Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

Nov 11, 2009

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
November 11, 2009 // Upcoming events and digital media

[1] [MONDAY 11/16/09] "Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems" with Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2009/11/eagle)

[2] [TUESDAY 11/17/09] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy" with Sam Bowles, Santa Fe Institute, Behavioral Sciences Program (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/bowles)

[3] [WEDNESDAY 11/18/09] Berkman West Celebration featuring Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for Sale" // Mountain View, CA (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/berkwest)

[MONDAY] LAW LAB SPEAKER SERIES on BIG DATA, GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT, and COMPLEX SOCIAL SYSTEMS
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11/16/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu).
This event will be webcast live.

Topic: Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems
Guest: Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and communication patterns are continuously being generated by everyday technologies such as mobile phones and credit cards. This unprecedented volume of information facilitates a novel set of research questions applicable to a wide range of development issues. In collaboration with the mobile phone, internet, and credit card industries, my colleagues and I are aggregating and analyzing behavioral data from over 250 million people from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I will discuss a selection of projects arising from these collaborations that involve inferring behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales; from risky behavior in a group of MIT freshman to population-level behavioral signatures, including cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK. Access to the movement patterns of the majority of mobile phones in East Africa also facilitates realistic models of disease transmission as well as slum formations. This vast volume of data requires new analytical tools - we are developing a range of large-scale network analysis and machine learning algorithms that we hope will provide deeper insight into human behavior. However, ultimately our goal is to determine how we can use these insights to actively improve the lives of the billions of people who generate this data and the societies in which they live.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2009/11/eagle

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on INFORMATION AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN THE WEIGHTLESS ECONOMY
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11/17/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.harvard.edu).
This event will be webcast live.

Topic: Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy
Guest: Sam Bowles, Santa Fe Institute, Behavioral Sciences Program

Why is a good idea like a kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros)? For most of human history – the first 150,000 years of it at least – valuable resources like kudus and other large game were difficult to own individually. As a result when captured, they were shared. The emergence of agriculture 11,000 years ago made land and other forms of wealth productive enough to be worth demarcating and defending, and thus allowed for the evolution of the modern possession-based individual property rights in land, domesticated animals, and goods.

In the resulting economy of grain and steel, as Adam Smith conjectured and was eventually demonstrated in the Fundamental Theorem of Welfare Economics, exchange on competitive markets allowed the decentralized implementation of an efficient allocation of resources as long as property rights were complete and enforceable.

But the economy of grain and steel is being displaced by a weightless economy in which the information and network connections that constitute the new wealth cannot be weighed, measured, or fenced. Good ideas are indeed like the large game that once formed a major part of our subsistence: the pursuit of a new operating system, a new drug, or a hit tune is uncertain, and when the hunt is successful, it is not only wasteful not to share the prey, it is often impossible to prevent it from being stolen.

Will intellectual property rights domesticate the kudu? Or will innovations like a new song or program remain more valuable ‘in the wild’? Answers will be provided by a model and history of the long-term development and transformation of property rights drawing on recent behavioral experiments and econometric estimates of wealth dynamics in hunter gatherer societies. An evolutionary model and computer simulations will show how systems of property rights might respond to the challenges of the weightless economy.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/weinberger

[WEDNESDAY] BERKMAN WEST CELEBRATION featuring JONATHAN ZITTRAIN on MINDS FOR SALE
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11/18/09, 6:30 PM PT, Computer History Museum, 1401 N Shoreline Blvd, Mountain View, CA
RSVP requested: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dHU4Y01CVGpnbEJQcWJwY3lMaGVvM0E6MA

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University warmly invites you to attend our third annual celebration of our friends, affiliates and partners on the left coast.

When: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 6:30pm PT
Where: Computer History Museum, Mountain View
What: Talk by Prof. Jonathan Zittrain on "Minds for sale", followed by reception
Who: Anyone and everyone who's interested in the work of the Berkman Center, including all our friends and family in the Bay Area
Why: Because we miss you!

About "Minds for Sale"

Cloud computing is not just for computing anymore: you can now find as much mindshare as you can afford out in the cloud, too. A new range of projects is making the application of human brainpower as purchasable and fungible as additional server rackspace. What are some of the issues arising as armies of thinkers are recruited by the thousands and millions? A fascinating (and non-scare-mongering) view is offered of a future in which nearly any mental act can be bought and sold.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2009/11/berkwest

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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[1] 11/11/09: Class and Connection in the Network Age with danah boyd (http://supernovahub.com/2009/11/nov-11-class-and-connection-in-the-network-age-with-danah-boyd/)

[2] 11/12/09: The Impact of Social Media in the Middle East (with Berkman Research Director Rob Faris)// Harvard Arab Weekend (http://www.harvardarabalumni.org/MENAweekend/event.php?evid=5)

[3] 11/12/09: The Culture Beat and New Media (http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/culture_beat.html)

[4] 11/12-14: The Internet as Playground and Factory Conference // New School (http://digitallabor.org/)

[5] 11/13/09: Awesome Foundation Award Ceremony (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171467669211)

[6] 11/13/09: Enterprise Uses of Social Media (http://www.csail.mit.edu/events/eventcalendar/calendar.php?show=event&id=2345q)

[7] 11/17/09: David Weinberger at the Ethos Roundtable (http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=92474922615)

[8] 11/19/09: Cyber-Terrorism/Warfare - The Emergent Threat: Strategies for Survival // Boston University (https://secure-alumni.bu.edu/olc/pub/BUAR/events/event_order.cgi?tmpl=events&event=2237679)

[9] 11/21-22/09: Music Hackday Boston // MS NERD (http://boston.musichackday.org/)

[10] 12/2/09: Ignite Spatial Boston (http://isb09.eventbrite.com/)

[11] 12/5/09: The Future of the Forum: Internet Communities and the Public Interest // UC Berkeley (http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/fotf/)

[12] 12/8/09: The library is dead. Long live the library! The rebirth of libraries in the 21st century (with Berkman Faculty Co-Director John Palfrey) // Cambridge, MA (http://neasist.eventbrite.com/)

DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
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Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Berkman Luncheon Series on WHAT INFORMATION WAS with DAVID WEINBERGER (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/11/weinberger)

-Berkman Luncheon Series on REDESIGNING PUBLIC MEDIA FOR THE 21st CENTURY (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheons/2009/11/prx)

-RADIO BERKMAN 136: The Garden and the Net (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman136)

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BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.

ABOUT US
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.harvard.edu.