Terrific speech — provocative, funny, asking great questions — by Stephen Downes (transcript mp3) about what we can do to keep tags from forming power laws that suppress community. How can tags encourage community? He suggests embedding a pointer to FOAF files in RSS feeds, but the presentation is much broader than that. (Here’s a post of mine that relates to one point he makes.) [Thanks to Scott Rosenberg for the link.] [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy Downes ]

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The Berkman Center has a lunchtime speaker every Tuesday, and this week it’s my turn. I’m talking about — guess what? — taxonomies and tags. It’s an informal venue, and with luck I’ll be interrupted after ten minutes, but I need to have a full talk prepared, just in case. I’ve been having trouble structuring it. Here are the notes I have so far. Comments? Criticisms? Rude suggestions?

Why Tags Matter

I want to talk about three ways tags matter.

If necessary: Brief explanation of tags. Show del.icio.us and Flickr. [Yes, I'm confident Berkpeople know what tags are, but these talks draw a broader audience.]

First, tags may not matter:

We’re in an early adopter phase. Historically, people have resisted adding metadata to objects.

Why is there such enthusiasm now? A. We get individual value from tagging.
B. No one is telling us to do it or how to do it.

First reason: Aristotle

For Aristotle, to be is to be a type of thing. Types = categories. He gave us genus-species definitions: X is a type of P and is different from other members of P. I.e., X is what it is because of the category it’s in.

Atistotle’s implications/assumptions:

Knowledge and world are one

Categories are defined by principles (e.g., “rational animal”): These principles are rational, can be known by experts who have authority, exist independent of our awareness, and are precise. (Every member of a category is an equally good example of that category.)

Aristotle’s principles of organization come from how we organize physical things in the real world: Lumping and splitting. So, ideas are assumed to be subject to the same limitations as physical things: X can only be “shelved” in one spot at a time. (Law of Identity — ((A=A) and ~(A = ~A)) — becomes true for ideas as well as for physical objects.)

Challenges to Aristotle:

Postmodernism (brief!): Disputes that categories are independent of us and are rational. Points to relation of knowledge, authority and power.

Eleanor Rosch: Not all members of a category are equally good examples. Her theory of classification by prototype. Prototype classification says our conceptual organization is far fuzzier and messier than Aristotle thought.

Tagging: Categories are driven by convenience not principle, are relative and relevant to the individual, and are non-authoritative

Lack of special status for author’s own tags indicates just how non-authoritative tagging is

Why does disputing Aristotle matter? Aristotelianism affects us when we think of the world as something that starts with definitions, that consists of topics that persist through history, that enable domain-specific authority.

Second reason: Nature of topics

Frank Miksa, professor at the University of Texas, Austin: We all tend to believe that “there exists a realm of knowledge that grows through individual contributions and is transmitted from generation to generation such that its existence is thought to be continuous and is capable of being examined.”

Example of the breakdown of that idea: Wikipedia

Topics are whatever someone is interested in, so long as it can be verified

450,000 entries in English so far (60,000 in Encyc. Britannica)

Categories (like tags) are assigned by readers. Hierarchy also. E.g., Tori Amos is a top-level category because someone assigned her sub-categories. This isn’t a statement about what’s important but about how to make it easy to find the new Tori Amos CD.

Topics are becoming more like interests than self-standing, transgenerational slots. Also, finer-grained.

Third reason: Re-meaning

We have been born into taxonomies. Now we’re making our own. It’s messy, but, well, so are we.

The fact that the basic principles of taxonomies — lumping and splitting — have reflected physical limitations means that our alienation from categories is an alienation from the physical world??

Most exciting thing: We don’t know where this is going. A new infrastructure of human meaning. What will emerge?

[Technorati tags: taxonomy tags berkman ]

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This Wednesday, I’m leading yet another in a series of discussions at the Berkman Center. This time the topic is:

Many of our metaphors about the Internet treat it as a place, which is perfectly appropriate. But many - or perhaps all - Net phenomena have a temporal dimension which is not “merely” metaphorical. For example, weblogs are able to become proxy selves because they have permanent addresses, IM’s distinguishing characteristic is that it’s interruptive of the now, and discussions are presented as threaded as a way to sort through overlapping chronologies. How else does time manifest itself on the Net? How is it different from real world time and our traditional conception of time as a series of atomic moments?

