Why our ancestors sometimes lied on official records in the pre-digital age

I'm reading a memoir by MIT professor Sherry Turkle, The Empathy Diaries. I attended a talk she game some years ago at the MIT Media Lab and was fascinated - her research revolves around questions about how technology impacts people. In the book, she not only traces the evolution of her academic passions, but her personal influences. She shared some interesting facts about her mother, shown above. There were some discrepancies listed on official documents filed in New York City in the 1940s and 1950s:

"She had a drivers license that gave her incorrect height and also shaved a few years off her age, something she told me that certain ladies at the Department of Motor Vehicles would agree to do, understanding it was better if unmarried women over 23 were officially younger. When she married Charles Zimmerman in 1947, she took a year off her age on the marriage license declaring herself 28. Six years later when she married Milton Turkel, their marriage license had her at 29."

Both scenarios described by Turkle - asking a DMV clerk to fudge the birth year, or providing the wrong ages on marriage registrations - are almost impossible now.

But a long time ago, this was not unusual. We know not only because of Turkle's mother's experience, but because a few people on my own family tree also had discrepancies, particularly for marriage certificates and job applications.

In the pre-digital age, many people (including immigrants, cross-country migrants, adoptees, and poverty-stricken families) may not have had access to birth records. Government officials had to go by what they were told, and may not have been told the truth for various reasons, including very compelling reasons. In some cases, sympathetic clerks may have helped, as we learned from Turkle's book. 

We know this happened in other situations, too. Teenagers lying about their age to join the military was commonplace. An estimated 200,000 underage men and women enlisted during World War II. Not long after the war, enumerators for the 1950 federal census (released in April) could note in a dedicated field on the census form if they thought a respondent was not being truthful!

The moral of the story: Sometimes ancestors supplied incorrect information to officials, and they had good reasons to do so. Try to confirm dates and ages using other types of records that are less likely to be fudged, such as birth and death certificates.  

Yet another post about the future of liberal arts education

For at least 15 years, there has been a lot of hand-wringing in higher education about the impact of new technologies on education. I've written about it myself many times (see "For-profit schools take a hit from Frontline"). As online models disrupt traditional college education, there is another debate taking place about the value of a liberal arts education itself. That students, parents, and the business sector are questioning this shouldn't come as a surprise, considering the $50,-$75,000 "all-in" annual costs at many American colleges. What is surprising is the denial that proponents -- many of them academics -- continue to display. The January 2019 Seattle Times article titled "As STEM majors soar at UW, interest in humanities shrinks — a potentially costly loss" is a case in point:

"The swing to STEM is having unexpected consequences. With fewer students studying the humanities — history, philosophy, foreign languages and English — those departments are shrinking. Retiring professors aren’t replaced. Academics worry that the nation would be impoverished — both culturally and intellectually — if only an elite few understand the arc of American history, know how to find meaning in poetry, or can discuss the ideas of the great philosophers."

This type of thinking seems to harken back to the 1800s, when the only people who could afford a traditional liberal arts education were the elite. That changed with the introduction of public schools, state universities, and low-cost college programs that could be paid for with part-time work. Now the pendulum is swinging back to a high-cost model, and lots of students and parents are saying that a $200,000 - $300,000 undergraduate sociology degree is simply not worth it.

There's another problem with the argument put forth in the Seattle Times article, which seems to be trotted out in many articles about the future of liberal arts education. For decades many colleges have created core curriculums that require even the most hard-core STEM major to take a range of liberal arts classes. I experienced this myself 30 years ago at Boston University, and know that it's the same situation elsewhere. It's a good idea, and one that gives young students a truly well-rounded education.

That's not good enough to some academics, though. Quoting from the Seattle Times:

“The broad general education we want for all of our students is increasingly done at the high-school level,” said Robert Stacey, dean of the UW’s College of Arts & Sciences. “And with all due respect to a high-school history course, it’s not the same as a college history course.”

Is getting a broad general education in high school a bad thing? I think it's preferable to getting the basics covered in high school, not only because it frees up students to pursue professional and other interests in college, but also because it serves those students who will never attend college. Isn't that better for our society as a whole?

