Archive for the 'Society' Category

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From Counterculture to Cyberculture

Published on November 10, 2006 in Society and Technology. 0 Comments

Tonight I attended what I consider to be an historic meeting of minds: several rockstars in the long, strange and entangled common history of 60s counterculture and commune life, mind-expanding chemicals, personal computing, virtual communities and Web 2.0.

Stewart Brand: founder of the Whole Earth Catalog — a series of books that single-handedly educated a generation of countercultural do-it-yerselfers — and the WELL — arguably the first virtual community.

Kevin Kelly: founding executive editor of Wired magazine and CoEvolution Quarterly, journalist and author of Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World — which told a better tale about emergence and complexity science than the Santa Fe Institute ever could.

Howard Rheingold: the great tech-culture journalist and “freelance instigator”, educator on participatory media in journalism and learning, author of Smart Mobs: the next social revolution, the Virtual Community, and several other works. Howard is also lately becoming my collaborator around the idea of using participatory media in the classroom.

Fred Turner: Stanford professor of Communications and Digital Media, one of my mentors, and now celebrated author of the superb work of scholarship and story-telling that brought all these free-thinking intellectuals together tonight: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.

I have much to share with you about what these folks shared with me tonight, but it’s 4:42am and will have to wait.

Daniel Steinbock in 100 words

Published on September 30, 2006 in Personal, Research, Science Culture and Visualization. 1 Comment

The tag cloud displayed on my name tag at Stanford University’s H-STAR faculty retreat.

I created tag clouds for every professor’s name tag to visualize their research interests based on research statements and resumes. It was such a treat to watch these great minds interacting and using the tag clouds as launching points for conversations.

I made the tag clouds at TagCrowd. Check it out and play with creating your own clouds from your papers, resume, poetry, chat logs, or whatever suits your fancy.

Do ethics apply to great data?

Published on August 7, 2006 in Ethics, Research, Science Culture and Society. 0 Comments

AOL just unwittingly released private, personally-identifiable data for 650,000 of its subscribers when it posted a large chunk of its search logs (20 million queries, actually) to its research website as a service to the scientific community.

Despite anonymizing user id’s, the search queries often include information that make it easy to associate them with a person. The query data include social security numbers, credit card numbers, porn queries, evidence of intent to engage in criminal activities, etc.

AOL has since removed the data, but it’s spreading like wildfire over the internet on mirrors and torrents. I was able retrieve a complete copy of it (2 gigabytes, uncompressed) in about an hour.

As a scientist who does research that could would really benefit from data like this, I can tell you: this is big. Big and dirty.

Ethically speaking…should we, as researchers, ignore that this data exists or deal with it pragmatically as an unfortunate accident?

On one hand this is extremely useful and compelling data for a host of social and computer sciences; on the other, it is an unequivocally criminal violation of ethical standards.

Given the Google subpoena, big brother NSA, and the ethical debates about scientific research this story is provoking in mass media, this feels like a watershed moment.

No one can ever create a ‘clean’ version of this data since it could always be traced back to the original, identifiable information.

Here’s a possible scenario:

Most scientists will hesitate to research it, but some rebels will and no doubt find interesting, at-first-unpublishable, results. Sooner or later, something will get published, and then the floodgates will open. Because something can’t be unethical if everyone is doing it.

Right?