This semester's work is now complete! Getting registered and acclimated was non-trivial, but the deliverables for the classes I ended up in are below:

1. E59.3001 Seminar (Syllabus)
   • Midterm: Marxist terms, Piaget, and Mauss.
   • Final: Castorides, Anderson and Jameson, and Paul Stoller.
   • Notes: collection of my and other students' notes.
2. E38.2007 Media Criticism (Syllabus)
   • Spectral Critique in Empire and Protocol, a response to a common form of post-modern critique.
   • Reading and Revolution in Media Sniping, can media sniping still be read as subversive?
3. G93.2211 Socialization (Syllabus)
   • Socialization in Open Technical Communities, how do open and voluntary communities socialize newcomers? Contributions include etymology of "RTFM", a definition of open communities, findings, and further research questions.
   • Weekly summaries and class notes
4. Independent Study
   • An annotated bibliography (see the complete mindmap XML file or bibtex citations)

This work was done with the Freemind mind mapping tool, a python script that extract bibliographic information from mind maps, that can then be used with OpenOffice.org.

Next, to converge on a S'04 curriculum!

I've been using the Freemind mind-mapper to represent my readings. While I'm not terrible fond of Java — startup/exit are very slow and I prefer Python obviously — the application is very nice. Fortunately, the data format is in XML, though a rather odd schema, so I can easily go at it with Python and xmltramp regardless.

Freemind extract relies upon a particular patterns.xml (in tar ball below) and certain conventions in the mind-map to create bibtex or OpenOffice.org CSV files.

• Authors are green and bound to F3.
• Titles are navy blue and bound to F4.
• Excerpts are blue and bound to F5.
• Annotations are purple and bound to F6.
• Abstracts are gray and bound to F7.
• Citations are magenta and bound to F8.
• My comments are left black, or F1

A citation node looks like "y=2000 p=Basic Books a=New York, NY".

The resulting OpenOffice.org semi-colon delimited file will have this entry (many thanks to David Wilson for answering my many questions):

"Lessig 2000";"1";"New York, NY";;"Lessig,
  Lawrence";;;;;;;;;;;;;"Basic Books";;;"Code: And Other Laws of
  Cyberspace";;;"2000";;;;;;;;

The BibTex entry will look like:

@book{Lessig2000,
   address = {New York, NY},
   author = {Lawrence Lessig},
   publisher = {Basic Books},
   title = {Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace},
   year = {2000},
}

The tar file includes these utilities:

• be.py: extract a MM from a bibtex file (dependent on bibstuff)
• de.py: extract a MM from a dictated text file
• fe.py: extract bibliographic data from bibliographic MM (dependent on xmltramp)
• ff.py: fix the case of titles of a bibliographic MM
• te.py: parse inconsistently formatted textual bibliographies into bibliographic MM (e.g., from syllabi, cb2Bib is cool too)

In Reading and Revolution in Media Sniping, I consider whether media sniping (jamming) can be subversively read:

. . . Graffiti, sniping, and guerrilla marketing are now all tactics of communication cut of the same cloth: none of which is intrinsically subversive. Some use graffiti for advertising, others for independent expression, and others for subversion. The relevance and effect of their content is dependent on how it is decoded, which is dependent on their discursive context and novelty. As Hall states " Yesterday's rebellious subculture is today's commercial pap and today's pap can become the basis for tomorrow's culture of resistance." (Hall 2002:185)

Ever wonder where the term RTFM came from? An excerpt from a paper on Socialization in Open Technical Communities:

One of the oldest open communities maxims I'm familiar with is RTFM: "Read The Fucking/Fine Manual." The Google Group archives are an extensive archive of Usenet messages, a pre-Web bulletin board type system on the Internet, from 1981 to the present. The first instance of "RTFM" usage in the archives is a 1983 message referring to the VMS mainframe computer community:

Try looking in the Master Index to the VMS volume set. There, under BACKUP, you will see a pointer off to appendix B of manual 4A. This appendix describes the BACKUP tape format in some detail. The VMS people have a cute little piece of advice for people who are too slug-headed to read the manuals: RTFM. (Reason 1983)

I tend to keep most of my files on encrypted partitions. Fortunately, this is easy to do now that the crypto loop devices are integrated into the Knoppix kernels (and even the mainline 2.4.22 kernel) and tools (e.g., losetup). To do a backup, I mount a local partition, and then use unison (a very fast update program) to send the changes to a partition on a remote host. A day's work takes less than a minute, sometimes seconds, to update over a decent connection.

sb.py is the script I wrote to mount the partitions locally and remotely (via pyexpect over SSH). Presently, the remote functionality is commented out since I don't have a couple of gigabytes of storage on a remote host anymore.

Given the way it is currently written, the remote crypto partition is actually mounted on the remote host, and unison then works its magic over SSH. That means root on the remote host could look at the unencrypted files if he wished to abuse the permissions specified for the mounted (unencrypted) partition. In the past, I was root on the remote machine so I had little to worry about.

However, I could re-implement this script such that the remote raw crypto loop-back file is actually available locally (via NFS or SAMBA) and I mount it locally. In this case, the remote host should never have access to the unencrypted files even when I do. Unfortunately, I'm unsure of the performance of doing a local mount of a remote crypto file system, and unison would probably be slower. A strength of unison is that when it's running over SSH looking for file changes, each host is running its own version of unison that is quickly examining a local file system and then the two versions compare notes. In the new scheme, one version of unison would be comparing two directories, one of which would mounted over a network and have slower access times associated with it.

A draft of my paper on how newcomers are socialized into open technical communities is now available. Before I could consider the "socialization features" I had to first define an open community, which delivers or demonstrates:

1. Open products: provides products which are available under licenses like those that satisfy the Open Source Definition.
2. Transparency: makes its processes, rules, determinations, and their rationales available.
3. Integrity: ensures the integrity of the processes and the participants' contributions.
4. Non-discrimination: prohibits arbitrary discrimination against persons, groups, or characteristics not relevant to the community's scope of activity. Persons and proposals should be judged on their merits. Leadership should be based on meritocratic or representative processes.
5. Non-interference: the linchpin of openness, if a constituency disagrees with the implementation of the previous three criteria, they can take the products and commence to work on them under their own conceptualization without interference. While "forking" is often complained about in open communities ? it can create some redundancy/inefficiency ? I have and continue to argue it is the essential character and major benefit of open communities as well.