It’s open to anyone. And we serve pizza. Woohoo! Wednesday, 6-7:30pm, at the Baker House (map) [Technorati tag: berkman ]

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I find it interesting that I haven’t seen a new age tagging app that gives special social weight to the tags the authors of works create. Obviously authors get to sort their resources by the tags they’ve assigned, but when it comes to make sense of the aggregation of tags, authors’ tags have no special weight.

This isn’t a criticism. Rather, it’s an observation about how reader-centric we’re becoming.

It also is another signal that we are shifting from topics to interests. Topics get declared by authorities and have authority. They are assumed to have some independent, trans-generational longevity. Topics can even have ontological status: A topic is what a resource is about. In the tagging world, though, a tag expresses what something means to me, the reader. It can say what something is about, but it can just as easily denote its genre (”humor”, “disclosure statements”), significance (”must read,” “nitpicking”) or its language. And if the tag expresses the resource’s topic, it’s the topic in its relevance to my interests: I might tag a custard pie recipe as “ballistic object.”

Now, along comes folksonomy, the emergence of taxonomy from the bottom up. It can occur if people get some feedback about how others are tagging resources: If I see that 500 people tag photos of San Francisco as “SanFran” and only three tag them “SF,” I will go with “SanFran” if I want my photos to be found, thus adding to that tag’s momentum.

Does this mean that folksonomies will encourage the re-emergence of topics, bottom up? Are we going to be double-minded, applying one tag for the folksonomy so the resource can be found and others that reflect our own interests? ? (If we also start tagging for local folksonomies — our social networks — we may become multi-minded in our tagging.) Are topics dead or are we rebuilding them in our images? [Technorati tags: tags taxonomy folksonomy ]

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Rael has coined a term: Shufflecasting:

Rather than downloading fully-formed podcast “shows” consisting of talk, music, and assorted sound-effects, I’ve been autofilling my Shuffle with an eclectic mix…

Rather than a “produced” full-blown radio show (the direction in which some podcasting seems headed), shufflecasting is more geek NPR meets Prairie Home Companion meets The Screensavers…

[Technorati tags: shufflecast rael ]

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A 1955 Geniacs computer kit for kids 1955 is currently selling at eBay for $232.50, and there are four days left in the auction.

Geniacs kit

I had one of these when I was a lad. You programmed it by placing metal strips on wheels.

I also had a plastic computer that consisted of layers like a lasagna that had tubes you slid over prongs to make them longer (where long=on), and then you shuffled the layers. Yes, the memory is a bit fuzzy, but the computer’s logic was not.

I did not care for either toy. I didn’t like computers until I was typing my wife’s dissertation for her and discovered word processing. [Thanks to Mark Dionne for the link.] [Technorati tags: geniacs ebay ]

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Marc Abrahams points to a Geniac ad from 1957. The first paragraph:

GENIAC the first electrical brain construction kit is equipped to play tic-tac-toe, cipher and encipher codes, convert from binary to decimal, reason in syllogisms, as well as add, subtract, multiply and divide. Specific problems in a variety of fields–actuarial, policy claim settlement, physics, etc., can be set up and solved with the components. Connections are solderless and are completely explained with templates in the manual. This covers 33 circuits and shows how new ones can be designed.

It cost $19.95.

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I wrote the current issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 newsletter, a looong piece on taxonomies and tagging. Esther has given me permission to post the introduction to the article. It attempts to give an overview of taxonomies, trees, faceted classification, tags and folksonomies. Here’s how it begins:

The narrative that tells of the first man and woman encountering the tree of knowledge focuses on its tempting fruit. But after we took the bite, we apparently looked up and got the idea that knowledge is shaped like the tree’s branching structure: Big concepts contain smaller ones that contain smaller ones yet. Over the millennia, we have fashioned the structures of knowledge in just such tree-like ways, from the departmental organization of universities (liberal arts contains history and history contains ancient Chinese history) to the hierarchy of species. The idea that knowledge is shaped like a tree is perhaps our oldest knowledge about knowledge.

