Stu's Fluency Blog

The Coming Storm Over Mass E-mails

2006-03-12T12:35:00.000-05:00

It seems as if every time I do a talk these days on e-rulemaking and the reserach problems we are tackling, at least one person wants to know whether all this is leading to a new set of rules governing speech. In the March 13, 2006 edition of The New York Times, we begin to see more concrete signs of a coming storm.

"In the eyes of one conservative group, a lesser-known Senate lobbying proposal would have forced Revolutionary patriots to reveal their leafleting routes to King George.

A fanciful leap, for sure, but what the provision would do is require the disclosure of money spent on the kind of grassroots campaigns that involve paying lobbyists to recruit large numbers of people to call or write or e-mail their lawmakers and press their views on, say, school prayer or trigger locks or greenhouse gases.

To its supporters, the provision would unmask "Astroturf" ventures, fake grassroots operations with big money funneled through shell groups that employ friendly voices and benign names to cajole voters into swamping government officials with messages. Nearly every elected official has felt the onslaught of mass campaigns: phone lines clogged, letter bins overflowing, servers jammed with e-mail."

Since so many organizations and for profit firms (ex., CTSG or Get Active) have been rather cavilier as they generate completely unmanageable amounts of e-mail, we now face the possibility of having less free speech and more regulated speech. Perhaps this will give some cause for retrospection about possibly counterproductive use of IT to flood the government with popular and unpopular sentiment.

CBC Down

2006-01-23T22:25:00.000-05:00

Well, this is a reminder of the limits of technology. In this case, at 10:20 pm when the polls have just closed and the returns from the Canadian election are due, the CBC servers simply cannot handle the traffic. Too bad, eh?

The last time I remember being in direct contact with server overload like this, it was 9/11 and I was trying to get the news online.

Which brings me to the an observation linking back to class. Luke mentioned the problem of emergency broadcast in the age of the podcast. How dependent do I want to be on the Internet for information when the next crisis hits this country in real time?

Lessig

2006-01-17T11:19:00.000-05:00

The impact of the scholarship of Lawrence Lessig on questions of digital governance probably cannot be overstated. My serveral readings of Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999) changed the way I think about the possibilities for governance, or what he calls regulability. I see architecture pretty much everywhere now, but not much of it has anything to do with buildings. It is more about what is enabled and disabled by certain forms of digital technology.

Perhaps more to the point for this class, the book is being edited by anyone who cares to on the Code v.2 wiki. The idea is a very bold one that is suggestive of the spirit of collaboration and innovation that is central is a central guiding principle in the argument found in Free Culture.

Lessig's personal home page Google ranks as an 8 of 10, making him nearly as important, at least according to the Google page rank algorithm, as entire institutions, like the Washington Post. His blog is considered an excellent place for legal and technology nerds who cannot get enough of the copyright debates or discussions about how to make cool digital objects without using Microsoft or other proprietary tools.

In his brief discussion of blogs (p. 41), Lessig writes: "The best blog entries are relatively short; they point directly to words used by others . . .They are arguably the most important form of unchoreographed public discourse we have." While I'm not certain I would go this far yet, most of us find ourselves playing catch-up with Professor Lessig.

Podcasts and Education

2005-11-29T14:27:00.000-05:00

The School of Information Sciences, the Pittsburgh Technology Council, and Apple will present two information sessions on Podcasting in Education. Both will be held on Wednesday, December 14, 2005 in the Kurtzman Room of the William Pitt Union.

1) Podcasting in the K-12 Environment

8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.

RSVP

2) Podcasting in the Higher Ed. Environment 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m.

RSVP

Apple SMEs with hands-on Podcast implementation experience will present and discuss with you key issues ranging from content creation and management, to digital divide concerns, to hardware and software requirements.

Kofi's Take on Internet Governance

2005-11-05T20:02:00.000-05:00

"Governance of matters related to the Internet, such as spam and cybercrime, is being dealt with in a dispersed and fragmented manner, while the Internet's infrastructure has been managed in an informal but effective collaboration among private businesses, civil society and the academic and technical communities. But developing countries find it difficult to follow all these processes and feel left out of Internet governance structures.

The United States deserves our thanks for having developed the Internet and made it available to the world. For historical reasons, the United States has the ultimate authority over some of the Internet's core resources. It is an authority that many say should be shared with the international community. The United States, which has exercised its oversight responsibilities fairly and honorably, recognizes that other governments have legitimate public policy and sovereignty concerns, and that efforts to make the governance arrangements more international should continue.