That last principle of non-interference is critical to me and is completely at odds with the common sentiment expressed in a Slashdot article posted today: "Forking" Greatest Danger of Adopting Open Source? In March, I compared this sort of hand-wringing to complaining about too many cooks in a potluck feast:

. . . To ask if too many cooks would spoil the stone soup is to ignore the very nature of the soup. Our software benefits from the cacophony of free ideas. It does seem wasteful when development efforts are doubly spent. And they may very well be. But to expect a marketing driven "command and control" focus is to forget how the software you now use was developed. If you use free software (e.g., Linux, GNU, Apache, Mozilla, etc.) it's very likely the result of a competitive development or fork — wherein a project splits and developers form a new project with their own variant. Folks are presently concerned about Keith Packard's xwin fork of XFree86, but XFree86 itself was a fork. People complain about the competing desktops KDE and Gnome, but perhaps both are stronger for the competition, and they themselves were once new and competed with other windowing systems: should they have been suppressed back then?. . . . Splits over ego and misunderstanding are unfortunate and should be avoided, but they are also a reflection of our fortune. Too much salt can spoil the soup, but it also gives it its flavor.

In any case, I hope to do more work on this issue next semester, but since this was a sociological paper I considered a number of features that might affect socialization in open communities. For example, the "scratch your itch" and 'fix it yourself" maxims might be opposite sides of the same coin. I conclude with the following findings:

In this paper I've attempted to synthesize existing literature and community practice so as to derive a number of questions for future research. In looking at the socialization features of motivation, structure, joining, learning, goal setting, identity, and roles and attribution I've posited a few novel characteristics of these communities that have interesting implications for socialization. In summary:

1. Many open technical communities are characterized by significant growth, in addition to the high-turnover typical to voluntary organizations. Seemingly, there are always "newbies."
2. While considered aberrant by some, the action of "forking" is critical to the very conception and life of open communities.
3. Unlike other voluntary organizations such as the Peak rescue group, and aside from a handful of celebrities, much of the status derived from participation is orientated within the community itself.

...

Jennifer Louis's paper on Socialization to Heroism: Individualism and Collectivism in a Voluntary Rescue Group was a great foil to my considerations on open technical communities.

Siobhán O'Mahony and Fabrizio Ferraro have written an excellent paper on evolution of the Debian project. In Beyond Majority Rule Sheeran notes that the growth and control of decision making among Quakers, who otherwise were individualistic and loosely coupled, arose from the threat of government persecution. O'Mahony and Ferraro note that the need for managing boundaries in an "open" technical project arise in order to protect the project from trojans: folks who join the community for malicious purposes such as introducing back-doors.

We examine the project's face-to-face social network during a five-year period (1997-2001) to see how changes in the social structure affect the evolution of membership mechanisms and the determination of gatekeepers. While the amount and importance of a contributor's work increases the probability that a contributor will become a gatekeeper, those more central in the social network are more likely to become gatekeepers and influence the membership process.(2)

They also consider social connectedness by looking at the Debian Developer PGP keyring:

Betweenness centrality is a measure that synthetically captures the structural position of developers in the social network and each individual's ability to potentially broker information and exert social influence. In this context, betweenness centrality is a measure of an individual's ability to link disconnected parts of the network through face-to-face interaction3. Betweenness centrality (Freeman, 1979; Marsden, 1982; Wasserman and Faust, 1994) measures the extent to which an actor can broker communication between other actors. (14)

There research shows that one's "betweenness centrality" and the popularity of one's packages is predictive of gatekeeper status, though oddly enough experience in the community is not:

The popularity of one's package is also predictive of NMC status. For every 100 people who use a developer's package, he or she is 4% more likely to become a NMT member (3% in 2003). Tenure likely had a negative effect because those who joined the project more recently were more likely to be aware of the problems with admitting new members. In 2002, these results are confirmed, even though the magnitude of the effect of centrality is smaller (Odds ratio=1.47). (27)

What's nice about this paper is it includes a theoretical treatment (open science), historical exposition (evolution of Debian organization), and social network analysis augmented with ethnography (interviews). This is what I also liked about Stephen Lansing and John H. Miller's Cooperation in Balinese Rice Farming: a game theoretical model of upstream/downstream rice farmers given the variables of water deprivation and pest damage validated by field interviews.

In the Sound Factory episode of MTV's True Life a Long Island bartender wanted to become a Manhattan bartender as his first step towards his dream of "making it." Once in Manhattan, he was confident he would be discovered. Discovered for what? Nothing apparently. His aspiration of fame was profound but oddly simple.

When, on an episode of Punk'd, Nichole Ritchie was interviewed on the red carpet and asked if she's famous, she responded that she was, she was going to be on the reality show Simple Life. Asked when her home video would be appearing, a reference to her co-star Paris Hilton's sex tape, she naturally turned away in a huff. (Though rumor has it that a Baywatch actress's video has been offered to a tabloid and last night discussion of blurry photos of a "topless" Britney Spears appeared on the Net.)

When one considers the social achievement of youth, their aspirations and the expectations of those around them are an important factor. Apparently, many youth today aspire simply to be famous without concern for how they might get that way. Reality TV has focussed on three classes of subject: (1) "real" people, such as the Loud family, (2) genuine celebrities, such as actual musicians, actors, and athletes; those who did something that drew the camera to them, (3) and this new class of hyper celebrities that the camera focuses upon seemingly of its own accord. There's always been an arbitrariness with respect to where the camera's gaze settled, but it also feels as if we've recently crossed a threshold. Does Howard Stern's "Wack Pack", including a man with a cocaine induced mental impairment, merit the attention of the camera? Do Rich Girls?

Heaven knows what this means for the masses of youth that are socialized by this circus. Fortunately, ReplayTV permits me to crunch 60 minutes of such silliness into 15 minutes of viewing.

A recent CNN article the entitled "Norwegian hacker cracks iTunes code" tells the the story of Jon Johansen's latest effort, QTFairUse:

The new program circumvents iTunes' anti-copying program, MPEG-4 Advanced Audio Coding, by legally opening and playing a protected music file in QuickTime, but then, essentially, draining the unprotected music data into a new and parallel file.

While the headline is incorrect (no encryption or code was broken), the sentence above is an accurate description. As long as one has access to the internals of the Operating System (OS), one will have access to raw "decoded" sound. GNU/Linux is open, and I've used this fact to save and encode real audio files for quite some time now (saverm.py). However, there are dangers; I use the vsound tool which the original author discontinued:

October 27th, 2002

Although I have maintained vsound for nearly three years, I can no longer do so, nor can I continue to make it available from this web site.

I live in Australia which has a law (Digital Agenda Bill 2000) which is similar to the DCMA in the US in that it makes the distribution of a devices for circumventing copyright protection illegal. I have neither the time, money or inclination to make myself a possible target for such legal action by companies with endless legal and financial resources.

Johansen is an interesting character in this latest drama because he was also prosecuted for writing DeCSS, the tool I use to watch DVDs under Linux. In March 2003 he was acquitted in Norway, "The court finds that someone who buys a DVD film that has been legally produced has legal access to the film. Something else would apply if the film had been an illegal pirate copy."

So now, Johansen is taking a stand for reasonable use once again. However, the Norwegian legal system has shown some sanity, and they don't have a DMCA. He's probably safe. In the U.S. the publisher 2600 was successfully sued for merely linking to a site which had the DeCSS software. Also, things like QTFairUse and vsound are used by some in the industry to argue that the law should mandate DRM (Digital Rights Management) in all software and operating systems, rendering open systems such as GNU/Linux illegal.

