Pippa Norris of the Harvard Kennedy School is giving a lunchtime Berkman talk titled “Cultural Convergence: The Impact on National Identities and Trust in Outsiders.” [Note: I'm live-blogging, hence making mistakes, missing stuff, misunderstanding other stuff, typing badly. This is an inaccurate, incomplete record of her talk.]

What might be the impact of cosmopolitan communications, she asks? Her thesis is that there are many firewalls that block global information flows. She will argue that the news media has an impact through cosmopolitan communications, and will look at the implications for public policies. It makes people slightly less nationalistic. [Note: She talks fast. Bad for live bloggers, but good for listeners.] (This is from her book, available free on her Web site.)

Globalization is the starting part. It’s about more than trade; it’s also social and political. Cosmopolitan communications = “the way we learn about, and interact with, people and places beyond the borders of our nation-state.” Cosmocomms have been expanding. But, so what, she asks. In the 1970s, this was seen as cultural imperialism. In the 1990s, it was thought of as Coca-colonization. In the 2000s, we’re still seeing cultural protectionism.

Pippa will focus on audio-visual publishing. Western countries remain dominant. In fact, the gap has widened. There are four views in the literature: 1. There’s a convergence around US exports. 2. There’s a polarization of national cultures. 3. There’s a fusion of national cultures. 4. Pippa’s firewall model.

The firewall model says that there are barriers: 1. Trade barriers; 2. Internal barriers to free press; 3. Poverty; 4. Learning barriers that make it harder to acquire values and attitudes.

She discusses three levels: individual, national, and cross-level. For the national, she talks about the “cosmopolitanism index” she’s devised. She’s surveyed 90 countries using a set of survey questions. At the bottom are the poorest countries with the poorest press freedom. At the top, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Norway, Denmark. It goes from 1972-2004.

That’s the framework. She confines her discussion of the results to effects on national identity and trust. Roughly, the more cosmpolitan, the less national identity and higher trust in outsiders. In terms of trusting outsiders, Norway takes the cake. US and Sweden are also high. (The Netherlands are high on the cosmo scale but only in the middle on the trust scale. Also, Germany and Spain.) But because there’s no control group — maybe trust maps to education? — you have to do multilevel regression. She uses age, gender, income, education, and news media use, and finds that trust correlates with news media use.

Her conclusions: Use of the news media “is positively related to more trust in outsiders” (different countries and religions) and “is related to weaker feelings of nationalism.” “I regard that as positive results.” But there are some qualifications: 1. Many other factors create trust in outsiders. 2. This study looks at the impact of news media, but not the impact of entertainment media. 3. There may be self-selection bias or interaction effects.

Policy implications? Is the globalization of news media a threat to national diversity? See www.pippanorris.com …

She concludes by asking what we know about how we measure flows of info from one country to another, over time, say from 1995?

Q: [ethanz] There are some familiar data sets. E.g., Alexa, although because it’s opt-in, it’s not perfect. There’s also Google Search Insights that tracks searches. In most countries, “news” is almost always one of the very top searches. A question: How might your analysis integrate with national-level studies. E.g., a study that showed that as cable TV was introduced to communities in India, you got an increase in empowerment equivalent to 4 years of education. [I probably got this substantially wrong.]

Q: There are categories of trust…
A: We use the World Values survey that includes over a quarter million people. Is trust in Nigeria and Sweden the same? There are many categories indeed. But when you see a strong pattern emerge, as we have, then we should assume something is happening in the data.

Q: A speaker from Microsoft was at Berkman recently, talking about the issues importing and exporting data on the Net across national boundaries. What sorts of measures have you been using?
A: The obvious ones. Internet access. Location of hosts. And some articles that have looked at search terms.

Q: I’m from Poland: High cosmo, low trust. In the US, we rent movies instead of watching TV. But rental stores don’t know about a particular movie highly famous in Europe. My question is about the global dimension of local issues.
A: Poland and much of Central Europe have suddenly become much more open and have found greater value change than in countries open for a long time. You should see greater variation within such countries, e.g., by age.

