Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
February 3, 2010 // Upcoming events and digital media

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[1] [TODAY 2/3/10] Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group at MIT with Berkman Fellow Fernando Bermejo, Yale Information Society Project Fellow Christopher Wong, and PhD Student at the MIT Media Lab Andrés Monroy-Hernández (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/cyberscholars/2010/02/mit)

[2] [MONDAY 2/8/10] Law Lab Series: "Signaling Theory and the Evolution of Religion" with Richard Sosis, director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University of Connecticut (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2010/02/sosis)

[3] [MONDAY 2/8/10] Berkman Special Event: "When Countries Collide Online: Internet Spies, Cyberwar, and Government sponsored skullduggery" with Cliff Stoll and Jonathan Zittrain (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/02/stoll)

[4] [TUESDAY 2/9/10] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Beyond online/offline: Information access, public spaces, and the boundaries of visibility for queer youth in the rural US" with Mary L. Gray, Indiana University (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/02/gray)

[TODAY] HARVARD-MIT-YALE CYBERSCHOLAR WORKING GROUP at MIT
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2/3/10, 6:00 PM ET, Room E14-633 (6th floor), MIT Campus, 75 Amherst St., Cambridge, MA

How Do We Know What We Know about the Internet? The State of Online Measurement, Fernando Bermejo

Besides our first-hand knowledge of the internet, acquired as online users, a great deal of what we know about the net derives from different forms of measurement and from data sources that provide a constant monitoring of online activities. However, most of this additional knowledge is rather incomplete, fragmented, heavily filtered, and opaque in its production. And while that might not matter to us as everyday users, this talk will argue that it should matter to us as scholars and researchers, it will examine the consequences of this scenario and explore possible alternatives.

Lost in Translation: The Open Patent Project, Christopher Wong

While patent databases, such as those provided by the USPTO or www.freepatentsonline.com, provide comprehensive information about the contents of a patent—the abstract, prior art references, specification, claims, drawings, etc.—they are limited in their scope and utility. This program is aimed at increasing the usefulness of patent databases by applying "tagging" and visualization technologies to make the information contained within the patent applications more functional and robust. By allowing the public to apply "tags" to patent information we may create an ontology of related resources that provide context for understanding the information contained in patent documents.

Built from Scratch: Remixing and Online Communities of Cooperation, Andrés Monroy-Hernández

Andrés will describe the ways participants of the Scratch website – a large online community where users, primarily young people – engage in remixing of each others’ shared animations and video games. This website, in which young people have shared close to a million video games and animations, is examined as part of ongoing social computing research on networked technologies that support cooperation. In particular, he will focus on recent work that looks at young people's attitudes towards remixing, such as the connection between plagiarism complaints and similarities between a remix and the work it is based on.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/cyberscholars/2010/02/mit

[MONDAY] LAW LAB SERIES on SIGNALING THEORY AND THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION
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2/8/10, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (kglemaud@cyber.harvard.edu)

Topic: Signaling Theory and the Evolution of Religion
Guest: Richard Sosis, director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University of Connecticut

This talk is part of the The Psychology and Economics of Trust and Honesty Speaker Series, led by Berkman Fellow Judith Donath and hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Law Lab. For more information, see this page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/node/5831.

From Richard:

The performance of costly religious behaviors poses a genuine challenge for those who employ egoistic-based models to explain human behavioral variation. Researchers from diverse disciplines have suggested that rituals and other religious behaviors serve as signals of an individual's commitment to a religious group, and some have argued that increased levels of commitment facilitate intra-group cooperation and trust. Here I present results from recent studies that aim to test this claim and I will discuss the relevance of these results for resolving current adaptationist-byproduct debates on the evolution of religion.