Tim Bray notes much discussion about taxonomies for organizing one's blog entries, akin to those categories you see on the left of this blog. My big concern is that as content fills this blog, and I want to do some reorganization, I can't, because that would break too many URIs unless I then commit to doing HTTP rewrites to keep it all straight. Another option would be to move from using the taxonomy as part of the permanent URI of the entry, and instead use the date.

Peter Van Dijck has composed an interesting summary of the themes that arise in debates about the Semantic Web, including the recent discussion of Shirky's essay. I follow this discussion with some bemusement and distance. I don't think it's an exaggeration to claim that I'm the first RDF/XML pancake: experiencing the crush of the "RDF versus XML" debate, back in 1999 as a Chair of the XML Signature Working Group. Since then, I've quietly commented in many places on why I came to think that the RDF/XML syntax was inappropriate to that work, and yet how the work was improved by thinking about the data model. The political tensions are something best forgotten. The result of this crush is almost comical: the XML Signature Recommendation includes a GIF of an RDF model that basically models the XML syntax, quite different from the original semantic model.

While the public has rehashed many of the technical debates I had four years ago, this is the least interesting topic for me. I'm most interested in, though disappointed by, the discussion around historical innovation, which brings me back to Van Dijck's document. The first theme he identifies is the following claim, "If the Semantic web was anywhere even close to half-as-good as the claims that are being made for it, it would ALREADY have gained massive widespread acceptance. Meaning VAST implementation." I've heard that before, and my answer has always been: there's about three million Web sites out there!

Some will complain that my response is not fair, the Web is completely different, but they aren't up on their history. If you look at the original 1989 proposal to CERN for what would become the "World Wide Web", it's actually a proposal for what people now consider the "Semantic Web." The proposal is for an architecture that can be represented with a directed label graph, "We can call the circles nodes, and the arrows links. . . . Ideally, it represents or describes one particular person or object. Examples of nodes can be: People, Software Modules, Groups of People, Projects, Concepts, Types of hardware, Specific hardware objects. The arrows which links circle A to circle B can mean, for example, that A: depends on B, is part of B, made B, refers to B, uses B, is an example of B." This short description has got it all, including the existential quandary about representing a concept of a thing, and the thing itself.

A theme that Van Dijck hasn't identified is a common response by the advocates, "People originally resisted the Web and said it was stupid, but now look at it!" Yes, according to the original conception, about three million half baked Web sites. And I quietly think to myself, "Past performance is not an indicator of future results." Or at least that's the case in the stock market, I don't know if that's the case for innovation.

The interesting thing about both sides of the argument is that they both rely upon an incomplete articulation of history for their argument. And while the technical substance of the debate doesn't change with this realization, our understanding of innovation and the rhetoric surrounding this technology might. What are other cases of half-way innovations? In what ways does history cleave the innovation: what aspects are quickly deployed, and what is their relationship to those pieces still waiting in the wings?

Simply, when you must ask, "is it done yet?", what does an adoption curve look like?

Today I attended two interesting media policy talks. The first was by Sarah Deutsch of Verizon discussing the legal cases against them for (rightfully) withholding customer data from the RIAA. If I understood correctly, Verizon originally accepted the DCMA's "notice and take-down" provisions for content they hosted, but now RIAA is trying to apply it for any content that flows through the carrier. Furthermore, the "(h) Subpoena to Identify Infringer" clause of the DMCA creates an administrative procedure by which an alleged copyright infringee with "reasonable belief" can demand information about a Verizon customer. Again, the original intent was that it apply to content hosted by Verizon, but now RIAA is trying to use it for what folks are doing on their home computers. These requests have no judicial review, there have already been numerous mistaken allegations by RIAA against users of the Internet, and there is no remedy for the customer if the allegation is incorrect or such information is abused. Verizon has received nearly 200 such requests, and the industry has received about 2,600 all-together, though there are more waiting in the wings. (Allegedly, RIAA has asked others to wait while they persecute their own claims through the court system against Verizon's objections.)

I asked why didn't Verizon purge or anonymize their logs? Ms. Deutsch responded that they want to keep their logs for legitimate purposes including responding to law enforcement requests. Yet, RIAA's requests are only the start, imagine what Scientologists and stalkers might be able to do with this procedure, and it's probably pushing both file swappers and those doing genuinely bad things (e.g., child porn) to develop better means of stealth.

Later in the afternoon I went to see a panel with Lawrence Lessig at EyeBeam on Distributed Creativity. I'm always amazed by how eloquently Lessig presents his case, and he was doubly so this time with a flashy little presentation that was narrated by Christopher Lydon if I'm not mistaken. Consequently, I'm also doubly dumfounded when it seemingly falls on deaf ears in the halls of government — I'll skip the metaphors of lobbeyists cloggying their ears with campaign donations. Carrie McLaren (editor of my favorite media magazine StayFree), Joline Blais (who showed a project I'd love to see used with SourceForge), and Jon Ippolito (presenting on Open Art Network) were also on the panel. As an aside, when Ippolito mentioned OpenJava as a response to, at least in part, the difficulty of sharing Java objects since they are compiled, I couldn't help but think that this is yet another reason to use Python! Interprated languages such as Python, exhibit the same "view source" characteristic that made HTML so popular.

At the beginning of the year I mentioned how excited I was to find the book Beyond Majority Rule: Voteless Decisions in the Religious Society of Friends. Michael Sheeran wrote it as his PhD dissertation, and I'd like to do something similar, but for on-line open communities. I reread it this week and posted my notes/outlines for those interested.

People often expect a media to engender community: "I'm blogging but not getting enough comments!", or "if I put up a Wiki, they will come." But if you look at the amount of blog dead wood — some estimate 2/3 of blogs never got out of infancy — this is clearly not the case. The degree to which the community and media prompt and depend on each other can be complex, and differ across media genres. A common form of this mistake is what I refer to as the "fat end of the scale" fallacy: people look at the "fat" part of a scaling system and think, "Wow, a Wiki could support 1000 different collaborators." Sure, but even systems that scaled to 100,000 start small; it is in the genesis, the first one to three folks collaborating, that the community is born and the ball starts rolling.

My current belief is that Wiki's are inappropriate for starting a community. The best way to get a Wiki rolling is to use it as a collaborative "white board" for a pre-existing email list or IRC channel. People scribble to it and reference it, and that prompts others to investigate and perhaps contribute. One reason for this characteristic of Wikis is social psychology. The norms surrounding stepping on someone else's toes when editing or deleting their text are powerful: they inhibit participation or prompt easily hurt feelings. Having an existing community where the participants know each other and the community's norms mitigate this deficiency.