The need for change is a reflection of the future, when Internet growth will be most dramatic in developing countries. What we are seeing is the beginning of a dialogue between two different cultures: the nongovernmental Internet community, with its traditions of informal, bottom-up decision making, and the more formal, structured world of governments and intergovernmental organizations."

{Excerpt from Kofi A. Annan's November 5, 2005 Washington Post article}

What's Your Ideology?

2005-11-02T20:51:00.000-05:00

This year the Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) gave its best instructional website award to the founders of IDEALOG, which advertises itself as a website for analyzing political values. The award announcement read:

"The award was given for the simplicity and utility of the site. There are sites which may have much more information on a broader range of subjects, but IDEAlog's ability to raise important, nuanced issues on the specific topic of U.S. political ideology is worthy of recognition. The site is a simple test that students (and others) can take to identify their own political ideology, providing instructors the opportunity to address overlapping issues and to point out to students that ideology is not always clear cut.

The original version of the IDEALog program was released in 1989. It was inspired by "The World's Smallest Political Quiz," a computer program that explained the libertarian political philosophy. In 1992, IDEAlog won the Computer Software Award, Instructional Category, of the Computers and Multimedia Section of the American Political Science Association (ITP’s predecessor!). Indeed, Kenneth Janda and Jerry Goldman from Northwestern University are now 3-time award winners with a web site that permits professors to track class results, even over a number of iterations, to monitor ideological change. Since its inception, more than 1,000 classes and more than 10,000 students have visited IDEAlog. While other nominations were also strong, the committee decided to go with the web site it thought had the greatest immediate impact for political science instruction."

CMU Report on Copyright and Digital Access to Books

2005-10-26T12:49:00.000-04:00

Here is an interesting study from Carnegie Mellon University relevant to the ongoing effort to digitize and provide open access to all books. The report's ends:

"I encourage librarians to continue advocating for open or affordable access to scholarly information. And I urge them to lobby for the development of laws, licenses, and technologies that do not sacrifi ce public rights."

Sounds prudent to me.

Google 2084: Randy Siegel's Op-Art

2005-10-10T07:17:00.000-04:00

Has there ever been a technology this disruptive before? For me, the entire Google ethos is a marvel to watch. This includes the popular humor, the potential and real impacts of these rapidly evolving algorithms, and even those neat little thematic graphics.

Uncyclopedia: A Digital Governance Nugget

2005-10-08T18:07:00.000-04:00

I was "blazing away" (sort of) with the new version of the Google Desktop and I happened to see something about a 200GB iPod Nano in the "What's Hot" section of the RSS feeds. This caught my eye so off I went. I was taken to an article within the Uncylopedia. Peter, I do believe your formidable efforts on the Wikipedia are being mocked. What can we say about a new resource such as this?

Milestone Two: What Happened to My HR?

2005-09-29T13:29:00.000-04:00

Did I ever mention that fluency milestones need not be successes? They can also be failures that create the chance for collaborative success later on. Let me demonstrate this.

After reading Snyder's chapter on HTML, I wanter to try out something new here in the fluency blog. In my "Links" list I have all the up to date links to the other flogs followed by some Google links, and the spam poison. I wanted to use a new HTML command to insert a "horizontal rule" between the last link to a class flog and the first Google link. I thought it would look oh so spiffy. So I added the following code {HR="50%"} to my Blogger settings [which in fact works just fine here in the preview, but not in the actual post itslef]:

Damien's Fluency Blog

Joohyun's Fluency Blog

Google News

Google Scholar

A fluency shortcome quickly emerged. As you can see, there was (and still is) no line on my blogs links sidebar. I refreshed the browser. I tried a different browser. I double-checked everything, I thought. So...where is my HR? Digital governance specialists to the rescue, please. Is this a fluency issue or a Blogger issue?