Q: [smacleod] Pippa asked for ideas about media flows, with some positivist assumptions about the ability of globalization and media studies to be objective. Has she read Appadurai’s “Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,” which emphasizes the mutability of flows. I wonder how Pippa might engage on-the-ground research and how such ethnographic research might recast her methodological assumptions. Extensive anthropological field work has been done in all the countries she’s mentioned, which engages and historicizes the legacy of colonialism.
A: I am a positivist. But I also like dealing with cases. There’s rich work being done in communications and other fields, but there’s also good division of labor. You need both. Some people like to fly over a country and others like to walk through it, and you get value from both.

Q: The US has more cultural exports than imports, while most seem to have about equal amounts. How does this play into cosmo?
A: America also imports a lot. America doesn’t have to import a lot because it’s got so much.

Q: Tribal populations in America have a tight tie to geography. Where’s UNESCO is generating the data to look at other regions than nation states?
A: The data generally depend on national statistical offices. UNESCO depends on those; it has no data generation capability itself.

Q: [hal] Google Ad-Planner lets you download a list of the 500 most visited sites for many countries. It has unique visitor numbers.
A: So I could see how many people go into Norway and how many go out.

This gives us a way to focus on globalization of media by focusing on the people, not on the media, Pippa concludes, reminding us that the chapters are up on her site. [Tags: norris_pippa globalization media trust ]

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Mark Gibbs reports on a, oh, let’s say over-zealous New Zealand copyright law:

This insanity, found in Sections 92A and C of New Zealand’s Copyright Amendment Act 2008 establishes – and I am not making this up – a guilt upon accusation principle!

Yep, you read that right. This means that anyone accused of “copyright infringement” will get his Internet connection cut off; and treated as guilty until proven innocent.

And if that weren’t enough, this crazy legislation defines anyone providing Internet access as an ISP and makes them responsible for monitoring and cutting off Internet access for anyone who uses their services and is accused of copyright violations. Thus libraries, schools, coffee shops, cafes – anyone offering any kind of Internet access – will be considered ISPs and become responsible and potentially liable.

Yikes. That is some extra nasty legislation.

[Minutes later] GlobalVoices reports:

A large swatch of New Zealand’s political blogosphere shut down its websites for a half-day on Monday, February 23 in protest of a copyright law that could have required internet service providers from disconnecting users who download pirated materials like movies or music.

…

The protest appeared to work as Prime Minister John Key announced he will stall the proposal for one month as he looks to forge a compromise with ISPs and copyright holders. If a solution cannot be found, Section 92 will be scrapped.

Be sure to read the entire GlobalVoices article, though. It explains how the boycott happened, points to similarly scary legislation elsewhere, and, of course, aggregates what the NZ blogosphere has been saying about this.

[Tags: new_zealand copyright copyleft conchords hobbits ]

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A couple of weeks ago, I happened to come across a few Wikipedia articles that struck me as too hard. I started getting worried that Wikipedia’s constant review process was resulting in articles inching up the Technical Accuracy pole while slipping down the Intelligibility for Non-Experts pole.

So, I checked in on a handful of articles, looking particularly at the introductory paragraphs Here are the examples, minus the many hyperlinks. (My premise is that you shouldn’t have to click on a hyperlink to figure out what the intro is talking about.)

Please note that this is an entirely unscientific, non-significant sampling. Still, the results were that I’m pretty much reassured. I think these generally are quite understandable intros. I wonder what your experience has been.

Fibonacci number

In mathematics, the Fibonacci numbers are a sequence of numbers named after Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci (a contraction of filius Bonaccio, "son of Bonaccio"). Fibonacci’s 1202 book Liber Abaci introduced the sequence to Western European mathematics, although the sequence had been previously described in Indian mathematics.[2][3]

The first number of the sequence is 0, the second number is 1, and each subsequent number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers of the sequence itself, yielding the sequence 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc. In mathematical terms, it is defined by the following recurrence relation:

Iambic pentameter

Iambic pentameter is a type of meter that is used in poetry and drama. It describes a particular rhythm that the words establish in each line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used. The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet".

Entropy

In many branches of science, entropy is a measure of the disorder of a system. The concept of entropy is particularly notable as it is applied across physics, information theory and mathematics.