In a class yesterday, someone pulled a "that's basic Kuhn" on me. Granted, I prefaced my first comment to the class in a somewhat antagonistic mode, stating that I was now inclined to append DNA to the list of concepts co-opted as metaphor from science by social theory (along with Relativity and the Uncertainty Principle), to poor effect. My orneriness has gone so far that I've been occasionally substituting "philosophy" in place of "theory" in terms such as "social theory," "critical theory", and even "media theory." I think to myself, where exactly is this supposed "empiricism" (of Marx and others), and is this "theory" falsifiable? Of course, to raise the principle of the falsibility of theory is to betray my sympathies with Karl Popper, who debated with Thomas Kuhn on the nature of change in science. Kuhn is evidently a favorite of many critical philosophers because he, rightly, points out the role of "received beliefs" (assumptions) inherent to a scientific paradigm. Marxists also like him because of the perceived sympathy of a scientific paradigm shift with social revolt.

In any case, I'm struck by how similar this supposed debate between Popper and Kuhn is to the debate between Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould over gradual versus punctuated equilibrium. I'm fond of all of these authors and their approaches and don't see any necessary contradictions.

(I wonder if in evolution of language, and chain letters, whether instances exhibit gradual or punctuated transitions?)

In the continuing theme of socialization in graduate education, I recently read Processes of Socialization in American Graduate Schools, Making Elite Lawyers, and Scientific Elite. In the first article, Gottlieb shows that graduate students change their career preferences based on the opportunity to discuss one's plans with faculty and the consequent cues given to the students -- though not always in the way one would expect. Those who have a chance to substantively interact with faculty are more amendable to change. The cues are of being told they have a "flair" for research or teaching, in eclectic and single-minded departments. Interestingly being told one has a flair for teaching in a single-minded department by a researcher is more likely to change the career preference towards research than not being told anything!

In the second text Granfield considers the career preferences of Harvard Law students in light of the odd observation: there is a disjunction in that many students enter wanting to work on issues of social justice, and become even more radical during their tenure (Granfield 1992:46), but leave to become corporate lawyers (Granfield 1992:48): only 5% enter government or public interest organizations upon graduation. A possible explanation is that through the law school socialization students become cynical about the ability of law to effect positive social change. This happens through the intense socialization and being taught how to win an argument on either side (Granfield 1992:58), which disorientates many who came to law school hoping to find "justice" -- those with a firm conceptualization of justice aren't so shaken.

In the final text Zuckerman considers the interesting characteristic that Nobel laureates are very much "related" via master/apprentice ties: in 1972 48% of winner had worked with Nobel laureates themselves (Zuckerman 1977:99). He notes that this is probably the result of a "mutual search," where good apprentices and masters aggressively search each other out (Zuckerman 1977:107), and socialization, wherein the apprentices reproduce elite master behaviour (e.g., 'taste') more so than actual content (Zuckerman 1977:135). The most interesting factoid was that 68% of female Nobel Laureates were husbands of Laureates! This sort of structure is perhaps indicative of scale-free networks by another name: the "Mathew Effect" in education whereby the "rich get richer, and the poor get poorer."

Gottlieb, D. 1961. "Processes of socialization in American graduate schools." Social Forces 40:124-31.

Granfield, Robert. 1992. Making Elite Lawyers. New York: Routledge.

Zuckerman, Harriet. 1977. Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates in the United States. New York: Free Press, Ch. 4, "Masters and Apprentices in Science.

I've been playing with Aaron Swarz's XML Tramp as an intuitive/pythonic way of processing XML. The model/syntax isn't explicitly documented, but from the source and (mostly) examples, this is what I've figured out:

XML Tramp Conventions

• Elements have a list of children '[]'
  • iterate over children: for child in doc
  • get first and second (splice) child: doc[0:2]
  • get named child element book: doc.book or doc['book']
• Elements have a dict of attributes '()'
  • test for an attribute COLOR: if 'COLOR' in doc.book()
  • get attribute COLOR value: doc.book('COLOR')
  • assign attribute value: doc.book(COLOR='blue')
• Namespaces (NS) are indicated with a period, the period indicates its not a literal value (as with quotes), but a namespace corresponding to an arbitrary but specified prefix
  • NS qualified elments now appear unquoted within brackets: doc[ns.book]
  • NS qualified attributes now appear unquoted within parenthesis: doc(ns.COLOR)
• To reserialize an object use print doc.__repr__(True)

In The Development of Identification with an Occupation and The Elements of Identification with An Occupation, Becker and Carper identify how graduate students ("young males" in 1956) come to be socialized into the fields of physiology, engineering, and philosophy, including the construction of their identity within that field. They demonstrate the way in which some disappointed medical students come to accommodate their likely physiological career (Development, 292), and it is amusing to identify with the sense of bravado the surveyed engineers expressed: feeling as if one is happy to, or can, work on any project as long as it's interesting or challenging (Identification, 344), and one can move back to the more lucrative workforce at any time (Development, 293).

However, leaving graduate school is not trivial, "Movement into the academic structure through matriculation as a graduate student, sets the investment mechanism going" (Development, 296). (Though I remind myself that such an investment can be thought of as a sunk cost, and that feeling one has passed the point of no return is an irrational fallacy.) Furthermore, the authors identify the four major elements of work identification (1) occupational title, and associated ideology; (2) commitment to task; (3) commitment to particular organizations or institutional positions; and (4) significance for one's position in the larger society. I wrestle with all of these issues: how to check my ego as a student, given I was previously a respected and productive contributor to a different discipline, am I still an engineer/geek at the core, how do I assuage the cognitive dissonance of being expected to absorb some of the (Marxist) social theory that I find so alien, and how do I navigate and relate to the various competing institutions and personalities in this new field?

Becker, Howard, James W. Carper 1956. "The Development of Identification with an Occupation." 289-298 in American Journal of Sociology.

Becker, Howard, James W. Carper 1956. "The Elements of Identification with an Occupation." 341-348 in American Sociological Review.

If we do live in a small world (6-degress of seperation), and the government is watching everything we do (Total Information Awareness), they might note that the brother of an acquaintance is a terrorist:

I was completely shocked. They pointed out that Abdullah had signed the lease as a witness. I had completely forgotten that he had signed it for me -- when we moved to Ottawa in 1997, we needed someone to witness our lease, and I phoned Abdullah's brother, and he could not come, so he sent Abdullah.

If you take the inexpensive flight that stops in the U.S. on your way home to Ottawa Canada, you might be interdicted and "renditioned": deported to an ally of the U.S. willing to torture you.

The way I think of Shannon's information theoretic concept of entropy is as "uncertainty." Or, in another approach, Shannon's entropy — and there are many types of entropy — is a measure of how resistant "information content" is to compression: more entropy/uncertainty, means less redundancy, and consequently less compression. Consequently, static on the TV, while we think of as being rather meaningless and not communicating much information, actually has very high Shannon entropy. If you took a screen shot of static and saved it to a GIF file, its size would be quite large. If, instead, you consider an image of a flower, it will have a lower Shannon entropy, even though it feels like there's more being communicated.