Here's another quote from the article:

Those introductory classes — refined over the years by some of the university’s best professors, and taught to several hundred students at a time in big lecture halls — are designed to inspire and delight, sparking an interest in literature, or history, or politics, that could lead a student to major in those fields.

The impacts of encouraging students to major in those fields has led to a vast skills imbalance in our workforce, and the sad situation of people with lit and history BAs taking unskilled jobs or jobs that are a poor fit for their skills (see "Fear of a College-Educated Barista").

Moreover, for those who graduate with PhDs in these fields, it's nearly impossible to get hired as a professor or researcher. There just aren't as many academic jobs available, and yet, amazingly, there are now more English and History PhDs awarded every year than 30 years ago:

Humanities programs awarded 5,891 doctoral degrees in 2015. That is the largest number recorded back to the start of collection of such information in 1987. The figure was 3,110 in 1988, then rose steadily to 4,994 in 2000, dipped to about 4,700 from 2002 to 2007, and then started going up again, year after year.

As that article notes, jobs in those fields "are increasingly hard to come by." Yet the universities keep churning out PhDs in these fields, to keep the tuition rolling in and as a source of cheap labor for undergraduate instruction.

I appreciate the value of including liberal arts in higher education, but only a cost that students can truly afford.

A late review of Blade Runner 2049

Friends have asked me about Blade Runner 2049, the sequel to the ground-breaking 1982 film by Director Ridley Scott and a very talented cast, crew, and composer. I was 13 when the first film came out and it made a huge impact -- it was a dystopian future, to be sure, but one that was fascinating and different than the "clean" utopias depicted in Star Trek or the alien-infused space opera of Star Wars.

Back to Blade Runner 2049. I saw it on IMAX and went on an afternoon when I knew there wouldn't be many other people in the theater to disturb my experience. The film was beautifully shot, and had some incredible scenes, including the climactic, desperate fight scene outside the city's sea wall. I really liked the score by Hans Zimmer, too. He had a tough job, not only being brought in to replace the late Jóhann Jóhannsson, but also living up to the incredible soundtrack from the first film by Vangelis (which has perhaps the most dedicated cult following of any film soundtrack, judging by the mods and remixes created by fans, such as the Esper Edition. I've included one of them below).

Nevertheless, there were some serious flaws in BR49. Ryan Gosling had the lead role, and was an obvious pick (Hollywood always goes for leading men with strong "brands," which it had done when Harrison Ford in the first film). But I believe Gosling was the wrong person for the role -- he was too emotionless and almost mechanical in the fight scenes. Yes, he's a synthetic human, but considering they were designed to be "More Human than Human," I expected more humanity in Gosling's character in the 2049 generation.

There was another element that bothered me. Los Angeles 2049 has clear Asian influences, including Chinese and Japanese signage everywhere, and a cafeteria that has Asian dishes and themes. Yet there were hardly any Asian people in any roles, even extras.

Taking things one step further: Assuming demographic trends persist, in the far future society "minorities" will be white and the population will be mostly black, brown, yellow, and multiracial. Yet every major and most minor roles in Blade Runner 2049 are white, except for Olmos (reprised from the first film for about a minute), the east African shopkeeper (another short scene), and the junkyard orphanage owner.

The 1982 film was far better in this respect, imagining a future where society did include lots of people from different backgrounds and cultural influences from across the Pacific -- and even a street language based on Japanese, German, and English! 

Blade Runner 2049 isn't the only science fiction film that gets the future humanity wrong. In my long experience watching science fiction movies, only Luc Besson's 1997 film The Fifth Element tried to get humanity right, at least with secondary characters and extras who were black, mixed race, and Asian.

Despite all of this, I would like to see Blade Runner 2049 once more. I had trouble following some of the plot threads and details, and would like to see it at least once more to wrap my head around them and help me fathom the meaning of the story.

Facebook sells out to China, and what it means for critics abroad

The New York Times published an article this week titled China is trying to police what people are saying about it around the world. I've written about China and its paranoid information-control efforts for years, but the activities to tamp down voices of dissent abroad are extreme. What I'd like to point out here are the reasons why Facebook and others are actually following China's Orwellian wishes. Take this example from the article: 

Facebook suspended Mr. Guo’s account. In a statement, the company said the account published the personal information of others without their consent, which violated the platform’s policies.

