authoritative source for data.” We know about ranges of values; we’ll make that information available. “But by the time you have a lot of footnotes on a number, there’s not a lot you can do with that number.” “We do try to give footnotes.”

Q: How do you keep current?
A: Lots of people want to make their data available. We hope to make a streamlined, formalized way for people to contribute the data. We want to curate it so we can stand by it.

Q: [me] Openness? Of API, of metadata, of contributions of interesting comparisons, etc.
A: We’ll do a variety of levels of API. First: presentation level: put output on their pages. Second, XML-level so people can mash it up. Third level: individual results from the databases and from the computations. [He shows a first draft of the api] You can get as the symbolic expressions that Mathematica is based on. We hope to have a personalizable version. Metadata: When we open up our data repository mechanisms so people can contribute, some of our ontology will be exposed.

How about in areas where people disagree? If a new universe model comes out from Stanford, does someone at WolframAlpha have to say yes and put it in?
A: Yes
Q: How many people?
A: It’s been 150 for a long time. Now it’s 250. It’s probably going to be a thousand people.

Q: Who is this for?
A: It’s for expert knowledge for anyone who needs it.

Q: Business model?
A: The site will be free. Corporate sponsors will put ads on the side. We’re trying to figure out how to ingest vendor info when it’s relevant, and how to present it on the site. There will also be a professional version for people who are doing a lot of computation, want to put in their own data…

Q: Can you define the medical and population databases to get the total mass of people in England.
A: We could integrate those databases, but we don’t have that now. We’re working on “splat pages” you get when it doesn’t work. It should tell you what it does know.

Q: What happens when there is no answer, e.g., 55th largest state in the US?
A: It says it doesn’t know.

Q: [eszter] For some data, there are agreed-upon sources. For some there aren’t. How do you choose sources?
A: That’s a key problem in doing data curation. “How do we do it? We try to do the best job we can.” Use experts. Assess. Compare. [This is a bigger issue than Wolfram apparently thinks where data models are political. E.g., Eszter Hargittai, who is sitting next to me, points out “How many Internet users are there?” is a highly controversial question.] We give info about what our sources are.

Q: Technologically, where do you want to focus in the future?
A: All 4 areas need to be pushed forward.

Q: How does this compare to the Semantic Web?
A: Had the Web already had been semantically tagged, this product would have been far far easier, although keep in mind that much of the data in WA comes from private databases. We have a sophisticated ontology. We didn’t create the ontology top-down. It’s mostly bottom-up. We have domains. We have ontologies for them. We merge them together. “I hope as we expose some of our data repository methods, it will make it easier to do some Semantic Web kind of things. People will be able to line data up.”

Q: When can we look at the formal specifications of these ontologies? When can we inject our own?
A: It’s all represented in clean Mathematica code. Knitting new knowledge into the system is tricky because our UI is natural language, which is messy. E.g., “There’s a chap who goes by the name Fifty Cent.” You have to be careful.

Q: What reference source tells you if Palestine exists…?
A: In cases like this, we say “Assuming Case A or B.” There are holes in the data. I’m hoping people will be motivated to fill them in. Then there’s the question of the extent to which we can build expert communities. We don’t know the best way to do this. Lots of interesting ideas.

How about pop culture?
A: Pop culture info is much shallower computationally. (”Britney Spears” just gets her name, birthdate, and birthplace. No music, no photos, nothing about her genre, etc.) (”Meaning of life” does answer “42″)

Q: Compare with CYC? (A common sense reasoning system)
A: CYC deals with human reasoning. That’s not the best method for figuring out physics, etc. “We can do the non-human parts of reasoning really well.”

Q: [couldn’t hear the question]
A: The best way to debug it is not necessarily to inspect the code but to inspect the results. People reading code is less efficient than automated systems.

Q: Will it be integrated into Mathematica?
A: A future version will let you type WA data into Mathematica.

Q: How much work do you have to do on the NLP sound? Your searches used a special lexicon…
A: We don’t know. We have a daily splat call to see what types of queries have failed. We’re pretty good at removing linguistic fluff. People drop the fluff pretty quickly after they’ve been using WA for a while.

Q: (free software foundation) How does this change the landscape for open access? There’s info in commercial journals…
A: When there’s a proprietary database, the challenge is making the right deals. People will not be able to take out of our system all the data that we put into it. We have yet to learn all of the issues that will come up.