Shannon's conception of "information content" and "uncertainty" has nothing to do with the meaning of the symbols, only their statistical character, as Shannon wrote, "These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem." In the image of the flower there's redundancy: there's whole chunks of pixels representing the petals that are of the same shade of yellow. Even though the image of the flower is more meaningful to us, the image of the flower has much less entropy/uncertainty: it doesn't have to represent a different color for every single pixel as in the image of static.

Other conceptualizations (including those from physics) of entropy tend to confuse an understanding of Shannon entropy — and the metaphor of moving objects around can make it worse. This confusion tends to happen for a number of reasons:

1. Shannon didn't know what to call his measure of uncertainty, and John von Neumann didn't help things when he coyly suggested, "You should call it entropy ... [since] ... no one knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."
2. In physics, entropy is often considered to be a measurement of "disorder" in a closed system, and static on a TV certainly seems disordered. However, physical entropy is best thought of as an irreversible physical or chemical change that will not spontaneously reverse itself without some external influence. So the Sun is shedding energy, towards "disorder" and a "heat death." Of course, the Earth is picking a lot of that up and using it for "ordered" things like photo-synthesis and evolution. But if you look at the Sun and Earth (and everything that influences them), the sum total is towards disorder. In any case, it's best just to avoid this conflation all-together.
3. Shannon was tackling a problem different than the frame in which most people try to understand the concept. Shannon asked how can we achieve the reliable communication of information in the presence of noise? His concept of entropy as uncertainty could be applied to the statistical character of the signal, or the noise. As mentioned, it had nothing to do with the meaning of the messages being sent.
4. The framework that people often approach Shannon's information theory is that of Kolmogorov/Chaitin (KC) complexity theory. KC attempts to quantify the amount of information in a string with respect to some interpreter. Shannon doesn't care if a message with really high Shannon entropy is simply random noise, an alien message, or a very efficient encoding of information, KC's conception of complexity includes this variable, which is quite handy when one need to consider the context that is brought to bear in understanding a message.

In my socialization class we've been considering the role of class, race, and gender in reproducing social structures, including those that aren't as equitable as we might like. An article in the New York Times magazine by Lisa Belkin entitled The Opt-Out Revolution has generated much response. My question, what effect does exiting the workplace for parenthood affect the subsequent career path? Some dismiss structural bias and presume that the killer instinct is no longer there, that one's priorities have substantively shifted, or one simply can't compete with those that now have that additional experience. I don't think a simple deficit of experience is necessarily the cause for failing to achieve prominent positions. Instead, given the importance of social networks (Stanton-Salazar 1997) in advancement, dropping from the workplace is akin to dropping from one's generational "team." Might dropping from the work place sever one's connections to one's cohort of peers, who are also making their steps forward in a rough tandem? When one re-enters, one's peers have advanced beyond reach, and one has few social/institutional attachments to the present generation of up-and-comers.

Stanton-Salazar, R. 1997. "A Social Capital Framework for Understanding the Socialization of Ethnic Minority Children and Youths." Harvard Educational Review 67:1-39.

I've been eagerly waiting for the next release of Quanta and its WYSIWYG mode (called "Kafka"). I'm hoping it'll be in KDE 3.2. However, looks like Lindows might beat them to the punch with Nvu. Yet, while I'm confident Quanta will support valid (X)HTML, Nvu only says "reliable." Here's hoping the W3C QA project and WASP sends them some encouragement to do the right thing!

One of the things I learned at the W3C, particularly when working on the various XML Canonicalization specifications, was that dealing with characters isn't as easy as it might seem. Joel's article The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!) reminded of my useful conversations with Martin Dürst, and my readings of Charset considered Harmful and Unicode Transformation Formats via Unicode TR#17. Joel does a good job of explaining the issues, but when reading specifications, one is also likely to come across various confusing terms. Here's my crib sheet:

Character Repertoire (CR) = a set of abstract characters

Coded Character Set (CCS) = a mapping of code values (space, points, positions) to a Character Repertoire

Character Encoding Scheme (CES) = scheme for representing a character repertoire in a code space. Frequently, a (|CR| > |code space|) so one has to do various extensions and escaping to represent those extra charters. UTF-8 is a CES.

Charset = CCS + CES

I'm realizing that if I'm going to be a media wonk, I'm going to have to learn to navigate a new set of conferences and publication venues. At a colloquium this evening, Professors mentioned a few variables related to strategies for networking, creating panels, and filling the CV, as well as the following institutions. I'd like to annotate and order them according to relevance once I'm more informed.

Organizations

• Media Ecology Association (MEA)
• National Communications Association (NCA)
• The Eastern Communication Association (ECA)
• International Communication Association (ICA)
• International Association of Mass Communication Research (IAMCR)
• Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS)
• American Studies Association (ASA)
• Popular Culture Association (PCA)
• Western Social Science Association (WSSA), supposedly student friendly.
• Organization of American Historians
• American Anthropology Association (AAA)
• Euricomm
• Association of Internet Researchers (AOIR)
• International Society for Ethics and Information Technology (INSEIT)

Journals

• Journal of Communication
• Critical Studies in Media Communication
• Media, Culture and Society
• Theory and Society
• New Media and Society
• Ethics and Information Technology

Disciplinary News

• American Studies Newsletter
• The Chronicle of Higher Education

In addition, it's recommended that one join the ECCR mailist.

Frank and Cooks' The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us first introduced me to the notion that competition can be wasteful. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty has a lovely description of "competition as collusive behaviour." Firms that slip and provide lower quality products are likely to have their customers "exit" their relationship for a competitor. However, if all firms are of equally low quality, cell phones come to mind, then (p. 26):

Competition in this situation is a considerable convenience to the manufacturers because ti keeps consumers from complaining; it diverts their energy to the hunting for the inexistent improved products that might possibly have been turned out by the competition. Under these circumstances, the manufacturers have a common interest in the maintenance rather than the abridgement of competition -- and may conceivable resort to collusive behaviour to that end.

Furthermore, he notes that when quality declines, its those that care most about quality that are most likely to choose the exit option if its easy relative to voicing their concern and causing management change. Consequently, the inefficient firm stumbles on (or public institution such as schools or transportation), not able to expire but unable to reform itself.

1. Create a format for txt/html entries in which I can include the trackback URLs of those sites I want to send a trackback ping to when I publish it. For example:

   <p class="trackback-ping">


   http://www.gothamist.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/5594
</p>

   These wouldn't be shown in the formatted entry, just used for the ping. (Wari's already covered some of related ground, I'd just like it integrated into the entry. Wari suggests creating a flavour akin to blosxom that allows one to add URLs to an entry.)

2. I keep a "mini-log", akin to what most bloggers do. (My entries are more subsantive, and the trivial stuff I log to a private web page.) It'd be neat if I could have a mini-log on the blog with those links. Wari has suggested Wills pystatic. This would show the log entries, but of course wouldn't syndicate or archive them.