This is not just a case of China citing "hurt feelings" or some supposed rule-breaking on Facebook.
Zuckerberg is desperate to be in China. He's learned Mandarin, plays up his family connections (via his wife's family), and puts on the charm when visiting China. He's created relationships with officials at every level. His representatives have talked with companies which may be partners or acquired at some point.

Mark Zuckerberg speaking in Mandarin during a 2015 visit

So it does not surprise me one bit that Facebook will bend over backwards to accommodate officials on censorship demands. This is the cost of doing business in China for a tech company. Media companies learned this decades ago -- read up on how Rupert Murdoch tried to operate in China. It's quite fascinating, worthy of a soap opera-style biopic.

Now it's Silicon Valley's turn, especially companies that specialize in communication -- social networks, mobile phone manufacturers, companies that sell networking hardware or cloud services, etc. The Chinese government's survival depends on information control, and if they can't do it themselves, then they force local and foreign companies to do it for them.

Don't think that this issue will be limited to human rights activists. It doesn't matter who you are -- your social media comments, family relationships, WeChat and Facebook messages, work connections on LinkedIn, and other digital footprints that reflect your attitude or influence will be used to build a social media score that determines your level of access to the country and ability to do business in China.

Facebook's failed march to video

Facebook has a lot of problems on its plate right now, but one of the worst trends has been the poorly thought out march to video. It came from Zuckerberg and was repeated by various senior Facebook  executives, and then became a mantra for publishers. Many publishers made large investments in video programming for Facebook, only to find the money isn't there and Facebook has decided to demote publisher content.

This is not just large media companies that got burned, I know some smaller producers who believed the "five years the feed will be all video" baloney and shifted their efforts accordingly. Some were doing really important work, too, around causes or local news. What a waste.

Meanwhile, overall video consumption in Facebook is declining, and it's the one percent that get the most engagement, regardless of who the publisher is.

I personally would not mind if Facebook turned back the clock 10 years, when most conversations seemed to be personal and text-based, and the truckloads of memes, ads, gaming achievements, real and fake news, and videos of cats playing the piano had yet to be shoved down Facebook's maw. Old-school text discussions seem to work for Hacker News and large swathes of Reddit; why can't it work for Facebook?


My Facebook feed: Ads, viral videos, and other crap I would rather not see:

Google Adwords bans my ad, citing "Revisionist Concepts" and "Anti Content"

Google appears to be getting ready for re-entry into the People's Republic of China or Soviet Russia, judging by the "Revisionist Concepts: Unacceptable Anti Content" notification I received from the Google Adwords team for one of my AdWords ad campaigns for Lean Media.

Here's what the advertisements looked like. I created four simple text ads promoting the book and the Lean Media framework:

Anything seem wrong? These ads are about as milquetoast as you can get. Yet AdWords reviewers or algorithms thought the ad contained extremely offensive ... something. See for yourself: 

The message says "Unacceptable Anti Content ... Google policy does not permit the advertisement of revisionist concepts."

What does that even mean? The email doesn't explain, and Google's support website was no help either. Honestly, it sounds like something a Communist Party official might hand down to a hapless journalist or dissident before sentencing him or her to the gulag.

To be clear: Lean Media is a production framework for people who create media. The 50,000-word book I wrote is apolitical, non-offensive, and encourages media creators to make better media that audiences love. There are tons of real-world examples, from an art-photography publisher in China to global media brands like Minecraft and The Simpsons. Even if the book were related to politics or some other controversial subject, there's no reason Google should ban it ... at least not in this country.

Putting on my tinfoil hat: What I suspect happened is my recent public criticisms of Google AdWords about misleading settings for locations and ad fraud got noticed, and someone flagged it for additional review. "Anti-content" was the only thing they could come up with, and they banned the ad.

Do no evil, indeed.

A startup called "Bodega"

You may have heard the news about "Bodega," a hot Silicon Valley startup that wants to shake up the vending machine space with machine learning and clever placement. They've got two young ex-Google employees as founders, and have attracted lots of funding.

And then there's the name: A pretty shameless appropriation of the term used to describe the small mom-and-pop convenience stores in New York and elsewhere, often serving poor immigrant communities and offering special goods such as home-made sandwiches and services such as international money transfers. The logo is a cat, which in real bodegas is often the mascot. People are up in arms about all of this.

