Jan 3, 2002: cog sci

The university and open source

Public money, private code (Salon) "Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. 'Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing,' he says."

David Levy

David Levy, author of Scrolling Forward: Making Sense of Documents in the Digital Age will be doing a book-reading at Black Oak Books on Wed, Jan 16

Now I understand those miserable URLs

Until I stumbled across How to Obscure Any URL how http://!$^&*()_+`-=true|[]:;@www.pc-help.org/obscure.htm#how could bring you to http://www.pc-help.org/obscure.htm

Coming Soon: Hollywood Versus the Internet

Mike Godwin: "The consequences of the outcome of the struggle between the Content Faction and the Tech Faction fight are huge. At the heart of the fight are two questions: whether computer users can continue to be allowed to have the abilities that computers have had since their invention, and whether the content companies can survive in a world in which users have that power. What's been missing from the debate so far has been the users themselves. It seems safe to say that most computer and Internet users like to have choices -- choices both of the content they consume and of the kinds of tools they should get to use. Still, maybe citizens would say they're willing to give up "general-purpose" computers and willing to use, instead, systems designed to prevent them from engaging in willy-nilly copying, if that is the price you have to pay for compelling music and movies and television over the Internet.. That is, maybe they'd say so if you asked them. But right now, nobody's asking."

[Link from cmpnet.byte.joncon]

Trojan horse

Online lottery program houses Trojan horse (Infoworld)

TLS review of Metaphors of Memory

As a way of getting more out of reading The Times Literary Supplement, I'm being metacognitive, thinking about what I'm learning and what I'm not. I've been pondering John Sutton's review of Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind (by Douwe Draaisma) At first, other than having a general curiosity about psychology and intellectual history, I did not have any burning interest in this book. But as I pondered the implications of the review (and of the book), I've begun thinking about everything from childhood psychology, growing old, computers, and my own journal writing.

BTW, a draft version of Sutton's review is on Sutton's website.

Every hour is a billable hour

From A Religious Alternative to Billable Hours (NY Times).

Lawyers, it turns out, are not the only ones whose lives are shaped — or rather distorted, in the author's opinion — by what she calls the "billable hours mentality." That mentality, she maintains, is only an extreme version "of the view of time dominant in American life today."

The writer is the John P. Murphy Foundation professor of law at the University of Notre Dame Law School and a professor in the university's theology department as well. She believes that religious traditions have resources to "provide a three- dimensional alternative" to the debilitating world of billable hours.

Thanks to Rick for the reference.

Dec Feb

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