I'm receiving a few good natured jibes from fellow students in a class where I resisted the idea of extensions or exceeding page length requirements. There's two issues there. Given my RSI, I have to be very careful in planning my keyboard intensive activities and I must pace myself. If it's something that will require a last minute crunch, it's probably not something I can do without incurring pain and maybe a set-back. Then there's the variable of content to time. When a Professor extends a dead-line or says, "Sure, feel free to answer that question with 10 pages," while it feels like a favor, it rarely is. To me, it means more typing. For example, how often do they consider constraining the requirement, or dropping a question?

I spent about 20 hours in front of the computer for a mid-term and could not have done that much computer time in the original one week given my other tasks. So in one sense I was glad I could pace it out over two weeks. Also, for students that had other mid-terms, an extension allows them to mitigate the collision of demand. However, one could also spend the one's life working on the exam to "get it perfect," but one needs to call it quits at some point and focus on other priorities. Of course, graduate students are generally work-a-holics and also feel that they are in competition with each other, so they don't often recognize this dynamic. While I love writing, and playing on computers, my RSI and work experience gives me a very pragmatic and cautionary approach to work/typing/pain management.

I found this nice simple definition on Usenet that I like:

With a polynomial, it is the base number that varies. The exponent is given.

Ex. x^2 (x is the base number, 2 is the exponent.)

With an exponential, the exponent varies. The base number is given.

Ex. 2^x (2 is the base number, x is the exponent.)

Thus, as x increases, the exponential function grows much faster than the polynomial.

In this short proposal I wonder if it'd be possible to add a bit more structure and privacy to an open social network.

An alternative to the above social networks is FOAF (Friend of a Friend). It's based on an open Web data format (RDF/XML), so just like one's home page it's decentralized and very extensible. However, as I discussed a few years ago with Dan Brickley, the privacy implications of its openness are all the more severe. While my profile and friends are in someway limited to the gated community of one the services above, in FOAF my information is available to the whole world.

... This introducer key sits in a secured portion of my friend's profile. The simplest approach is for my friend to include it directly within his secured profile such that if he's willing to release the information he considers non-public to someone, then he's also released a third of the information necessary to get my profile key and consequently my email address. In effect, if 3 out of 5 of my friends are willing to share their non-public information (e.g., email address) to someone, they can then also get my email address.

I needed to actually write and print out a letter...

New York University

Office of the University Registrar

To Whom It May Concern,

Please assign me a student ID number other than my social security number. US Social Security Numbers were created for a specific and narrow purpose in the Social Security Act of 1935. However, that purpose did not include the identification or authentication of individuals for other purposes. I appreciate that using this number is convenient for your institution, but I'm also sure that you appreciate that the more this number is used for this contrary purpose of authentication, the less valuable it becomes in that capacity. In fact, "According to the FTC's figures, ID theft is the most popular form of consumer fraud, in part because it is the most profitable. ID thieves stole nearly $100 million from financial institutions last year, or an average of $6,767 per victim." Having my social security number spread throughout the institution of NYU for purposes of authentication dramatically increases my exposure to identity theft.

Sincerely,

Joseph M. Reagle Jr.

In 1984 Umberto Eco, a semiotician and author of the popular book and film Name of the Rose, wrote an essay entitled A Guide to the Neo-Television of the 1980's. He argued that TV had become so consumed with itself via award ceremonies, spoof ads, talk shows, celebrities, and gossip about all of the above that it had lost its grasp of reality and instead was only consumed with itself, "Whereas paleo-television talked about the external world, or pretended to, neo-television talks about itself and about the contacts it established with the public." Of course, this was before MTV aired its first episode of Real World in 1992! To me, his description of neo-TV is applicable to the blogosphere as well — see my previous rants on ego and navel-gazing. However, while Eco acknowledged a "palaeo-TV", the blogosphere never had a time when it was not consumed with itself.

I spent some time at the library looking for Media Ecology dissertation among the mob of the education and nursing volumes. I started at 2003 and managed browse back to 2001. Apparently, Neil Postman and Jonathan Zimmerman were the committee machines, generating quite a lot of PhDs. I noted the following Media Ecology dissertations and methods:

• Tropp, Propaganda As A Public Service. Included 3 case studies.
• Kelso, Advertising as a Social Gospel. Multiple interviews.
• Hibbert, The Contribution of the Dime Periodical to the Radical Discussion Canon. Historical.
• Domine, Hacking Through the Billboard Jungle. Qualitative, focus groups, and transcripts of dialog.
• Cogan, Wired Words: An Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the PC and Internet. Historical frame analysis.
• Bauman, Talking Toward One America. President's Initiative on Race. Historical frame analysis.
• Sternberg, Misbehavior in Cyber Places. Taxonomy, patterns, regulation.

Sternberg's dissertation looked at Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and seemed particularly relevant (Boyum, Postman, and Strate were the committee members) to me; it seemingly relied heavily upon Goffman's Behavior in Public Places and Meyrowitz's No Sense of Place. I need to follow up further with that dissertation and its references.

Matt's entry about being "crushed" by finding a project that already satisfies part of something he's been planning reminded me of another recent discussion. My brother had a project he was excited to work on, but he lost his enthusiasm when he learned other folks were already working on it. He doubted he'd pursue his own project, and whether he would contribute to the other. There's no sense working on something redundant; and having to work on something already half-baked according to someone else's tastes isn't as fun.

This is an understandable response, and a contributing factor to the many half-started open source projects that fill the SourceForge repository.

Siva Vaidhyanathan and I have been discussing the big stink related to the "Verisign thing." Regardless, of the technical issues involved, the stink is, in part, a smell arising from a contentious issue crossing the boundary of an expert (technical) discipline into general public discussion.

Previous to this change by VeriSign, which is a for-profit entity providing a "public service", if you typed in a non-existent URL or email address (e.g., perhaps it was mistyped), the network would usefully tell you so. Now, every non-existent domain is an advertisement for VeriSign. The practical effects are substantive but non-cataclysmic. Of course, it is also extremely "offensive" and a response from an expert domain (e.g., technologists) to such an event is often implied (from the experts) or inferred (from the larger public) as cataclysmic. This change abuses technical principles for Verisign's gain, will disrupt some Internet applications and services, requiring retrofitting (e.g., the ISC BIND patch) or a lessening of quality of service (e.g., lost/confused email), but not in any way that an ordinary end user would perceive it as a specific problem traceable to VeriSign.

This is why I've always felt guilty for largely ignoring all of these issues involved with domain names, ICANN, and VeriSign. There are real problems here, but the stench involved from the participants and shit thrown in public as a public proxy for the technical substance makes it unappealing.

At a doctoral colloquium in the Information Systems group at Stern the students introduced themselves and described the papers they had written over the past year with the faculty of the department. At a doctoral colloqium in the Media Ecology program the everyone talked about the classes they were teaching, the students described their efforts to find a good dissertation topic, and the faculty described the books they were working on. It was quite a stark difference to encounter within the same week. Of course, I'm not necessarily faulting the liberal arts program in that I hope to be writing books and articles one day, but it is indicative of a challenge I should be mindful of.