Let's be honest: If the startup were called "Vendoogle" or "Quikbox" I don't think there would be so much outrage.

Local mom & pop stores have been under assault by all kinds of well-funded rivals for decades, including CVS, Target Mini-Stores, gas station franchises, and bottling companies working with vending machine distributors. Nevertheless, the little corner stores still keep ticking in many areas thanks to goods and services not offered by these bigger competitors, including specialty food, extended hours, and money transfer services.

However, if Target were to rebrand their mini-stores as "Red Bodegas" or something similar there would be similar outrage. It's one thing to compete, it's another thing to play dirty by usurping the little guy's brand or throwing your weight around too much in a very obvious or threatening way.

If I were McDonald and Rajan, I would use this opportunity to rebrand to something more acceptable, offer a mea culpa, and maybe even figure out some way to work with real bodegas and local stores (shared distribution for certain items to lower costs? Machine learning for real bodegas' inventory? "Local" goods? Spillover sales?)

The evolution of reading in the digital age

In the past few years, a lot of people have remarked about how their reading habits have changed. Here’s an example I saw on Hacker News earlier this week:

I was a good reader throughout my childhood, youth and academic years. Lately, and after a couple of decades, it's becoming increasingly challenging to focus, consume and finish books. I'm becoming the modern age illiterate. I'm usually squeezed for time - but even if I find some, I don't pick up where I left.

Does anyone encountering the same challenge? Any ideas/tips that could help overcome the cycle? Do you think it's caused by modern information overload, distraction addiction, or perhaps dealing with short cryptographic lines of code?

I know exactly what he or she is talking about. I loved reading when I was younger, everything from newspapers to novels. I took a long break from reading for pleasure when I started my first graduate degree in the mid-2000s, and never really got back into it. Part of the reason is I don’t have enough time to read. I am very busy with work, even on the weekends and in the evening (after dinner is actually my most productive writing time). When I do have free time, I like to spend time with my family. I can watch TV with them or even play video games with my son. But it’s hard to share a book.

But there’s something else. My reading habits have really changed. What I find myself doing now with most long-form Web or mobile content, as well as printed magazines and newspapers, is skimming to get the basic facts or quotes and then moving on. I just don't have the time or attention to stay focused anymore.

 

As for books (fiction and nonfiction), I find myself skimming when I use the Kindle. The Kindle Fire is even worse because of the easy access to other distractions. For printed books I can focus but I have found my threshold for abandoning a book is much lower. I did this recently with a novel by an author I used to love (Martin Cruz Smith if anyone is curious). I just felt the characters in the new novel were wooden and I noticed some basic editing errors. I returned the book to the library after about 40 or 50 pages.

One of the commenters in the Hacker News thread speculated that the community focus on programming in bursts while looking at snippets of code all day may explain the change. But that hypothesis doesn’t hold for me … I don’t look at much code. Indeed, a large part of my day job involves looking at or writing long pieces of text for the In 30 Minutes series.

Rather, I believe the change in habits results from a combination of information overload, easy access to screens, and training our minds (through exposure to text messages, tweets, online updates, short video clips, etc.) to prefer condensed communication.

It’s an uncomfortable trend. On the other hand, I also see it as part of the evolution of media and society. If we look back through history, we can see how other new media had a similar impact. Newspapers, film, and television changed styles of writing and peoples' preferences for reading materials and storytelling. Then, as now, there was great discomfort in the way media and storytelling evolved. A 1961 speech by the then-chairman of the FCC called television a "vast wasteland." If you go further back, there was negative reaction to the introduction of radio, the use of photos in newspapers, certain types of stage plays, and even opera, which was seen by 17th-century British intellectuals as "chromatic torture."

There has been a lot of thoughtful expository writing about this; if you are interested (and can manage to read an entire book) I recommend checking out Mitchell Stephens "The Rise of the Image, the Fall of the Word" and Walter Ong's "Orality and Literacy". They are somewhat dated now, but I think they really documented important transitions from antiquity to the end of the 20th century.

Why online communities die

If you've actively participated in a great online community, and watched its quality decline over time, the following excerpt from "Well-Kept Gardens Die By Pacifism" should ring true.

