Ray knows a thing or two about respect. And about applied anthropology.
UPDATE: Transcript of that episode. And more info about Ray a.k.a. Sa Ra.
Ray knows a thing or two about respect. And about applied anthropology.
UPDATE: Transcript of that episode. And more info about Ray a.k.a. Sa Ra.
Digital Fair Use bill introduced to US House (sans teeth)
If passed, the FAIR USE Act will amend the DMCA to codify recent exceptions granted to the anti-circumvention rules by the Register of Copyrights, which include some allowances for obsolete technologies and cell phone unlocking.
Doesn’t sound like a whole lot, especially since the bill specifically does not address some of the most controversial parts of the DMCA. But if codifying fair use is the goal (as fair use is not yet guaranteed, in the United States), maybe this bill can shake things up at least a bit.
It’s quite interesting to see how a large majority of citizens agree that things need to change yet a handful of corporate entities enforce the status quo without much apparent effort.
It’s also quite funny how many bills in the U.S. have acronyms designed to work as expressions. This one is: Freedom And Innovation Revitalizing U.S. Entrepreneurship Act of 2007. Catchy!
Talk about chilling effects…
Colleges and Universities – Institutional Review Boards – Ethics – New York Times
Interesting that the NYT should take this issue on. Because of its readership, it might have an impact. Many researchers have, in fact, been having these discussions, including in ethnographic disciplines.
Watched George Stroumboulopoulos’s The Hour last night. He did an interview with Canada’s Auditor General Sheila Fraser who is widely known for her role in unveiling the sponshorship scandal which rocked Canadian politics during the past few years.
Not sure what other people’s reaction has been but, the first time I saw Fraser, her approach and behaviour impressed me as heroic. I don’t tend to have heroes, idols, or even role models (apart from my mother, my paternal grand-mother, and my wife). But I’m touched by people’s sense of duty and Fraser seems to have exactly that.
This isn’t to say that Fraser is a better person than anybody else. But there’s something truly glorious about her work. Maybe there’s something in her attitude which oozes both self-confidence and selflessness. At any rate, I get the feeling that we need more people like her. And I wish she won’t go into partisan politics.
What’s interesting here is that, in her interview with Stroumboulopoulos, Fraser addressed the issue of how chartered accountants (CAs) are perceived. Typically, accountants are thought to be boring, uncool people. Currently, there’s a campaign in Quebec to fight this perception. Some ad agency (Cossette, most likely) has been putting posters in metro cars with actual CAs pictured as glamourous Stars on the covers of fake gossip magazines. There’s also a TV show about CAs (haven’t watched it but it seems to approach the same idea of glamour).
Can glamour backfire on the definition of what a CA should be?
In anthropology, we often have the “Indiana Jones Effect” as people take anthropology to be all about a sense of adventure. There’s also the “CSI Effect” about forensics, which influences the way some people interpret forensic evidence.
Mass media may tend to produce heroes of a specific kind. Is this process detrimental to the type of heroism displayed by Sheila Fraser and, say, Louise Arbour?
Is heroism defined by the epic genre or is the epic genre defined by heroic characters?
Catherine and I have a lot to celebrate. Her recent offer from Austin, her less recent doctoral defense, ten years of living together… We had promised ourselves one truly good restaurant meal. In fact, this promise was made several times over the past year or so but we had never been able to fulfill it. Continue reading
Latest in the line of corporations getting a clue, Swiss pharmaceutical Novartis releases data it can’t process alone:
Biology Goes Open Source – Forbes.com
For its part, the NIH has suggested making this kind of free access the standard operating procedure for all of its genetic research.
[Update May 21, 2007: Trackbacks closed because of spam.]
This is getting fun!
Which is faster? Communication in a relatively small group of academics, “viral marketing” from Internet celebrities, or blogs by entreprising Web-savvy people? In this case, seems like the latter has an advantage.
Not that it matters. But it’s interesting, in the context of the move toward Open Access in academia.
A quick rundown of a few elements in a timeline surrounding the dissemination of ideas about the “Web 2.0” via a video created by a fellow anthropologist. I haven’t been really involved in this dissemination process but I find interesting some of the links that connect some of the people who are involved.
On January 31, Kansas State University anthropologist Michael Wesch posted a neat video on YouTube, apparently in response to a video about Web 2.0 posted by China-based tech educational specialist Jeff Utecht almost a year ago. The video has been attracting a lot of attention from different people and some of this attention has followed interesting paths.
On February 5, Montreal Web strategist Martin Lessard posted a blog entry (in French) about Wesch’s video.