Q: Privacy?
A: We’re dealing with public data. We could do people search, but, personally, I don’t want to.

Q: What would you think of a more Wikipedia-like model? Do you worry about a competitor making a wiki data that is completely open and grows faster?
A: That’d be great. Making WA is hard. It’s not just a matter of shoveling data in. Wikipedia is fantastic and I use it all the time, but it’s gone in particular directions. When you’re looking for systematic data there, even if people put in systematic data — e.g., 300 pages about chemicals — over the course of time, the data gets dirty. You can’t compute from it.

Q: How about if Google starts presenting your results in response to queries?
A: We’re looking for synergies But we’re generating these on the fly; it won’t get indexed.

Q: I wonder how universities will find a place for this.
A: Very interesting question. Generating hard data is hard and useful, although universities often prefer higher levels of synthesis and opinion. [Loose paraphrase!] Leibniz had this nailed: Take any human argument and find a way to mechanically compute it. [Tags: wolfram wolframapha search expertise google metadata libraries ]

W. Russell Neuman is giving a Berkman talked called “Theories of Media Evolution.” He wants to think about the effect of the Internet in the context of the history of other media and the difference they’ve made. (The book “Theories of Media Evolution” will be out this fall.)

There are four classic dismissive argumenst about the Internet: 1. It’s just another communication tech. 2. Human psychology doesn’t change. (Russ thinks we should take that seriously.) 3. “Just you wait.” “The iron laws of political economy just aren’t going to change.” 4. If you say the Net will make a difference, you are a naive techno-determinist. Doc Searls

Russ says his current research was inspired by his own mentor, Ithiel de Sola Pool. The volume of communication is growing exponentially. His conclusion: The volume of info changes the media from push to pull.

He shows a famous graph of volumes and cost in communication, 1960-1977. Volume goes up and cost goes down exponentially. Russ has done a new study, 1980-2005, studying the number of words per medium per day going into the average American home. How many newspapers, how many words in each, etc. Russ looked at 12 traditional media and the Internet. And he shifted from words to minutes as the unit of measurement. He includes CDs, video games, etc. He finds that the average newspaper consumption has gone from 16 mins/day to 6.5mins/day. But most of the charts are climbing at a tremendous rate. E.g., Average American home spends 1.10 hr/day on the Net (which includes houses with no access). The total media supply to the home has gone up exponentially. The total media consumed in minutes per day is a much shallower curve, from about 600 mins per day in 1960 to about 1,000 mins per day, in part because homes now have more TV sets and portable media. The growth of media supply consumption grew very slowly 1960-1980, but has gone up from single digits (minutes per day) to over 20,000. The ratio was 98:1 — if you read every book and watched every minute of TV available, the ratio of supply to consumption was 98:1. “That was a human metric. You can deal with that.” But in 2005, it’s 20943:1, which is not a human level of metric. “And this counts the Internet as one. You should count the number of pages available to you” which is somewhere north of 8.5 billion.

So, he says, we need the help of machines with their algorithms and socially-based recommendation systems. Search is incredibly important in this world of super-abundance, he says. It will help us to think about the new media in the context of the old, he says.

Q: You think volume is the fundamental factor. You’re saying the volume changes the nature of media from push to pull. Maybe it’s volume + technical affordance. If you look at satellite TV or cable TV, those didn’t fundamentally change the nature of the medium as the volume went up.
A: “Affordance” makes the “you’re a techno-determinist” go away, because it says that technology isn’t determinative but it does have capabilities that people can take up. As far as the first part of the question that said “Isn’t it more complicated than…,” the answer is always yes. About regulation: The argument for regulation was spectrum scarcity, which is why we don’t regulate the print medium. Ironically, we’d get one newspaper in a market but dozens of broadcasters.
The shape of media could come from a number of places, but it’s going to come from Google.

Q: How about the number of words going out from households?
A: 900,000 bloggers (US only)… One of the questions is: What are the topics?
Q: The Berkman MediaCloud project should help address that in a rigorous way.

Q: Pool left out data like the phone book and the home encyclopedia.
A: There’s a psychological analytic (cf. Todd Gittlin) of info overload: people panic and withdraw when faced with this much info. But people who entered a library weren’t intimidated by it. That seems to be the case wit the Web.