Now autumn has come to the forest of knowledge, thanks to the digital revolution. The leaves are falling and the trees are looking bare. We are discovering that traditional knowledge hierarchies that have served us so well are unnecessarily restricted when it comes to organizing information in the digital world. The principles of organization themselves are changing now that they are being freed from the constraints of the physical world. For example …

Click here to read the rest of the introductory section… [Technorati tags: taxonomy tags folksonomy ]

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Gary Googlewhack Stock points out that Google no longer provides automatic links to the definition of search terms that end in S:

Nothing is delicious (11M pages). No one is anxious (6M). This may be because no one has a penis (24M). In apparent response to GOP fiscal irresponsiblity, nothing remains gratis (131M). Some fail to see the obvious (28M), that Genesis (16M) is not in conflict with physics (56M). Alas! (5M)

You know how when you search for, say, anxietyon Google, the light blue bar at the top reports that it’s showing Results 1-100 of about 16,900,00 for anxiety (0.55), and since “anxiety” is a recognized word, there’s a ink to a dictionary definition? If you search for any word that ends with an “s,” as in “anxious,” there’s no link.

Gary speculates, among other possibilites that “At Google’s heart, the regex !^(?i)[a-z]+\s*$ has lost a slash, banning all pluralization!”

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There have been two problems, both involving veterans. After receiving the big money, Mark Blount has been about 60 percent of the Mark Blount of a year ago. And then there was the resident star, who has played much of the season in a pout…

— Bob Ryan, “Ainge may not be able to wiggle out of this,” Boston Globe, Feb. 25, 2005

The resident star is apparently so famous that he does not need to be named. His absence of namingness signals his fame, so to speak. It’s takes one-namers such as Madonna and Cher one step further, all the way to being a non-namer. Now that’s fame!

I, of course, don’t have any idea who the article is referring to. Presumably, a computer trying to parse this article, even just to index it, is going to have less of an idea.

Here’s where you get to jump in and explain that latent semantic indexing would associate cues such as “star” with other articles where the star is named, and thus computers are smarter than I am and I ought to take my hair-sprouting protoplasm back to the swamp that spawned it and not only that but chrome takes a polish better than my sagging flesh ever did. To which I reply that if computers are so smart, how come they haven’t sent an Arnold-like cyborg from the future and have it assume the reins of government. Yeah, how come? Answer me that, bit-brain-boy!

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At the Thursday night blogging confab at the Berkman Center, the question of how to define blogs briefly surfaced in a meta way. It reminded me of a page I’ve wanted for a long time, but apparently haven’t wanted enough to build.

The idea is that most living terms are impossible to define cleanly. We do much better by pointing to some examples that everyone agrees “If these aren’t ___s, then nothing is!” (This is part of the rejection of Aristotelianism built on Eleanor Rosch’s work in prototype classification, but that’s an example of a different color.) So, if you wanted to explain to someone what a blog is, what would be a reasonable set of examples to which you could point? These aren’t necessarily the award-winning, big time blogs. In fact, they probably shouldn’t be because, by definition, the award winners aren’t typical. You’d want the list to include a good range of types and styles.

What would you put on a list of prototype blogs that would give a newbie — or a journalist — a good sense of the nature and range of blogs?

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BTW, here’s now not to define a blog:

“A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web.”

This would be slightly amusing if it didn’t come from Michael Gorman, president-elect of the American Library Association, and Dean of Library Services, Madden Library, California State University, Fresno

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You may not care about the frequency of baby names sorted by year, but you will go gaga over this way of visualizing that information you may not care about.

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Online Media Daily reports that MSN Search has started a “viral campaign” created by an agency called 42 Entertainment. But I don’t get what’s viral about it.

The main page, MSNFound, aggregates six phony blogs supposedly written by a demographically-appealing set of people. The individual blogs are one-entry and not very interesting. In fact, they are interest-averse, as so much marketing is. For example, the one by the so-called conspiracy theorist has a small banner about the “Enron/Afghanistan connection,” but it’s not linked to anything.