Elsewhere, in the 2nd of a 3 part essay on propaganda and the copyright, I discussed the myth and history of copyright as "property", and have since recommended that the most appropriate term is "intellectual monopoly right." However in looking at the new wordpirates site that attempts to "reclaim" various words in the contemporary discourse, I'd caution against claiming that the term "property" has only recently arrived to the discussion. Shortly after the issuance of the Statute of Ann (1710), often referenced as the first copyright law, we can see debates invoking the concept of property. In Donaldson v. Beckett, Proceedings in the Lords (1774), one can note:

"... he then dwelt much upon the sense of the word 'property,' defining it philosophically, and in the separate lights of being corporeal and spiritual; the term Literary Property, he in a manner laughed at, as signifying nothing but what was of too abstruse and chimerical a nature to be defined."

"... Was learning encouraged by depriving learned men of a property they had for a perpetuity, and vesting it in them for a term of years only? The supposition was absurd; and yet if the Act by some certain privileges not enjoyed before, did not encourage learning, a statute of the legislature was suffered to be published with a direct falshood for its imprimatur..."

"... what property can a man have in ideas? whilst he keeps them to himself they are his own, when he publishes them they are his no longer. If I take water from the ocean it is mine, if I pour it back it is mine no longer."

Discussions on the character of the limited monopolies of copyright and patent have historically relied upon "property" for comparison, but did not yield to equivelance. The balance has been that these monopoly rights, granted for the advancement of learning, is in some ways like property and in someways not. This understanding of difference and balance is what has been lost in contemporary discourse. Simply ignoring something is much more effective than the coercive pirating of it, as demonstrated when Eisner (of Disney) had to resort to an out of context quotation from Abe Lincoln, while ignoring the elegant sense of balance from another president, founding father, and head of the U.S. patent office, Thomas Jefferson:

"... That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation...."

This morning I was talking with my friend Nora about a conversation over style and culture in a recent Mark Crispin Miller class. As presented in Merchants of Cool, as soon as the mainstream picks up on a cultural trend, it kills the authenticity of it. She likened it to something we were discussing with our friend Ian last week about quantum cryptography and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, where:

"Typically photons are put into a particular state by the sender and then observed by the recipient. Because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, certain quantum information occurs as conjugates (superposition) that cannot be simultaneously measured . Depending on how an observation is carried out, different aspects of the system can be measured -- for example, polarizations of photons can be expressed as any of three different types: rectilinear, circular, and diagonal -- but any observation (including by any eavesdropper) changes the values of the conjugates. Thus, if the receiver and sender do not agree on what basis of a quantum system they are using as bases, the receiver or eavesdropper will destroy the sender's information without gaining any useful information, and, depending on the protocols being used, may betray his/her presence." - Wikipedia

Youth/underground culture is like the photon's state, once viewed by the mainstream, the mainstream's hand is betrayed and the cultural authenticity destroyed.

Recently, someone asked about the "2003" appearing in the "joseph.2003@reagle.org" email address I've been using in a recent public postings. Since I arrived at NYU I realized that continuing to use my MIT email address wouldn't be politic, but my NYU address is ugly. Back in 1990, folks would brag about how many email addresses they had — and I still see the odd web site where someone lists all of their addresses as a point of honor. Today, things are different:

• Simply, the more addresses I have, the more spam/junk I receive. If one email address receives a couple of hundred spams a day, two addresses receive twice as much and there's still only one of me to deal with it all. Also, because some of my email addresses where in Windows users' address books, I was receiving thousands of bounced SoBig virus messages a day. The same principle applies, more does not equal better.
• My domains permit me to receive email to any address at that domain; however I quickly turned that off as many spammers randomly guess addresses and collect those that don't bounce, consequently I could start receiving email at "2fsa98d7f@reagle.org".
• All of my public addresses flow throw a highly trusted, lifetime forward address that then sends it on to my primary pop and backup accounts, for redundancy and web access. I certainly don't want to publicly rely on an address as ephemeral as an ISP: I saved myself a lot of grief in in Cambridge when my ISP address changed from RoadRunner, to MediaOne, to AT&T in as little as two years because of mergers and trademark disputes! Hopefully, the lifetime forward address never gets seriously compromised by spammers.
• I'm not willing to remove my email address from public sites as a way of contacting me; and I get very frustrated with authors that do so.
• While I've frozen the number of "real" addresses I'm willing to maintain, I've started using disposable tokens (dates and places) that can later be thrown away, or even temporarily turned off to bounce off the spammers.

Fortunately, spamassassin and bogofilter are trashing (literally) thousands of messages a day for me. If somehow they stopped being effective, I would move to a whitelist based system (e.g., confirm your email to me before I see it) but would not stop using email, providing it as a point of contact, nor using it as an effective tool.

Based on a template from Wari Wahab and some tweaks to blosxom.py from Robert Leftwich, I've created htmlentryparser.py that permits me to edit my Pyblosxom entries in HTML, which I prefer after trying Textile. (In particular, I prefer adding hyperlinks, CSS styles, and tt/code elements in HTML.)

Shirky’s and Danah’s comments on Friendster reminded me of a response I sent to Danah, after I introduced myself to her. Through various connections, and most notably from a link of my friend and former roommate I found that Danah was interested in some of the same things I am. (When it comes to making connections within a social network, I observe the “when it rains it pours” phenomena: when I “connect” with someone, there is usually more than one event corresponding to that connection within a period of a few days.) When she asked about my Friendster identity I responded:

… I feel a bit like one of those old Comp Sci professors that don’t have email! The social networks are fun of their own accord, but I personally haven’t felt the need to use them, I’m a bit hesitant given the privacy and cliquishness aspects. I spoke to Dan Brickley about this a while back with respect to FOAF. In the past, I labored to actually remove links to my blog, and carefully maintain the separation of my nyms. The expectations are changing now though, blogs are so common and the line between the personal and public is much thinner….

In part, I already felt that my present “networks” were serving me well, and I was also following some of my friends’ experience with Friendster. I was seeing folks connecting with existing friends and goofing around with pseudonyms and such, but not much else. Or at least, not much beyond what I presently get from the various blogs, lists, and the face-to-face communities I belong to.

Over on my personal blog, I wrote about how I’ve largely given up on trying to actively keep my nyms separate; but the reader also has the ability to follow very granular aspects of my life: my personal blog, my public blog, with its own technology, culture, and other subdivisions. This reminds me of Armand Mattelart’s identification of the relationship of globalization with segmentation. As communication technology forces one’s horizon ever forward, one’s blinders and tinted glasses must become that much more sophisticated.

As I’ve been introducing myself to folks at NYU, I’ve noticed that I rely upon two motifs: interdisciplinary study and the importance of being a practitioner.