Lessard had already written a piece on six cultural groups characterising Internet’s continuing history. That piece has been at the back of my mind for a while, especially when the concept of “Web 2.0” is discussed.
(FWIW, since hearing about it in Tim O’Reilly’s writing a few years ago, I have been thinking of “Web 2.0” as a decent label. That label has already been overused but it did lead to interesting discussions by diverse people.)
Apparently, Lessard found Wesch’s video through someone else. Others have certainly created buzz about Wesch’s video for other reasons (techno-enthusiasm) but Lessard appears to have been rather quick at noticing the insight in Wesch’s video. In fact, Lessard’s blog entry about the video is itself quite insightful and rather elaborate.
This is the first example, in the paths I’ve observed, through which Wesch’s video has been commented. It’s the one linking what we may call “entreprising Web analysts.” People who make a living online (and may depend on online social networking like LinkedIn and blogs). Seems like this path was the fastest one, though I have no idea what happened with Weisch’s video between January 31 and February 5.
A second line of dissemination: what we may call “viral marketing by Internet celebrities.”
On February 6, Internet celebrity and science-fiction author Cory Doctorow (a fellow post-Buster Canadian) mentions Wesch’s video on his well-known blog BoingBoing (through a mention on gaming blog Wonderland). Internet celebrity and Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig then posts a blog entry about Wesch’s video on February 7. (Interestingly enough, on Lessig’s blog, some comments about the video relate to ethnography and cultural anthropology.)
Now, the third mode of dissemination: informal communication among academics.
By February 9, Michigan State University librarian Shawn Nicholson sends a message to librarian mailing-list ANSS-L about the video. This message is relayed to a Google Group on Open Access Anthropology by Weber State University librarian Wade Kotter.
(As luck would have it, I attended a brewclub meeting later on February 9 and fellow Montreal coffee and beer enthusiast Aaron Marchand was asking about Web 2.0 after having seen Wesch’s video.)
As it so happens, Michael Wesch himself is a member of the OA Anthropology Google group and he explained to the list, on February 10, that this video is a draft created for an online edition of academic journal Visual Anthropology Review.
It’s only at that time that I found the time to watch the video and share it here. Anthropologist and artist Sarah Butler then commented on the video via my blog. Which motivated me to to send a message to OA Anthro about Web 2.0 in the context of Open Access. It’s only while writing that message that I noticed Lessard’s earlier blog entry on Wesch’s video.
Phew!
Now, what’s my point in all of this? Well, I’m simply trying to emphasise Wesch’s idea that online communication (and the Web, specifically) may be forcing us to rethink different aspects of the dissemination of knowledge. Including the differences between , one one hand, academic gatekeeping (experts and “peers”) and, on the other hand, the fluid relationships of online-savvy, motivated people.
In other words, I’m emphatically not saying that any of this proves that academics are too slow for the current means of online communication. Nor am I trying to imply that communication among Web-savvy people is in some ways “better” than group discussion among academics. But we do need to reassess the value of “publishing” as the sole model for the dissemination of knowledge.
Why do I care so much? Well, apart from the fact that my doctoral research has to do with what we may call “knowledge workers” in Mali, I happen to care about the way academics and others handle issues surrounding communication. As naïve as it sounds, I still do think that dissemination of knowledge is an important mission for academics.
My battle cry: RERO!
And I mean that in a positive, optimistic, hopeful, idealistic way.
Been pretty busy recently. Have a bunch of things to read and catch up with. So this’ll just be a series of links. I feel they’re all related, in a way…
Will the GBN jump in now or did it do so already?
Who said anthropologists were out of the loop?
YouTube – Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us
Web 2.0 in just under 5 minutes.
Aux blogueurs, carnettiers, carnettistes et cornettistes.. Y compris ceux de YULBlog.
Ploguez votre blogue (carnet, billet, journal personnel, fluegelhorn) ici. Même pas besoin de rimes… 😉
Pour ceux qui viennent pour la torréfaction de café, le brassage de la bière, ou la musique, promenez-vous un peu…
J’ai aussi deux blogues dédiés à la musique. Un sur l’anthropologie de la musique (pour un cours à Concordia), l’autre sur la mondialisation pensée à travers la musique (pour un projet plus vaste).
I quite enjoy being powerless. Much more comfortable. And fun.
What’s more, nothing you say can nor will be used against you in a court of social capital.
Let’s hear it for power-free humanism!
Completely unsolicited, of course. In no particular order.
I admit: I am a User. A Mac User.
Oh, not that I use a Mac right now. But I’ll probably remain a Mac User all my life.
“Hello, my name is Alex and I’m a Macaholic.”