The aim seems to be to get you to click on links that are in fact queries so you can see the magnificence of MSN Search. But it in fact is confusing. The surfer dude’s “blog” suggests you do a search on “Tad _____” (where the blank is autofilled each time by the software with something different such as “Huntington Pier” or “Apprentice”) to see some “surprises.” The only surprise is that MSN Search puts a photo of the dude and a paragraph from his blog above all the legitimate entries and doesn’t explain how it got there. It’s just confusing. (In normal searches, the paid-for links are visually set off and the phrase “sponsored links” shows up in a too-faint gray.)

So, what’s supposed to be viral about this other than that by calling it viral, you get people like me to write about it?

(Disclosure: I was a member of the group of people MSN Search targeted for schmoozing shortly before the launch.) [Technorati tags: marketing MSNSearch ]

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I’m going to guess that this is the marketing project Scoble rips a new one for.

In response to Scoble, Pamela Parker Caird of The River wonders if a campaign can go viral these days without bloggers.

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Sean Carver of MSN responds.

Sean, it’s not that I’m taking the site too seriously. I admit that I’m probably out of your demographic, but why would I want to come back to this site? And if I don’t come back, how am I supposed to figure out that it’s actually a a “search engine ‘opera’”? I understand that it’s supposed to be entertaining but to me it just wasn’t. That’s sort of the opposite of viral.

But, then, I also think the MSN Search tv ads are a waste of electrons. After 28 seconds of random images dancing around a search box, we learn that MSN Search exists. Is there some reason we should go to MSN Search or is its mere existence supposed to be enough of an enticement? But, I assume this ad tested well, so I’m just showing my naivete.

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A big snippet from email Larry Lessig, star of The West Wing, is sending around, lightly edited:

Thanks to some prodding by a couple of great US Senators, the copyright office is currently considering whether to recommend changes to copyright law that will make it easier and cheaper for you to use “orphaned works” — works that remain under copyright but whose “owner” can’t be found…

To convince them, we need your help. If you have a relevant story, or a perspective that might help the Copyright Office evaluate this issue, I would be grateful if you took just a few minutes to write an email telling them your story. The most valuable submissions will make clear the practical burden the existing system creates. (One of my favorite stories is about a copy-shop’s refusal to enlarge a 60 year old photo from an elementary school year book for a eulogy because the copyright owner couldn’t be found.) Describe instances where you wanted to use a work, but couldn’t find the owner to ask permission. Explain how that impacted your ability to create…

The Copyright Office is already overworked and understaffed, so I’m not asking that you stuff their inbox with demands for action, or anything like that. [Emphasis added] They are not Congress. They are not even the FCC. Their role here is as fact-finder, so “just the facts, ma’am.” (Oops, do I need permission to use that?)

Everything you need to do this is online at http://eldred.cc. ..

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Larry also points at LuminousVoid’s reporting on the American Library Association’s oral argument against the FCC’s right to put in blace the Broadcast Flag regulation that will require manufacturers of digital equipment to ensure that their recorders can’t be used to make copies of copyrighted works. The article also points to Declan McCullagh’s coverage. [Technorati tags: fcc BroadcastFlag lessig ]

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Halley does a might fine pastiche in response to Rebecca’s request for bloggy sonnets. Here’s the first quatrain:

Let me not to the syndication of true blogs
Admit impediments. Blog is not blog
Which alters when it aggregation finds,
Or bends with the question of Atom or Dave:

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There’s one week left to register for David Isenberg’s Freedom to Connect conference at the reduced price of $250. It looks like it’ll be an informal confabulation of interesting people, with a special emphasis on how telecommunications might change and change the world. See you there?
[Technorati tag: DavidIsenberg f2c]

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While we’re talking about freedom to connect:

SaveMuniWireless wants to stop a Texas House bill that would ban municipal wireless networks.

And the EFF is having more luck putting together MythTVs than Greg and I are… [Technorati tag: mythtv ]

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Thomas Hoeren from Muenster is talking at the Berkman Tuesday lunch. He’s been described as the Larry Lessig of Europe.