Live Chat in Russian

2005-09-29T06:00:00.000-04:00

One of my many events here was a live chat with librarians in various former Soviet republics. I have pasted a sample of the transcript below (v.2 responding to Peter's comment):

которая увеличивается с огромной скоростью
также для интеграции данных, которые только создаютс ясейчас и которые уже были созданы ранее
как насчёт бизнеса
* Andijan_Aliye вошел на канал #iatp
в целом бизнес любит идею электронного рпаивтельства, так как вместо заполнения бумаг каждый раз заново, форма заполняется единожды и используется многократно
в США бизнес должен постоянно отчитываться данными например по выбросам, предоставление такой информации может быть автоматизировано
Какие приоритеты вы бы обозначили в работе над "электронным правительством"?
для многих стран это совершенно новая концепция, а в сша над этим работают уже...
* Kar_Dana покинул IRC (Client closed connection )
* TCMoldova вошел на канал #iatp
* Almaty_Pavel покинул IRC (Quit: )
* Kar_Dana вошел на канал #iatp
Насколько я знаю главными приоритетами эл. правительства обеспечение доступа к Интернет-связи, повышение уровня образования в сфере информационно-коммуникационных технологий, а также проведение модернизации системы государственного управления.
приоритеты сделать это ориентированным на пользователей и дать гарантии, что сохраняется их конфиденциальность и гарантии того, что информация, предоставляемая имим, не будет использована в иных целях
прозрачность деятельности государственных органов также один из приоритетов?
* Aliya_Atyrau покинул IRC (Ping timeout )
один из наиболее интересных экспериментов в США - предоставить бепроводную связь целому региону или городу
* Url_Alex покинул IRC (Ping timeout )
* Aliya_Atyrau вошел на канал #iatp
бизнес по-прежнему будет получать деньги,но вместе с тем, граждане, не имеющие возможность получать такую услугу, могут получить это бесплатно
прозрачность деятельности государственных органов также один из приоритетов?

Kazakh Digital Nugget

2005-09-29T05:12:00.000-04:00

My master plan to liveblog from all over Kazakhstan this week failed. After two very comfortable nights in a 5-star hotel in Almaty (at a hotel that includes a "Sultan Suite" which is ridiculously expensive) that has $34/day wireless access, I spent the last three nights in a rather more modest hotel in the north of Kazakhstan (city of Oskemen). While they had a "business center," it was more than a little run down, with an older computer, the likes of which I have not seen for perhaps 6-7 years. Also, the office was only open during hours that conflicted with my very busy speaking schedule.

I'll give you the full run down when I return, however, suffice it to say this has been a trip unlike any other in my life. Yesterday I spoke to a large public audience in a library. I showed them many slides, including one with a picture (that Blogger will not currently let me upload) of a plane about to fly into the World Trade Center. I believe I showed it in class.

I asked the audience (through my translator) whether they thought there was anything wrong with the picture, which is date-stamped 09 11 01. There was silence. I let them mull it over. Finally, they several of them spoke up at once and said: "A plane is about to hit that building."

When I explained that the picture was a hoax and that a digital citizen should be able to identify a hoax like this, or at least be suspicious of it, they were utterly lost. Not all of what I brought over here had this effect, but for that one moment I had to quietly laugh to myself and recalibrate the comments that followed.

It was remarkable to have about 100 Kazakh citizens in a standing room only setting, with the TV cameras recording it all. The older ones looked so very much like they wore the physical burden of having lived in the Soviet empire. The younger ones, on the other hand, were thrilled to see the Power Point slides, even if the content left many of them wondering what the heck I was talking about. I did see the eyes light up and the heads nod affirmatively on a regular basis. They were clearly thrilled to hear from an American professor.

The Kazakhstani citizens in general appear to be, like their government, very admiring of the U.S., even if they do not seem to care for the war in Iraq or the current President. My best story of life here I will save for class. However, make sure I tell you about the time my translator just stopped dead in her tracks and refused to translate my words out of concern for her own safety.

Digital Governance Nugget

2005-09-22T15:08:00.000-04:00

For anyone doubting the age of podcasting is upon us, see this page: http://www.oyez.org/ which is an online warehouse of US Supreme Court audio, among other things.

Milestone One: TCP/IP

2005-09-07T21:57:00.000-04:00

Thank-you Vint Cerf for two reasons. First, I really appreciate everything you have done to make the Internet a hegemonic force in my life. Without you, I might actually have time to smell the roses or see the sun shine.

More to the point here, thanks for the postcard metaphor, which helps me to better understand how information travels via the Internet. The idea of metaphorically describing IP "packets" as breaking a novel into numbered postcards that travel various routes to a destination makes sense to me. Furthermore, it begins to show me how a finite number of wires can carry what seems like an almost infinite amount of information at remarkable speeds over great distances. It makes it clear to me that network operations require a standard set of procedures -- a protocol -- to achieve the function of a "universal information carrier."