One year after being forced to switch to an entry-level Windows XP desktop computer, I still have withdrawal symptoms from my days as a full-time Mac User. I get goosebumps while thinking of the possibilities afforded users of Mac OS X. I occasionally get my fix of Mac goodness by spending time on my wife’s 2001 iBook (Dual USB). And, basically, I think like someone who spent the last ten years on a variety of Macintosh models (Mac Plus, iBook, SE/30, Mac IIvx…).
With this addiction, it might be unsurprising that it took me so long to do what any Windows user would have done while buying a computer: getting more RAM.
I finally did exactly that, when I got my first paycheck for the semester. Got a 512MB DIMM a couple of weeks ago and it transformed my PC-using life from a nightmare into something comfortably dull and uninteresting. Not bad for an $80 purchase:
CompuSmart.com – Product Information – eXtreme Memory Upgrades DDR PC2700 512MB
What took me so long? Well, when I went from running Mac OS X 10.3 on a 2001 laptop with a G3 at 500MHz, 384MB, and very little free disk space to running XPSP2 on a 2006 desktop with a Sempron at 2GHz, 512MB, and quite a bit of free disk space, I assumed the new machine would run at least as fast as the old one. When it failed to do so (I would get unbelievably slow response with only Firefox and iTunes as the main apps opened), I started blaming myself more than the lack of RAM. I had noticed a similar lack of performance on some Windows machines in offices in which I had worked in the past. Though I did notice that my pagefile was growing frequently and that many issues I had seemed to be related to memory, I still thought that the fault was in my pattern of use. “Maybe running a browser and a media player at the same time isn’t a common thing to do, in the Windows world.” Oh, it wasn’t an actual reflection. But it’s a set of uneasy impressions I had. And because I didn’t have much money for RAM (and the machine didn’t cost me much in the first place), I wasn’t particularly interested in buying a DIMM just to make sure the machine is working properly.
Then my friend Alain came over, right after I had installed Office 2007. For some reason, my machine was even slower than it had ever been in the past. Extremely frustrating. Alain, a former Mac User, tried to help me investigate the problem. We did talk about RAM but we focused on defragmentation and such. Nothing really made a difference, at the time, but I gained some hope in making the machine somewhat useable.
When I bought the DIMM, the difference was immediately noticeable. In every single process. My machine is no speed demon (that’s really not what I wanted anyway) but it’s not making me want to yell every time I use it. At this point, using a few apps at the same time is almost as efficient as using the same number and type of apps on my previous iBook.
So I now have a full 1GB of RAM on my emachine H3070 and it’s performing semi-appropriately when I have two or three apps open at the same time. My life improved drastically. 🙂
Meanwhile, the Recording Industry is still creating heroes:
Teen accuses record companies of collusion – USATODAY.com
Good job, guys! Keep it up!
😉
This one is even more exciting than the SecondLife statement.
After the announcement that the USPTO was reexamining its patents in a case against open source course management software, Blackboard incorporated is announcing that it is specifically not going to use its patents to sue open source and other non-commercial providers of course management software.
From a message sent to users of Blackboard’s products and relayed by the Moodle community.
I am writing to share some exciting news about a patent pledge Blackboard is making today to the open source and home-grown course management community. We are announcing a legally-binding, irrevocable, world-wide pledge not to assert any of our issued or pending patents related to course management systems or transaction systems against the use, development or support of any open source or home-grown course management systems.
This is a major victory. Not only for developers of Moodle, Sakai, ATutor, Elgg, and Bodington course- and content-management solutions, but for anyone involved in the open and free-as-in-speech approach to education, research, technology, and law.
Even more so than in Microsoft’s case, Blackboard is making the most logical decision it could make. Makes perfect business sense: they’re generating goodwill, encouraging the world’s leading eLearning communities, and putting themselves in a Google-like “do no evil” position in the general public’s opinion. Also makes perfect legal sense as they’re acknowledging that the law is really there to protect them against misappropriation of their ideas by commercial competitors and not to crush innovation.
A small step for a corporation … a giant step for freedomkind.
Plug a blog
Hey, blog-brothers and sisters!
Feel free to put a plug to your blog, here. Doesn’t even need to rhyme.
Got the idea from YULBlog last night and thought it might be neat. (Besides, it’s a shameless attempt at getting more comments and/or pings.)
Otherwise, if you came for stuff about craft and homebrewed beer, homeroasting and other coffee geekery, or musical diversity, do browse and comment.
I also have two blogs on music. One for a course in the anthropology of music, the other Thinking Globalisation Through Music.
Though it might not seem so obvious, I’m longing for comments… 😉
9 Comments | posted in Beer, Blogging, blogs, Coffee, comment-fishing, Montreal, music, Yulblog