He says there are five ways of regulating information:

1. By statute. But how do you manage statutes across national boundaries? Plus, technology out-races statues.

2. Regulation by courts. Lessig likes this because you have the client there advocating for herself. Hoeren likes it also, but there are problems: Courts don’t have rules. You can’t predict what they’re going to do.

3. Non-regulation. E.g., until 1989, the US avoided having copyright protection for foreign works. In Europe, consumer protection has not been regulated. But, there are areas where constitutions require regulation.

4. Self-regulation. Good, but there are problems. E.g., eBay is self-regulating but is now being sued under European anti-trust laws.

5. Code as Code, technical regulation. This is Lessig’s innovation. Use technology to reinvent the rules. But the DMCA has lawyers helping companies avoid hacking.

In which situation do we use which tool? That is the main issue of information regulation. We need to find a Kantian “regulative idea,” which Hoeren calls “informational justice.”

There are four ways of defining it:

1. Use a constitution. (BTW, he says in Germany they avoid using the word “property” when talking about “intellectual property.” Yay.)

2. International public law. E.g., Kyoto for air quality. But when it comes to information law, there are too many players. He maintains that Article 9 of the Geneva rules is now being used in a way that twists its original intention.

3. Law and economics. Let the efficiency of rules determine how we think in informational law. But there are fundamental values that are not economic: E.g., the moral right of authors.

4. Can we use ideas of procedural justice to determine the meta-rules for information? Presented by Habermas who said we’ll never find a solution for determining common values. But we can find procedural rules of justice. A result is ok if it’s the result of a fair procedure. Hoeren likes this.

Right now there are many procedural injustices, he says. E.g., most of the internal drafts copyright directives in Europe are first sent to the headquarters to the content producers, not the consumer organizations.

Q: (Me) At Harvard there’s a controversy. We try to have fair hiring processes but it has led to an imbalance in gender and race. Inevitably we judge whether a process is just in part by looking at the outcome. But with information, we don’t have agreement about what is just. So, how do we know that the process is just?

A: We don’t have an idea about what informational justice is, so it’s best to try to make sure that the processes are fair and open.

Q: (Urs) Who defines the procedural rules — that’s the meta-meta problem.

A: In Sweden there are many procedural rules for lobbying. The drafts of acts are published and any meetings with lobbyists are posted on the Net.

(John Clippinger asks about the effect of social norms, a point Hoeren very much liked, but I missed it. Sorry.)

Q: (Urs) What about blended approaches?

A: I’m not trying to invent a theory that changes the whole world. I see procedural justice as a type of negative justice: I can determine what is unjust but not what is just.

Q: (me) Let’s say we go through the process and we lose. E.g., Lessig lost the Eldred case. Should he then say, Ok, justice has been served because the process was fair? But he won’t. He has a non-procedural idea of justice.

A: Yes, but I don’t understand that. As a researcher, Lessig ought to be satisfied. The rest of it is religion. Larry is a preacher.

He ends by admitting that there is an old argument between Hegel and Kant about the limits of formalism. And, he says, he’s not a huge fan of procedural justice; he just can’t find anything better.

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Jason Kottke is going full time as a blogger and would like some help.

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An international team has put together a new blog on the virtues of bacon. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the baconists, sees this as yet another way to build bridges between bloggers, in this case the vegetarians and the carnivores.

As a vegetarian, I can only applaud this noble yet repulsive effort.

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Ethan has Flickred photos from his India trip. And this post is worth a second link to.

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Lisa Williams has started a community journalism site for Watertown, MA: H20town.info. (As of this morning, the name hasn’t made it entirely hrough the DNS system, so you may have to click here for now.) It looks great.

Lisa says she was inspired in large part by Adam Gaffin’s Boston-online.com and Debbie Galant’s Baristanet.com.

When it comes to blogging’s long-term effect on journalism, this stuff matters more than the ability of bloggers to bring down media authority figures. The latter counts, no doubt, but it’s giving us a Barbarians-at-the-gates image. In fact, I think it’d be fairer to view us overall as community gardeners.

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He was a ferociously talented writer and a truth teller. I’m sad to hear he’s gone.