In thermodynamics (a branch of physics), entropy, symbolized by S,[3] is a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work.[4][5] It is a measure of the disorder of molecules in a system, and is central to the second law of thermodynamics and to the fundamental thermodynamic relation, both of which deal with physical processes and whether they occur unexpectedly. Spontaneous changes in isolated systems occur with an increase in entropy. Unexpected changes tend to average out differences in temperature, pressure, density, and chemical potential that may exist in a system, and entropy is thus a measure of how great the unexpected changes are.

Uncertainty principle

In quantum physics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that the values of certain pairs of conjugate variables (position and momentum, for instance) cannot both be known with arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. This is not a statement about the limitations of a researcher’s ability to measure particular quantities of a system, but rather about the nature of the system itself.

In quantum mechanics, the particle is described by a wave. The position is where the wave is concentrated and the momentum, a measure of the velocity, is the wavelength. The position is uncertain to the degree that the wave is spread out, and the momentum is uncertain to the degree that the wavelength is ill-defined.

Black hole

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a black hole is a region of space in which the gravitational field is so powerful that nothing, including electromagnetic radiation (e.g. visible light), can escape its pull after having fallen past its event horizon. The term derives from the fact that absorption of visible light renders the hole’s interior invisible, and indistinguishable from the black space around it.

Despite its invisible interior, a black hole may reveal its presence through interaction with matter orbiting the event horizon. For example, a black hole may be perceived by tracking the movement of a group of stars that orbit its center. Alternatively, one may observe gas (from a nearby star, for instance) that has been drawn into the black hole. The gas spirals inward, heating up to very high temperatures and emitting large amounts of radiation that can be detected from earthbound and earth-orbiting telescopes.[2][3] Such observations have resulted in the general scientific consensus that—barring a breakdown in our understanding of nature—black holes do exist in our universe.[4]

Hawking radiation

Hawking radiation (also known as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation) is a thermal radiation with a black body spectrum predicted to be emitted by black holes due to quantum effects. It is named after the physicist Stephen Hawking who provided the theoretical argument for its existence in 1974, and sometimes also after the physicist Jacob Bekenstein who predicted that black holes should have a finite, non-zero temperature and entropy. Hawking’s work followed his visit to Moscow in 1973 where Soviet scientists Yakov Zeldovich and Alexander Starobinsky showed him that according to the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle, rotating black holes should create and emit particles.[1] The Hawking radiation process reduces the mass of the black hole and is therefore also known as black hole evaporation.

Because Hawking radiation allows black holes to lose mass, black holes that lose more matter than they gain through other means are expected to dissipate, shrink, and ultimately vanish. Smaller micro black holes (MBHs) are predicted to be larger net emitters of radiation than larger black holes, and to shrink and dissipate faster.

Higgs boson

In particle physics, the Higgs boson is a massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model.

The Higgs boson is the only Standard Model particle that has not yet been observed. Experimental detection of the Higgs boson would help explain how massless elementary particles can have mass. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon, which mediates electromagnetism, and the massive W and Z bosons, which mediate the weak force. If the Higgs boson exists, it is an integral and pervasive component of the material world.

Deontological ethics

Deontological ethics or deontology (from Greek δέον, deon, "obligation, duty"; and -λογία, -logia) is an approach to ethics that focuses on the rightness or wrongness of intentions or motives behind action such as respect for rights, duties, or principles, as opposed to the rightness or wrongness of the consequences of those actions.[1]

It is sometimes described as "duty" or "obligation" based ethics, because deontologists believe that ethical rules "bind you to your duty".[2] The term ‘deontological’ was first used in this way in 1930, in C. D. Broad’s book, Five Types of Ethical Theory.[3]

Phenomenology (philosophy)

Phenomenology is a philosophy or method of inquiry based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived or understood in human consciousness and not of anything independent of human consciousness. Developed in the early years of the twentieth century by Edmund Husserl and a circle of followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany, phenomenological themes were taken up by philosophers in France, the United States, and elsewhere, often in contexts far removed from Husserl’s work.

"Phenomenology" comes from the Greek words phainómenon, meaning "that which appears," and lógos, meaning "study." In Husserl’s conception, phenomenology is primarily concerned with making the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness, objects of systematic reflection and analysis. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified "first person" viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to "my" consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a "rigorous science".