Q: I’m surprised that you predict it’d take me longer to view all the movies than read all of the Net. You’re masking the actual size of the increase in media access…
A: Yes. I had to mask in order to make the other sources visible, so I counted it as one channel. But it makes my point even more strongly…
Q: When you construe the Net as a flow of info that a human has to parse, you get your way of approaching the problem: We have to rely on Google or a friend. But that masks what’s going on. We’re producing. We have to construct our own social environments. It’s not just push to pull, but also read to write. (Push to pull are read categories.) And the question of power depends on whether the machine is impervious to workarounds. The only tv broadcasters could not be worked around. But on the Net I can find others with related interests.”
A: Important questions. Let me bring out some points I didn’t make in my talk. It costs $3M/hr for TV. $16M/hr for a motion picture. We’ve developed historically a metric that people are willing to pay, say, $10 to see a movie, and that’s split 50:50 between the distributor and the motion picture company. They make $5/hr, whereas on TV the revenue is about $0.60/hr (commercials). Google News is repurposing independent professional journalism; if a competitive search engine started doing independent investigative journalism, and Google would do the same. [Sorry for the choppiness]

Q: The Internet is all about entertainment. People are reading fewer books.
A: You revealed your presumption when you said that books are hard to read and are good for you, while Internet is easy and not good for you. Where is the evidence that reading Shakespearean sonnets makes you a better person?

Q: You could argue, marxistly, that mass production changes how people interact with their environments. What’s the parallel of this and the mass production of consumer goods?
A: Alienation theory? When Marx got paid, rarely, he got paid as an independent investigative journalist. The Net makes it easier to find unalienated work (made by craftspeople who is not alienated from the product of her labor).

A: There are so many research questions that these technology afford that we should have our research budgets doubled.

[Tags: w_russell_neuman communication communication_theory internet technological_determinism media_studies ]

In his book The Victorian Internet, Tom Standage presents two quotations (pp. 103-104) prompted by the creation of transatlantic telegraph cables. The first is from Henry Fields:

“It brings the world together. It joins the sundered hemispheres. It unites distant nations, making them feel that they are members of one great family…An ocean cable is not an iron chain, lying cold and dead in the icy depths of the Atlantic. It is a living, fleshy bond between severed portions of the human family, along which pulses of love and tenderness will run backward and forward forever. By such strong ties does it tend to bind the human race in unity, peace and concord…it seems as if this sea-nymph, rising out of the waves, was born to be the herald of peace.”

The second is unattributed:

“The different nations and races of men will stand, as it were, in the presence of one another. They will know one another better. They will act and react upon each other. They may be moved by common sympathies and swayed by common interests. Thus the electric spark is the true Promethean fire which is to kindle human hearts. Men then will learn that they are brethren, and that it is not less their interest than their duty to cultivate goodwill and peace throughout the world.”

The obvious lessons are, first, that our enthusiasms are sometimes wildly wrong, and, second, that technology by itself doesn’t determine its effect.

And yet I wonder if the tele-utopians were entirely wrong. It is undeniable that the 150 years between the deploying of the telegraph and the rise of the Internet have been unimaginably bloody. So, in that sense, the telegraph heralded the opposite of peace.

That correlation — more communication, more war — certainly means that communication technology doesn’t bring peace. But communication technology may still be an instrument of peace. Peace — IMHO — ultimately comes from understanding that we share a world about which we care differently. The only feasible peace is a noisy peace. We only get there via communication. And I believe that overall communication technology has made us more aware of the unresolvable noisiness of the world. Simple-minded colonialism is no longer in vogue. There is an increasing understanding that no one religion or form of government is going to sweep the table (although those who think it’s their way or the highway to hell are still working their horrors). Our hearts and minds are closer to the conditions of peace than they were before the telegraph, although our governments, religions, and economic systems still have a long way to go.

No, the world is still a mess, and the warriors still tend to rise in power. Yes, communication technology enables armies to deploy on new and vast scales. But also: Peace comes from the recognition of difference that communication makes possible. The tele-utopians were comically wrong, just as are cyber-utopians who think the Net will automatically create peace. But both are also right to rejoice. The threading of the world through communication is the most fundamental condition for a noisy peace, which is the only type of peace possible in a world characterized by difference.