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Enter a mathematical expression into Google and it will return the results. E.g., if you enter “1+2″ (no quotes), it will tell you the answer is 3. Enter “half a cup in teaspoons” and it tells you that that’s 24 US teaspoons.

So, the lunatic journal, WordWays (I’m a long-time subscriber and love it) writes briefly about Eric Iverson’s attempt to see “which alphabetic phrase without any repreating letters generated the largest and smallest number.” Why? For that we’d need a psychiatrist and a pick axe. But who cares? Eric has found that the smallest is

and the largest is

I am so not tempted to outdo Eric.

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WordWays — “The Journal of Recreational Linguistics” — continues to get harder to read thanks to computers. A typical article treats words as collections of letters and tries to find ones that meet some odd constraint. Typical articles used to be about word pyramids and hyphenated words whose letters immediately before and after the hyphen cover every possible pairing. But now that word lists are computerized, the best of the WordWaysians have to come up with challenges that would not only stump a human but come close to stumping computers. I often can’t figure out what the hell the challenge is. For example, Simon Norton has an article wondering if all words can be expressed as sumagrams. Here’s the second paragraph:

This is what is called a free abelian group, where the second word derives from the name opf the Norwegian mathematician Abel. The elements of this group are sequences of (upper case) letters and antiletters…

Some I can follow, though. Eric Iverson, for example, publishes a list of words made only with letters with diagonals in them, from akavit to zanza. He finishes with a list of the longest words without any diagonal letters, starting with bioelectricities. And Darryl Francis lists all 300 tube stations in London and tries to find something interesting about their names. For example, did you know that Bond Street transadds to deobstruent and sober-tinted? I didn’t!

In the current issue, there’s also an article by Will Nediger speculating that Douglas Adams took his fascination with the number 42 from Lewis Carroll. And my son and I particularly enjoyed Fender Tucker’s list of 11 heterograms placed in perfectly ambiguous sentences, such as:

After breaking into the Sherriff of Nottingham’s armory, the flamboyant actor/thief Robin Hood took a bow.

Unfortunately, WordWays has a minimal Web presence — some samples and an opportunity to subscribe. It’s just about tailor-made for living on line. [Technorati tag: wordways ]

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Lawrence Summers, president of Harvard, talked
semi-informally to a conference held at the
university, offering three hypotheses about why
women are under-represented in science and
engineering: 1. They are less willing than men to
work the long hours because they value family more
than men do; 2. Women are inherently worse at science; 3. There are “different
socialization and patterns of discrimination in a
search.”

The discrepancy between the transcript and the
public statement

Before Summers released the transcript, I href="http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/0035
82.html">blogged that, from what he said and
what others reported, I thought he wasn’t really
just putting forward three hypotheses worth looking
at. I thought he betrayed a subtle preference for
one of them. Now that the href="http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005
/nber.html">transcript has been released, we
know it wasn’t subtle. He was arguing explicitly for
the first two hypotheses: Women choose not to
succeed and most women cannot succeed in the sciences.
Either way, it’s their fault. He said:

So my sense is that the unfortunate
truth—I would far prefer to believe something
else, … is that the combination of the high-
powered job hypothesis and the differing variances
probably explains a fair amount of this problem.

And:

So my best guess, to provoke you, of
what’s behind all of this is that the largest
phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between
people’s legitimate family desires and employers’
current desire for high power and high intensity,
that in the special case of science and engineering,
there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and
particularly of the variability of aptitude, and
that those considerations are reinforced by what are
in fact lesser factors involving socialization and
continuing discrimination.

But in Summers’ href="http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/2005
/womensci.html">initial public statement on the
controversy he says that in his remarks he was
“offering some informal observations on possibly
fruitful avenues for further research.” Now that we
see the entire transcript, we know that’s not the
whole truth. He wasn’t simply offering three
hypotheses. He was arguing for two of them.

His initial public statement tries to put a
gloss on matters. For example:

Despite reports to the contrary, I
did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are
intellectually less able than boys, or that women
lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of
science. As the careers of a great many
distinguished women scientists make plain, the human
potential to excel in science is not somehow the
province of one gender or another.