If you are new to online communities, pay close attention. If you are a moderator or "owner", internalize this advice ... if you want the community to thrive and prosper.

Good online communities die primarily by refusing to defend themselves.

Somewhere in the vastness of the Internet, it is happening even now. It was once a well-kept garden of intelligent discussion, where knowledgeable and interested folk came, attracted by the high quality of speech they saw ongoing. But into this garden comes a fool, and the level of discussion drops a little—or more than a little, if the fool is very prolific in their posting. (It is worse if the fool is just articulate enough that the former inhabitants of the garden feel obliged to respond, and correct misapprehensions—for then the fool dominates conversations.)

So the garden is tainted now, and it is less fun to play in; the old inhabitants, already invested there, will stay, but they are that much less likely to attract new blood. Or if there are new members, their quality also has gone down.

Then another fool joins, and the two fools begin talking to each other, and at that point some of the old members, those with the highest standards and the best opportunities elsewhere, leave...

In the beginning, while the community is still thriving, censorship seems like a terrible and unnecessary imposition. Things are still going fine. It's just one fool, and if we can't tolerate just one fool, well, we must not be very tolerant. Perhaps the fool will give up and go away, without any need of censorship. And if the whole community has become just that much less fun to be a part of... mere fun doesn't seem like a good justification for (gasp!) censorship, any more than disliking someone's looks seems like a good reason to punch them in the nose.

(But joining a community is a strictly voluntary process, and if prospective new members don't like your looks, they won't join in the first place.)

And after all—who will be the censor? Who can possibly be trusted with such power?

... I have seen it happen—over and over, with myself urging the moderators on and supporting them whether they were people I liked or not, and the moderators still not doing enough to prevent the slow decay. Being too humble, doubting themselves an order of magnitude more than I would have doubted them. It was a rationalist hangout, and the third besetting sin of rationalists is underconfidence.

This about the Internet: Anyone can walk in. And anyone can walk out. And so an online community must stay fun to stay alive. Waiting until the last resort of absolute, blatent, undeniable egregiousness—waiting as long as a police officer would wait to open fire—indulging your conscience and the virtues you learned in walled fortresses, waiting until you can be certain you are in the right, and fear no questioning looks—is waiting far too late.

Website development and the importance of technical cofounders

(Update: Since writing this post, I have launched a company which is dedicated to helping people understand complicated technologies and concepts. Besides creating online posts which address questions such as What Is Dropbox and What Is Google Drive, I have also published a series of guides under the In 30 Minutes brand.)

An acquaintance recently contacted me about an idea for a Web startup, using social media to bringing together people interested in humanitarian causes, art, positive change, etc. The problem she had, and it's a problem that I think is quite widespread, is she doesn't have the required coding skills. I responded with the following message:

Regarding your idea for a social media site (or network?) it sounds pretty interesting, and there are definitely niches out there that are not being well served by Facebook, Linkedin Groups, or existing Web forums. 

That being said, I would be very careful about what area you target, as there are many existing services that address some of the areas that you named below -- Jumo, http://www.humanitarianforum.org/, some specific art-oriented communities, etc. Convincing users to join your site when there are already compelling services out there with large user communities is more difficult than targeting an unserved or underserved population. 

In addition, in my experience creating user communities and blogs in the past, I have found that very tight niches ("South Florida Artists for Peace") are much easier to gain traction than broad communities ("Worldwide Artists for Positive Change and Humanitarian Causes"). 

As for the nuts and bolts of creating the community, the good news is that there are many existing software platforms out there that make it much easier to get started, and good coders will know how to use them. 

The bad news is that good coders can be hard to find -- there is definitely a shortage of engineering talent, and you will be competing against larger companies and funded startups for them. 

But there is a silver lining: There are many software developers who are currently working as employees who are interested in co-founding a company. The question then arises of how to find one who likes your idea, recognizes the skills/connections you are bringing to the table, can brainstorm/collaborate on how to move the project forward, and finds the opportunity worth pursuing. 

In my opinion, the co-founder has to be someone you can meet in person on a regular basis -- that's how trust gets built, and ideas can move forward much more quickly than by sending emails or relying on Skype. You can work your local networks, or start attending local entrepreneurial meetups (preferably technology-oriented events). If there are none in your area, try organizing one and bring in one or two speakers that startup founders would want to hear from (for instance, a local lawyer talking about LLC vs S-Corp formation, or someone who has founded a successful startup in the past). 

