Berkman Buzz: Week of September 7, 2009
BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.
* David Weinberger mingles the meta in the data.
* Harry Lewis says Amen to the apology to Turing.
* Dan Gillmor considers digital traces, tolerance, and career prospects.
* The CMLP adds another Section 230 no-brainer to the list.
* John Palfrey reports in on the financial crisis versus the market for legal services.
* Ethan Zuckerman rounds out his blogging from Ars Electronica with a burst of noise.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Uganda: Nine Dead in Kampala Riots"
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The full buzz.
"But experience is far more like language than like particle physics or Ikea assembly instructions. And that’s for a very good reason: linguistic creatures’ experience cannot be understood apart from language. Language doesn’t neatly separate into content and meta-content. It all comes together and it’s all intertwingled."
From David Weinberger's blog post Data and metadata: Together again
"The undisputed founding father of computer science is Alan Mathison Turing, 1912-1954. He worked as both a mathematician and an engineer, proving the fundamental theorem about computationally unsolvable problems and, during World War II, building early large-scale computing devices, which were used to crack the German Enigma Code."
From Harry Lewis' blog post A Wrong Righted
"In a Q&A on Tuesday at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, President Obama cautioned a group of 9th graders to be careful of what they post online. He was too cautious by half. ... The president may have been right about this in today’s world. I hope he’s wrong in tomorrow’s."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post Wrong Lesson: Obama Warns Kids on Social Media
"Search engines have become the new deep pockets in this age of cyber-litigation. Despite the fact that they do not control the content of the sites they index in any way, people still routinely seek to hold them liable for unsavory or objectionable things that appear in search results. One might have thought that passage of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“Section 230”) back in 1996 would have curtailed such suits, but alas, this has not been the case."
From Lee Baker's blog post for the Citizen Media Law Project, Beverly Stayart Supports Seals, Not Cialis: Section 230, Search Engines, and Vanity Queries
"At a workshop at Oxford University, HLS Prof. David Wilkins has convened the managing partners of some of the world’s leading law firms. ... [Ashish] Nanda is asking them about the impact of the financial crisis on the marketplace for global legal services. There wasn’t complete agreement on all fronts..."
From John Palfrey's blog post Managing Partners Weigh in on Impact of the Global Financial Crisis (Live-Blog)
"As we watched fireworks over the Danube, she pointed out that just carrying a still camera leaves you incapable of capturing some of the most experiences you have while travelling. I spent Sunday wandering art exhibitions in Linz and discovered that she’s totally, completely right. Almost without exception, my favorite pieces of artwork made noise and moved, and my cheap digital SLR doesn’t do them justice. But here they are, in their grainy, pixelated glory."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Ars Electronica: A few of my favorite things
"Riots in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, have led to the deaths of at least nine people as members of the Baganda ethnic group clashed with police and military forces on Wednesday and Thursday. The riots are an escalation of an ongoing feud between the central Ugandan government and the King (or 'Kabaka') of the Baganda tribe, Ronald Muwenda Mutebi II. The Baganda people belong to the Kingdom of Buganda, and they are the largest Ugandan ethnic group."
From Rebekah Heacock's blog post for Global Voices, Uganda: Nine Dead in Kampala Riots