If you read the public statement, you come away
thinking that he sees no inherent differences in men
and women when it comes to scientific aptitude. But,
after reading the transcript, you realize his public
statement fudges the issue by leaving out a
modifier: The fact that some women become
distinguished scientists doesn’t mean that women in
general aren’t innately inferior in the sciences.
From the transcript, we learn that Summers in fact
does believe that women’s under-representation is
caused by inherent inabilities, although, to be
fair, he repeatedly admits he could be wrong.

So after the controversy broke, Summers put a
better gloss on what he’d said. That’s a human thing
to do. But it detracts from the claim of his
supporters — especially the right wingers
shouting that this is a case of PC-ness gone wild
— that Summers was only engaging in the sort
of open inquiry we should applaud. Yes, taking bold
stands is a value we should cherish; being
disingenous about them afterwards is not.

Summers’ view of discrimination

In the transcript Summers makes the odd argument
(attributed to Gary Becker) that if discrimination
were pervasive, an institution that wasn’t
discriminatory should be able to gather up a whole
bunch of worthy hires quite cheaply. So, we should
see a few institutions with science and
engineering faculties overloaded with incredibly talented
women. But we don’t. Therefore, he concludes, there
isn’t pervasive discrimination. and the first two
hypotheses explain the situation.

Transpose this to major league baseball’s
discrimination against African-Americans before the
color barrier was broken. By Summers’ reasoning, the
fact that teams were all white proved that there
wasn’t pervasive discrimination, a peculiar argument
to say the least. So, you have to add in the
particularities of women’s situation. If you add in the real situation — schools are actively recruiting women — the argument doesn’t apply either. It only applies if one believes that discrimination means having a no “No Girls Allowed”
sign on the recruitment office door, except at a handful of institutions that have realized they can scoop up brilliant faculty members at bargain prices if they end their discriminatory policies.

That’s not how discrimination works these days. It’s
not something that occurs just at the moment of hiring.
It happens in the socializing of men and women and
in the structure of institutions that lead men and
women in different directions. That encouragement
need not be as explicit as being put on the Science
Team in junior high. It can also result from the
culture of science being hostile to women or how the scientific community is structured — It is
telling that Summers doesn’t introduce the structure
of institutions as a fourth hypothesis. That’s because, while he’s a brilliant intellectual, he has
a ham-fisted view of discrimination. He sees it as a
set of false beliefs through which a sufficiently enlightened
person — or an enlightened recruitment committee —
could see, rather than as a complex set of
assumptions, behaviors and body language pervasive
throughout a culture.

I believe that Larry Summers sincerely would like
to make Harvard’s faculty more diverse. But I also
think that his remarks are themselves evidence of
the environment in which women struggle, one that assumes that reasons and policies can get
over discrimination. Discrimination can come about
not only through judgment but, more dangerously,
through the environment that conditions judgment.

Larry: Stay or go?

Personally, open inquiry is under attack from so
many quarters that I would vote against firing
Summers. People need to be allowed to be bone-
headed, self-interested, defensive, and imperfectly
non-discriminatory. We need to be able to introduce
hypotheses and examine them, even if our
examinations are flawed. In this case, I think those
needs outweigh the degree of insensitivity apparent
in Summer’s statements and behavior…yes, even if
he had made similar remarks about Jews or African-
Americans. But it’s a hard judgment to make and, as
Summers would say, I’m not confident I’m right.

[Disclosure: I'm a Fellow at Harvard Law's
Berkman Center. I've never met Summers. I am not a
member of the faculty and have no voice in such
issues.] [Technorati tags: harvard LawrenceSummers ]

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Chapel Hill bloggers have started using MeetUp to get together in the real world. Given the success of the Berkman weekly blogging meeting, it seems like a great idea. Good luck to them.

A search at MeetUp on “blog” turns up interesting results: 450 meetup groups for LiveJournal, 34 for Persian Blogging, 54 fgor MovableType, 3 for Video Blogging. It’d be interesting to see how many meetups spawn group blogs… [Technorati tag: meetup ]

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Jon Stewart on blogs, thanks to onegoodmove.

A photo diary of a day in the life of Tom Peters.