Plan B would involve outsourcing all of the coding using Guru.com, Elance, or remote developers recommended to you by someone else. The problem with this approach, besides the cost, is working out the software specifications and deliverables can be very frustrating if you've never done it before. It's possible to find developers who can help walk you through the process, but even still the chance for misunderstandings and "scope creep" is very high -- another reason to find a technical co-founder.

I didn't get into the details of some of the software components that could be used to make such a site, but when I heard the idea I immediately thought of open-source content-management systems such as Joomla and Drupal, and authentication tools such as Facebook Connect and Twitter's xAuth/OAuth that would let people use their existing social media identities to authenticate/register and easily distribute the site's content and discussions elsewhere.

Taking photos in public: Can you get in trouble?

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The ACLU has a great page that explains what's allowed and what's not when it comes to taking photos and video in public places. It's an issue that's very important to anyone living in a free and open society, but is especially important now, considering nearly every mobile phone sold today has a digital camera buit in, and most of them can also take video (even my low-tech Nokia handset that came for free with my AT&T prepaid plan can shoot video, albeit at 128x96). The result is anyone with such a phone can photography anything or video any event that they happen to witness, whether it's mundane or extraordinary. Not everyone appreciates being photographed/videoed, however, and there is always a worry about getting in some sort of trouble for taking photographs. What are our rights?

The ACLU page lays it out very clearly. In terms of photography:

• When in public spaces where you are lawfully present you have the right to photograph anything that is in plain view. That includes pictures of federal buildings, transportation facilities, and police. Such photography is a form of public oversight over the government and is important in a free society.

• When you are on private property, the property owner may set rules about the taking of photographs. If you disobey the property owner's rules, they can order you off their property (and have you arrested for trespassing if you do not comply).

• Police officers may not generally confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant. If you are arrested, the contents of your phone may be scrutinized by the police, although their constitutional power to do so remains unsettled. In addition, it is possible that courts may approve the seizure of a camera in some circumstances if police have a reasonable, good-faith belief that it contains evidence of a crime by someone other than the police themselves (it is unsettled whether they still need a warrant to view them).

• Police may not delete your photographs or video under any circumstances.

And:

If you are stopped or detained for taking photographs:

• Always remain polite and never physically resist a police officer.

• If stopped for photography, the right question to ask is, "am I free to go?"
If the officer says no, then you are being detained, something that under the law an officer cannot do without reasonable suspicion that you have or are about to commit a crime or are in the process of doing so. Until you ask to leave, your being stopped is considered voluntary under the law and is legal.

• If you are detained, politely ask what crime you are suspected of committing, and remind the officer that taking photographs is your right under the First Amendment and does not constitute reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

The underlined emphasis is mine. I was not aware of these issues until I read this page, and the phrase "Am I free to go?" is one worth remembering. Note also that not all officials (including police) understand the law when it comes to taking pictures in public places.

It's also worth remembering that public spaces include streets, parks, and many other exterior spaces. Further, these rights don't only apply to photographing police, but also anyone who happens to be in them. While someone may demand that you "put that camera down" or "stop taking pictures of me" and you are in a public space, you are legally within your rights to keep shooting -- although the polite thing to do may be different.

When it comes to shooting video, however, wiretapping laws have clouded the picture, and have been abused by police in Massachusetts and other states. Stories of people videoing an arrest on the street or even from their own property only to be arrested themselves have become disturbingly commonplace, and has a chilling effect on public behavior. There are signs the courts are coming around, but in the meantime reading the ACLU's take is helpful for understanding what's at stake:

With regards to videotaping, there is an important legal distinction between a visual photographic record (fully protected) and the audio portion of a videotape, which some states have tried to regulate under state wiretapping laws.

• Such laws are generally intended to accomplish the important privacy-protecting goal of prohibiting audio "bugging" of private conversations. However, in nearly all cases audio recording the police is legal.

• In states that allow recording with the consent of just one party to the conversation, you can tape your own interactions with officers without violating wiretap statutes (since you are one of the parties).