Sarcoidosis

Sarcoidosis, also called sarcoid (from the Greek sarx, meaning "flesh") or Besnier-Boeck disease, is a multisystem disorder characterized by non-caseating granulomas (small inflammatory nodules). It most commonly arises in young adults. The cause of the disease is still unknown. Virtually any organ can be affected; however, granulomas most often appear in the lungs or the lymph nodes. Symptoms usually appear gradually but can occasionally appear suddenly. The clinical course generally varies and ranges from asymptomatic disease to a debilitating chronic condition that may lead to death .

Cascading style sheets

[This is what it said before I edited it, to try to make it a bit more understandable to those who don't already know about the topic.]

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a stylesheet language used to describe the presentation of a document written in a markup language. Its most common application is to style web pages written in HTML and XHTML, but the language can be applied to any kind of XML document, including SVG and XUL.

CSS can be used locally by the readers of web pages to define colors, fonts, layout, and other aspects of document presentation. It is designed primarily to enable the separation of document content (written in HTML or a similar markup language) from document presentation (written in CSS). This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content (such as by allowing for tableless web design). CSS can also allow the same markup page to be presented in different styles for different rendering methods, such as on-screen, in print, by voice (when read out by a speech-based browser or screen reader) and on Braille-based, tactile devices. CSS specifies a priority scheme to determine which style rules apply if more than one rule matches against a particular element. In this so-called cascade, priorities or weights are calculated and assigned to rules, so that the results are predictable.

Markup language

[This was how it began before I cleaned it up slightly.]

A markup language is an artificial language using a set of annotations to text that give instructions regarding the structure of text or how it is to be displayed. Markup languages have been in use for centuries, and in recent years have been used in computer typesetting and word-processing systems.

A well-known example of a markup language in use today in computing is HyperText Markup Language (HTML), one of the most used in the World Wide Web. HTML follows some of the markup conventions used in the publishing industry in the communication of printed work among authors, editors, and printers.

RNA

Ribonucleic acid (RNA) is a type of molecule that consists of a long chain of nucleotide units. Each nucleotide consists of a nitrogenous base, a ribose sugar, and a phosphate. RNA is very similar to DNA, but differs in a few important structural details: in the cell, RNA is usually single-stranded, while DNA is usually double-stranded; RNA nucleotides contain ribose while DNA contains deoxyribose (a type of ribose that lacks one oxygen atom); and RNA has the base uracil rather than thymine that is present in DNA.

RNA is transcribed from DNA by enzymes called RNA polymerases and is generally further processed by other enzymes. RNA is central to the synthesis of proteins. Here, a type of RNA called messenger RNA carries information from DNA to structures called ribosomes. These ribosomes are made from proteins and ribosomal RNAs, which come together to form a molecular machine that can read messenger RNAs and translate the information they carry into proteins. There are many RNAs with other roles – in particular regulating which genes are expressed, but also as the genomes of most viruses.

Twelve-tone scale

The chromatic scale is a musical scale with twelve pitches, each a semitone or half step apart. "A chromatic scale is a nondiatonic scale consisting entirely of half-step intervals," having, "no tonic," due to the symmetry or equal spacing of its tones[1].

[Image of "Chromatic scale on C: full octave ascending and descending"]

The most common conception of the chromatic scale before equal temperament was the Pythagorean chromatic scale, which is essentially a series of eleven 3:2 perfect fifths. The twelve-tone equally tempered scale tempers, or modifies, the Pythagorean chromatic scale by lowering each fifth slightly less than two cents, thus eliminating the Pythagorean comma of approximately 23.5 cents. Various other temperaments have also been proposed and implemented.

The term chromatic derives from the Greek word chroma, meaning color. Chromatic notes are traditionally understood as harmonically inessential embellishments, shadings, or inflections of diatonic notes.

I find the above pretty much incomprehensible.

Semiotics

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of sign processes (semiosis), or signification and communication, signs and symbols, both individually and grouped into sign systems. It includes the study of how meaning is constructed and understood.

One of the attempts to formalize the field was most notably led by the Vienna Circle and presented in their International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, in which the authors agreed on breaking out the field, which they called "semiotic", into three branches: …

Designated hitter rule

In baseball, the designated hitter rule is the common name for Major League Baseball Rule 6.10[1], an official position adopted by the American League in 1973 that allows teams to designate a player, known as the designated hitter (abbreviated DH), to bat in place of the pitcher. Since then, most collegiate, amateur, and professional leagues have adopted the rule or some variant; MLB’s National League and Nippon Professional Baseball’s Central League are the most prominent professional leagues that have not.