[Technorati tags:DailyShow TomPeters]

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Steve Garfield recorded the Thursday night meeting at Berkman that was taped by Nightline. He’s posted a 5-min (approx) version of it. So now the discussion about what’s on and off the record is totally on the record. Thanks, Steve!

And Mike Walsh has posted an MP3. Thanks, Mike!
[Technorati tags: berkman media]

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I used my Chanukah money from my in-laws (thanks Grandma and Grandpa!) to buy a watch on eBay that I’ve been admiring for a couple of years. It’s a Citizen Eco-Drive — the Eco means it runs on light, thus saving .0000000000000000005 kilowatts per year for the children of Mother Earth — and I like it, except for the instructions. Often watch instructions fail because they’re too brief. These fail because, although they are full, they are incomprehensible. Here’s an example, under the subhead “O-Position Correction of Function Hand and Date Wheel”:

The whole thing is like that. Page after page.

We need a Watch Setting Wiki where our civilization can pitch in and, using our combined brainpower, create understandable instructions for setting our watches. [Technorati tags: watches eco-drive]

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Robert Scoble made the blogosphere a little shinier by congratulating Firefox on its success.

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RageBoy’s new High-Beam blog was a pick of the day at The Guardian making The Guardian a little shinier and sanding down a carbunkle on RB’s craggy butt which is as close as RB gets to being shiny. (Here’s RB on Scoble.)

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Reading AKMA’s talk - sermon? invocation? - at the marriage of his friends Juliet and John will make you and your life companion feel shiny. For me, AKMA is a BridgeBlogger except instead of giving insight into another country, we learn what’s remarkable about another religion.

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I got a shiny copy of a new magazine in the mail a few days ago: Make. It’s packed with cool stuff and would appeal to the tinkerer in me if I had one of them in me. It’s off to a great start. (Dan Bricklin loves it.)

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EthanZ is doing some powerful blogging from India, shining his light on a place that is unfamiliar to most of us on this side of the world.

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Liz Lawley will be spending her time adding to the wattage of Microsoft Research’s Social Computing Group. It’s an impressive and congenial group. Congrats, Liz.

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Bob “Ethernet” Metcalfe has won a shiny National Medal of Technology for technological innovation. Congrats!

I’m puzzled, though, about why this medal, announced three days ago, is for 2003. Not quite keeping up in Internet time, are we, Department of Commerce?

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(Why the surge of miscellany? Because I just turned in a looong article on taxonomies and tags that will be the next issue of Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0, so now I have time to poke around the Web some more.)

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IBM plans on spending $100M over the next three years on getting linux onto desktops. According to eChannelLine the money will be used to:

…expand Linux support and technology across its Workplace software portfolio, which is used in a server-managed client model.

The investment will be focused on ISV support programs, channel and partner enablement and promotion, research and development, sales and marketing, and various technology and integration centers.

I’m actually surprised they’re not spending more. How much would it be worth to IBM to dethrone Windows? ,

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At the end of last night’s weird Berkman blogging meeting, recorded by ABC News for some upcoming episode of Nightline, the producer expressed surprise that anyone would blog about the presence of the cameras in the meeting. There were some very smart replies by bloggers there — Go Lisa, who concluded “Yes, my life is interesting to me” — but the producer’s comment indicated to me that we failed to make the point that blogging isn’t a sub-species of journalism. Of course we’re blogging the event because it’s something in our lives that we find interesting: We’re not in front of the cameras every day and it’s pretty damn fascinating to see how the mere presence of a camera creates a distortion field. But is “Cameras record meeting” news? Of course not; it’s a condition for there being news. (Hmm. I think I’m saying what Brendan Greeley of PRX said last night.)

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By the way, to read a surprisingly sympathetic view of the effect of blogging on journalism, see Peggy “Reagan’s Speechwriter” Noonan’s take on it. Wow. [Thanks, Dave, for the link.]

[Technorati tag: media]

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Pres. L. Summers has at last posted a transcript of his comments from a couple of weeks ago. So, now maybe (maybe) we can get a sense of the sense of his remarks. (Ironically, we learned about this at the Berkman Thursday blogging meeting which was discussing what’s on and off the record.)

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