• In situations where you are an observer but not a part of the conversation, or in states where all parties to a conversation must consent to taping, the legality of taping will depend on whether the state's prohibition on taping applies only when there is a reasonable expectation of privacy. But that is the case in nearly all states, and no state court has held that police officers performing their job in public have a reasonable expectation. The state of Illinois makes the recording illegal regardless of whether there is an expectation of privacy, but the ACLU of Illinois is challenging that statute in court as a violation of the First Amendment.

As for the question of whether it's OK to photograph or video the TSA, the answer is yes you can, as long as you are not interfering with the screening process or taking photos of their baggage scanner screens. Read the ACLU page for more information.

You may also be interested in some other blogging I've done, including:

• iPod touch video recording: A lesson for broadcast news
• Another reason China should fear the 'Net: A million people with camera phones
• Watershed event: Amateur riot video circulates in China
• The coming Video 2.0 storm
• Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution

Image: Protests in San Francisco, August 2011. Photo by flickr user tedeytan, posting here under the terms of the creative commons license used: Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-SA 2.0). 

Greg Maxwell's manifesto against the "poisonous" scientific publishing industry

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(Updated with full text of manifesto, at bottom of page) From Greg Maxwell's manifesto, announced as he uploaded more than 18,000 scientific articles to The Pirate Bay and attacked the prosecution of Aaron Swartz for "stealing" from JSTOR:

"... The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it."

"If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified -- it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime."

"When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else. ..."

I spotted the link and a good discussion on a Hacker News thread titled "33GB of public domain JSTOR articles, and a manifesto".

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

UPDATE: I'm adding the full text of the manifesto below, as many people are unable to read it on TPB owing to ISP blocks in countries such as Ireland or filters operated by their employers:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaply as $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd systemΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they
realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions
with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal SocietyΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, WikisourceΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproductionΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥scanning the documentsΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥ created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archivesΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledgeΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥as their lofty mission statements suggestΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value
they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justifiedΓΓé¼ΓÇ¥it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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WikiLove buttons: A weak response to a fundamental problem with Wikipedia's editing policy

Wikipedia is rolling out a new tool called "WikiLove Buttons." The experiment, as explained by Howie Fung, Erik Moeller, and other top editors, is a weak response to a rather significant problem: Ordinary people ("new editors") don't like being shut out of articles, and when their edits are removed (or even savagely put down by experienced editors) they are less likely to want to contribute again. This undermines the crowdsourcing mission upon which Wikipedia was founded, and erodes quality. Unfortunately for Wikimedia, Inc. and its hundreds of millions of users, this roundabout way of showing appreciation for newbie edits by using a love button won't solve the problem of condescending uber-editors putting down perfectly good edits based on misguided policies, poor/incomplete understanding of topic issues, or inflated ego.

Ordinarily I wouldn't bother writing about this, but what prompted me to was the ReadWriteWeb review of the love button by Marshall Kirkpatrick. I generally like Kirkpatrick's writing but I really dislike when Wikipedia is unquestionably held up as a reliable source of information -- especially by people who speak with authority. While it can be considered a starting place for basic facts, it's hardly a reliable or complete source of information, as I described in my comment left at the bottom of the RWW article:

Disagree with the statement that Wikipedia is an "undeniably good source of information on almost any topic." For some topics, yes. But many others are flawed.

For instance, articles about famous living people are often sanitized by their handlers or supporters. Non-Western topics on English-language Wikipedia are shallow and/or unable to cite primary and secondary sources in other languages. Wikipedia editors do not view blogs as reliable sources, even if the authors are experts in said topic. And attempting to correct mistakes or add information to certain articles often brings up an array of badges, warnings, and restrictions that make it practically impossible for "the crowd" to edit.

As for the new feature, the love icons seem to be designed in a way that they make browsing and contributing more difficult. This may make things better for "top nerds at Wikipedia" but I doubt it will lead to a better product or experience for the rest of us.

The Internet and the New World Order

"Governments and their security forces are afraid of the people now. The new generation, the generation of the Internet, is fearless. They want their full rights, and they want life, a dignified life.”

- Shawki al-Qadi, an opposition lawmaker in Yemen

Source: "In Cairo Streets, A Fight For The Arab Future", The New York Times, February 3, 2011