Derivatives (finance)

Derivatives are financial contracts, or financial instruments, whose values are derived from the value of something else (known as the underlying). The underlying on which a derivative is based can be an asset (e.g., commodities, equities (stocks), residential mortgages, commercial real estate, loans, bonds), an index (e.g., interest rates, exchange rates, stock market indices, consumer price index (CPI) — see inflation derivatives), or other items (e.g., weather conditions, or other derivatives). Credit derivatives are based on loans, bonds or other forms of credit.

The main types of derivatives are forwards, futures, options, and swaps.

Derivatives can be used to mitigate the risk of economic loss arising from changes in the value of the underlying. This activity is known as hedging. Alternatively, derivatives can be used by investors to increase the profit arising if the value of the underlying moves in the direction they expect. This activity is known as speculation.

Because the value of a derivative is contingent on the value of the underlying, the notional value of derivatives is recorded off the balance sheet of an institution, although the market value of derivatives is recorded on the balance sheet.

This intro doesn’t do a good job explaining derivatives or hedges, but the article itself is actually fairly clear.

[Tags: wikipedia everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Nicole Aylwin at iposgoode suggests that we ought to consider “intellectual property” policy in terms of its effects on culture, rather than sticking solely within the “property” frame. Seems right to me.

[Tags: ip copyright copyleft free_culture ]

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Punya Mishra blogs a “story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.” It contains some of my favorite things: Reflections on the nature of the Web, “serendipitous connectability,” and Scott Kim-style ambigrams.

Ambigrams are words printed in such a way that they can be read in ambiguous ways. Sometimes they can be read backwards and forwards (even though they’re not palindromes), sometimes they can be inverted or flipped, sometimes they contain other words (e.g., “true” written in such a way that you can also read it as “false”). Scott Kim‘s book Inversions has long been a favorite of mine, and the current issues of the relatively obscure journal WordWays has another bunch.

Punya recounts how it came to his attention that none other than Mahatma Gandhi worked on writing his name so that it could be read at one and the same time in English or in Hindi. (He has provided a scan of the pages of the book by an Indian civil servant that discloses this.) The path to this discovery is unlikely, reaching through strangers, hyperlinks and family. And it leads to an ambigram by Gandhi!

(Note that I did indeed find this page by ego-surfing my own name, since Punya cites a book of mine. But, rather than attributing this to my own narcissism, let’s just attribute it to what Punya calls serendipitious connectability.) [Tags: gandhi wordways scott_kim punya_mishra ambigrams wordplay ]

 

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WowTattoos has ambigrams for over 1,000 names, and a generator for words it doesn’t have. They’re not as beautifully clever as Scott Kim’s — they tend to look like gothic text — but it’s still pretty impressive.

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Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

[Tags: open_access law_school law_journals publishing media scholarship copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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Aaron Swartz reports that the stimulus bill requires that government agencies use RSS [LATER: or Atom] to report on the stimulus money they disperse, so that those who are interested can get automatically updated. And those who are interested will include institutions and individuals aggregating that information so that the alarms can sound … and, we hope, the bouquets can shower down.

[Tags: rss stimulus e-gov egovernment egov transparency obama everything_is_miscellaneous metadata ]

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In something like 2002, I wrote and posted a kid’s version of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Now Peter Ford has taken it upon himself to create a site with a copy of it with a facility that lets anyone comment on any paragraph. He’s hoping to get the must off of it, stem the link rot, etc.

I totally love this.

[Tags: crowd-sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd publishing small_pieces books ]

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Lots of good links to Open Courseware courses, tools, and aggregations at The .Edu Toolbox.

[Tags: open_courseware open_access education ]

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The Italian Interior Minister — the one who will be deciding which posts “defend” criminal activity and thus require ISPs to block the post’s host — is setting up a task force to hack Skype so the government can eavesdrop on its citizens.

Among his many virtues, I think it’s safe to say that Roberto Maroni is totally free of a sense of irony.

(I base this on a Google translation of an article sent to me by my friend Gianluca.)

[Tags: italy digital_rights rights skype hacking ]

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