January 24, 2007 - "Can Copyright Survive the Web by Lightening Up a Little?"
Pam Samuelson
Abstract
In 1976, the US Congress passed a revised copyright law which it hoped would be a flexible modern statute that would last 100 years or more without significant change. At that time, some commentators warned that advances in technologies, particularly computers, would present difficult questions that the revised law was not well-crafted to answer. The 1976 Act has been amended more than 25 times and is currently a hodge-podge of industry-crafted compromises. Under some interpretations of its scope, remix cultural productions made available on youtube and similar sites are virtually all infringing and should be shut down. The question I will address is how we might craft a copyright law that would more fairly balance the interests of the copyright industries and of the creative public, but is also flexible enough to adapt to change and is not as subject to industry capture as the present legislative process.
March 15, 2007 - "Interactive Data Exploration with Diamond"
Mahadev Satyanarayan
Abstract
How does an expert discover something relevant to a task in a large distributed repository of complex and loosely-structured data? For example, how does a pharmaceutical researcher identify adverse effects
of a drug in a large collection of automated cell microscopy images? The term "adverse effects" refers to a vague concept. A more precise definition can only be given after examining the data in some depth. In other words, hypothesis-formation and hypothesis-validation proceed hand-in-hand in a tightly-coupled and iterative sequence. We refer to this inherently human-centric activity as "interactive data exploration." Diamond is an open-source software platform for interactive data exploration that has been jointly developed by Intel Research and Carnegie Mellon. It implements the concept of "early discard." This makes brute-force interactive search practical by eliminating irrelevant data as cheaply as possible. Further, Diamond embodies the concept of "self-tuning." This allows it dynamically adapt to different hardware configurations, workloads, and data content in a manner that is completely transparent to users and applications.
May 23, 2007 - "Can Networks Be Better Designed to Suppress the Worst Qualities in Human Nature?"
Jaron Lanier
Abstract
There appear to be two primary classes of potential theories concerning links between online service design and emergent moral and ethical qualities in user behavior. One theoretical approach is economic while the other concerns human factors and user interface design. An economic theory, for instance, might predict that when users are heavily invested in earning goodwill from their online personas, they behave better, while the human factors-based explanations are concerned with the overall quality of experience and in particular with the invocation of interpersonal cues that activate empathetic responses. The large variety of widely used web services in the last few years provides an opportunity to discover unintended experiments to test both kinds of theories. Some of the least nasty online communities are best explained using both types of theory, with 2nd Life being an example.
August 9, 2007 - "High Tech Bubbles, Technology Diffusion, and How to Prepare for the Next Techno-Mania"
Andrew Odlyzko
Abstract
The Internet bubble of the late 1990s aroused great hopes among technologists, most of which were dashed in the crash that followed, but some of them appear to be reviving. There are multiple analogies with earlier techno-bubbles, in particular with the British Railway Mania of the 1840s, the greatest technology bubble in history. In both cases, the root causes were overestimates of the speed of technology diffusion ("Internet time" versus "railroad speed"), and a wilful refusal to look at clear quantitative measures that should have shown that crashes were inevitable. But there were also significant differences (concrete physical railroads versus photons and "monetizing eyeballs", for example). Exploration of both the analogies and the contrasts suggests something of the shape of future techno-manias.
October 15, 2007 - "What Have We Learned from Market Design"
Al Roth
Abstract
Al Roth will discuss what we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in the market; they have to overcome the congestion that thickness can bring, by making it possible to consider enough alternative transactions to arrive at good ones; and they need to make it safe and simple to participate in the market, as opposed to transacting outside of the market, or having to engage in costly and risky strategic behavior. In addition, some kinds of transactions are repugnant, and this can be an important constraint on markets. He'll draw on recent examples of market design ranging from labor markets for doctors and new economists, to kidney exchange, and school choice in New York City and Boston.
December 6, 2007 - "DIY Media and Amateur Cultural Production"
Mimi Ito
Abstract
The recent popularity of online video sharing sites is one of the more recent manifestations of the growing strength of amateur cultural content. Amateur digital video content and related online sharing environments are leading to new genres of media and new forms of social sharing and communication. This talk will describe some of these broader trends in online amateur media production, the Do-It- Yourself ethic, and social media sharing, and will then draw from ethnographic research to describe the case of the online fandom surrounding Japanese animation. Fans of Japanese animation represent a highly mobilized online media subculture that produces a massive amount of derivative and amateur cultural products such as video mashups, fan art, fan fiction, and fan subtitled videos, all embedded in a rich "technosocial" ecology for peer-to-peer sharing of media and knowledge.
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