As I mentioned in January, “I liken interdisciplinary studies to open source code development: finding objects of analysis and theory and applying them to a new application.” In social network theory (for example, Diane in the “Betweenness example” in The Social Life of Routers) it’s not necessarily the number of people you know, but the boundaries you span that determine your value in a network. (Ronald Burt seminally demonstrated this in Structural Holes versus Network Closure as Social Capital.) My interpretation of this research is that spanning the boundaries of disciplines is an extraordinarily rich and exciting position to occupy.

I consider myself a practitioner, because I like the satisfaction of making an appreciable contribution, I like learning, and I like writing about my experience: a cycle of action and reflection. I now hope to have the time to learn new disciplines and reflect, or to use a more buzz wordy turn of phrase, to “contextualize my experience.” Joseph Joubert, a French essayist who might have been a blogger had the technology existed in the 18th century, wrote, “He who has imagination without learning has wings and no feet.” But of course, becoming entrenched in theoretical learning only, is like wearing a pair of concrete boots. And to share what one has learned… again, Joubert wrote, “To teach is to learn twice.”

Now that I’m back in school, one of the things that would be terribly handy would be a flashcard/quiz type application that could extract it’s questions from a mindmap. That way I enter and organize my information, and then can use the appropriate methods to improve retention. This might require that I organize the mindmap in such a way that this relationship could be easily extracted; I need to give more thought to that.

I just noticed that Frank Merenda at uptime has provided reviews of many of the same tools I’ve tried out in my search for the perfect data organizer . Presently, I tend to use freemind (Java based) and would like to use treeline (faster and based on python) but it lacks supports for the way I would like to work.

When I’m creating my data structure I want to be able to say “this node is a title” and “that one is an author”. Freemind allows me to do this in an extemporaneous but awkward way (associating nodes with a color that I associate with a type). Treeline has even better support for data-types but presumes that the author already knows the structure of the data being entered beforehand. I want to sling nodes and arcs and organize and type as I go, but also have the flexibility of leaving things untyped, or re-typing later on.

So I’m still looking.

I’m a big fan of the NPR show Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Unfortunately, their site recently become even more unusable: they don’t use ordinary hyper-links, instead they use a javascript function to create a hyperlink from some parameters:

href=“javascript:getMedia(‘FA’, ‘02-Sep-2003’, ‘ALL’, ‘RM,WM’);”

Unfortunately, I can’t find a browser that this will work with, besides Microsoft’s IE. Yes, apparently, only users of a single (and rather old and buggy) browser are permitted to listen to Freshair. Lovely.

Fortunately, it wasn’t hard to create a python script that creates the day’s audio file (SMIL) such that I can listen to it at my convenience without having to worry about their broken web site.

This month’s Scientific America has an article by Charles H. Bennett, Ming Li and Bin Ma examining the evolution of 33 chain letters using algorithms borrowed from genetic analysis; these algorithms permit one to postulate the relatedness of different animals (evolutionary phylogeny) by looking at how DNA—and its alterations—persist in a historical population. In this case they posited a family tree of chain letters and noted the points of divergence, the subsequent subtrees, and the relative age of the changes.

I’ve often thought that it would be interesting to apply these techniques to the domain of culture/memes. In particular, I’ve thought of following trackbacks and analysing the characteristics of the discussion. This paper shows the idea has some merit, and hints that the following questions might be asked:
* Transitiveness: when folks include short blog entries on something of note, how often do they refer to the original source, versus the encountered source they were first exposed to?
* Mutation: does the text by which people cite a story substantively differ, particularly amongst ideological communities? The paper briefly mentions an approach of doing textual analysis by compressing text versions and determining the relative degree of redundancy: the less redundant, they more relatedness one can posit. For example, could I identify ideological clusters of blogs given the compression ratios of the text associated with their citation of a common story?
* Age: How long do stories exist in the Web media before they “pop”? For instance, news stories might exist for some period before the are “slash-dotted” or trickle up to the top of popdex . (One of the blog citation cites used to provide the acceleration of a story, though I can’t find it now.)

I finally had the pleasure of meeting Siva Vaidhyanathan yesterday, who mentioned Susan Garfinkel’s work on the architecture of Quaker Meeting Houses. Given my interest in their cultural approaches to consensus the use of physical architecture to facilitate consensus forming Quaker Meetinghouse Architecture
is interesting, and dove tails nicely with Lessig’s architectural thesis in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.

These are some of the steps I took to setup pyblosxom, though not all python string values are of a complete (literal) path:

1. my web directories are in $HOME/data/2web/reagle.org/joseph
2. untar pyblosxom-0.8rc1.tar.gz as $HOME/data/2web/pyblosxom/
3. cp pyblosxom.cgi ../../reagle.org/joseph/blog
4. make "blog" an executable file:

   ForceType application/cgi-script; SetHandler cgi-script

   Unfortunately, this is in the "reagle.org" the root directory and applies to any file named "blog"

5. Update "reagle.org/joseph/blog" to be able to find the files
   

   import sys
   sys.path.append("2web/pyblosxom/")
   sys.path.append("2web/pyblosxom/web")
   sys.path.append("2web/pyblosxom/Pyblosxom")

   I prefer to use these syspaths instead of copying various files within the distribution which seems to be the convenient, but would make migrating the software to future versions even trickier.

6. Update "2web/pyblosxom/web/config.py" for this site including:

   py["datadir"] = "2web/reagle.org/joseph/content"
   py["comment_dir"] = "2web/reagle.org/joseph/comments"
   py["plugin_dirs"] = ["2web/pyblosxom/contrib/plugins",
      "2web/pyblosxom/contrib/entryparsers",
      "2web/pyblosxom/contrib/plugins/comments/plugins"]
   py["load_plugins"] = ["conditionalhttp","pyarchives",
      "pycategories","txtl", "breadcrumbs","comments"]

7. secure "content" and "comments" from web browsing by placing deny directives in the .htaccess file in their directory
8. enable the web server write permission to the "comments" directory
9. find a copy of "textile.py", and place it at "2web/pyblosxom/contrib/entryparsers/"
10. find a copy of breadcrumbs.py, stick it in "2web/pyblosxom/contrib/plugins/breadcrumbs.py"
11. create html flavors
12. tweak pycategories and others to make it generate valid XHTML
13. add "trackback" to "reagle.org/joseph/", and add a system paths to it as for "blog"
14. the URIs for trackback pings should look like "http://reagle.org/joseph/trackback/technology/python/setting-up-pyblosxom"
15. add tweaks so that the flavours can sit in their own directory; and add the HTML entry parser.

Some books from Amazon:
* Getting What You Came for: The Smart Student’s Guide to Earning a Master’s or a Ph.D.
* Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day: A Guide to Starting, Revising, and Finishing Your Doctoral Thesis
* Peterson’s the Ultimate Grad School Survival Guide: Getting In, Getting Money, Exams and Classes, the Profs, the Thesis/Dissertation
* The Ph.D. Process: A Student’s Guide to Graduate School in the Sciences

And a very useful collection of links:
* Advice on Research and Writing