[Tags: cyber-utopian utopian telegraph communication peace noise ]

ThePirateBay has links to content hosted elsewhere that’s available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. The site also provides a search engine for finding that content, and a page for each torrent with information about the content. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t. The four founders of ThePirateBay were convicted by a Swedish court last week. They were fined a middling amount, and were sentenced to a year in jail. (”What’re you in for?” “Improper use of metadata.”)

Now there is ThePirateGoogle, created by someone to make a point. There you can use the Google search engine to search for content hosted elsewhere, available for download using the BitTorrent protocol. It doesn’t distinguish between content that’s protected by copyright and content that isn’t.

Here’s the text from ThePirateGoogle site:

Bit Torrent Search

Please Note: This site is not affiliated with Google, it simply makes use of Google Custom Search to restrict your searches to Torrent files. You can do this with any regular Google search by appending your query with filetype:torrent. This technique can be used for any type of file supported by Google.

The intention of this site is to demonstrate the double standard that was exemplified in the recent Pirate Bay Trial. Sites such as Google offer much the same functionality as The Pirate Bay and other Bit Torrent sites but are not targeted by media conglomerates such as the IFPI as they have the political and legal clout to defend themselves unlike these small independent sites.

This site is created in support of an open, neutral internet accessible and equitable to all regardless of political or financial standing.

Cheers!

Yes, you can do with Google what you do with ThePirateBay. For example, do the following search at Google:

filetype:torrent “the dark knight”

There’s obviously a difference in intent between ThePirateBay and Google. But there is precious little relevant difference in the service. So, why jail the founders of ThePirateBay but not the founders of Google since either can be used to find copyright-protected torrents? Having the wrong mental attitude? (”What are you in for?” “Intent to improperly use metadata.”)

What to make of this? I find myself in a jumble:

1. I don’t think it’s a double standard. Intent counts. The difference between the Heimlich maneuver and assault is intent, and that’s as it should be. ThePirateBay is intended to enable the sharing of copyrighted works: TPB has facilities designed to help you locate, evaluate, and share files, including a page for each torrent with comments, ratings, descriptions, and the number of seeders and leechers (to see how alive the torrent is). And it’s named The freaking Pirate Bay. There may or may not be a law in Sweden against what TPB does, but it’s disingenuous to say that the site is ethically the same as Google.

3. ThePirateGoogle shows that shutting down ThePirateBay is not going to stop the use of BitTorrent to share copyrighted files. But jailing TPB’s founders may slow sharing down. Torrent site after torrent site has been shut down over the past few years, making it harder to find and download files now. The verdict in TPB case, especially with its jail sentence, will slow down the torrent of torrents, although perhaps not by much.

4. Just in case someone tells you otherwise: The BitTorrent protocol is not the issue here. It’s a brilliant way of sharing large files, and it’s used all over the place for perfectly legal file-sharing.

5. I don’t know what to do about copyright. It’s obviously spun out of control and needs to be pulled back in — lasting 70 years after the death of the creator is absurd — but we need to do far more than just shorten its term. Compensating creators for every use of their works obviously contradicts the maximal open sharing and reuse of works that drives culture forward. Creating a legal and economic environment with incentives for creators does not contradict the open sharing and reuse of works. The question is: Which legal/economic environment would work best? I don’t know — I wish I did — but I suspect it’s one in which copyrighting a work takes a little bit of effort, not all categories of work have the same copyright protections, the terms are way way way shorter than they are now, fair use is greatly extended, infringement only counts if it actually hurts sales (in the way that most mashups do not), compensation does not come from accounting for each and every use of a work, and we start rewarding those who release their works into the public domain by showering them with affection, cultural uptake, and some money.

That’s about seven steps short of an actual copyright reform program. But I find the whole topic headache-making and, frankly, depressing. [Tags: thepiratebay google copyright copyleft ]

1. ThePirateBay posts all the legal letters it gets, plus its replies. Feisty doesn’t begin to describe the replies.

2. The judge in the case seems to have ties to the copyright industry. The lawyer for one of the defendants is calling for a new trial.

Doug Kaye keeps on polishing SpokenWord.org, a free site that collects spoken word podcasts (well, it only collects pointers to them) and lets you find, rate, discuss, and hear them. You can also add ones links to ones you like to the collection (i.e., share them). SpokenWord is getting quite useful and usable. Give it a try. (Disclosure: I’m on its board of directors; it’s a non-profit.)

[Tags: podcasts media ]