About Richard:

Richard Sosis is an associate professor of anthropology and director of the Evolution, Cognition, and Culture Program at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include the evolution of cooperation, utopian societies, and the behavioral ecology of religion. To explore these issues, he has conducted fieldwork with remote cooperative fishers in the Federated States of Micronesia and with various communities throughout Israel, including Ultra-Orthodox Jews and members of secular and religious kibbutzim.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2010/02/sosis

[MONDAY] WHEN COUNTRIES COLLIDE ONLINE with CLIFF STOLL and JONATHAN ZITTRAIN
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2/8/10, 6:00 PM ET, John Chipman Gray Room, Pound Hall, Harvard Law School
RSVP is required for those attending in person via this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFg5QmxJUTQyMXlidkdoWVc0OUprWXc6MA
This event will be webcast live

Topic: When Countries Collide Online: Internet Spies, Cyberwar, and Government sponsored skullduggery
Guest: Cliff Stoll and Jonathan Zittrain

In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson closed the State Department's cryptanalysis department by saying, "Gentlemen don't read each other's mail."

Such kind thoughts towards ones international partners didn't survive long: witness the code breaking of the 1930's and World War II.

For the past quarter century, the Internet has been the playground of government sponsored espionage. During the cold-war, the nascent Internet attracted such groups such as the KGB and the Stassi.

With the Internet woven into the fabric of all governmental activities, it's not surprising to find many international espionage agencies shadowing targets online and performing remote wiretapping. Occasionally, these break into the news, such as recent cases where the email overseas Chinese dissidents has been targeted by overseas operatives.

How far have these activities gone? How far might they go? What are the legal implications of state sponsored network espionage?

Join Cliff Stoll and Berkman Center Faculty Co-director Jonathan Zittrain for a conversation on "When Countries Collide Online".

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/02/stoll

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on INFORMATION ACCESS, PUBLIC SPACES, AND THE BOUNDARIES OF VISIBILITY FOR QUEER YOUTH IN THE RURAL US
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2/9/10, 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: Beyond online/offline: Information access, public spaces, and the boundaries of visibility for queer youth in the rural US
Guest: Mary L. Gray, Indiana University

Drawing on her experiences working for 2 years in rural parts of Kentucky and in small towns along its borders, Mary will map out how lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and questioning (LGBTQ) youth and their allies make use of social media and local resources to combat the marginalization they contend with in their own communities as well as the erasure they face in popular representations of gay and lesbian life and the agendas of national gay and lesbian advocacy groups. Against a backdrop of an increasingly impoverished and privatized rural America LGBTQ youth and their allies visibly—and often vibrantly—work the boundaries of the public and media spaces available to them. This talk will explore how youth suture together high schools, public libraries, town hall meetings, churches, and the web to construct spaces that fashion their emerging queer identities. Their triumphs and travails defy clear distinctions often drawn between online and offline or rural and urban experiences of identity, fundamentally redefining our understanding of the term 'queer visibility’ and the political stakes of information access out in the country.

About Mary:

Mary L. Gray is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and Culture at Indiana University, Bloomington. Her research looks at how everyday uses of media shape people's understandings and expressions of their social identities. She is the author of In Your Face: Stories from the Lives of Queer Youth (1999). Her most recent book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (NYU Press) examines how young people in rural parts of the United States fashion queer senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media--particularly the internet--play in their lives and political work.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/02/gray

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
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[1] 2/1-2/12: Google Book Search in Depth (http://cipcommunity.org/s/1039/index.aspx?sid=1039&gid=1&pgid=252&cid=951&ecid=951&crid=0&calpgid=303&calcid=807)

[2] 2/4: Old-fashioned Futures and Re-fashionable Media // MIT Comparative Media Studies (http://cms.mit.edu/events/colloquiaforums.php#020410)

[3] 2/10: "Out of the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America" with Mary Gray // Microsoft Research (http://marygray.eventbrite.com/)

[4] 2/13-14: Free Culture Conference 2010 // Keynoted by Berkman Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain // Washington, DC (http://conference.freeculture.org/) -- Registration

[5] 2/24-26: Limiting Knowledge in a Democracy // Featuring Berkman Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain and Berkman Fellow Julie Cohen // New School, NY (http://www.socres.org/limitingknowledge/)

[6] 3/6/10: Gov 2.0 Camp New England // Harvard Kennedy School of Government (http://gov20ne.eventbrite.com/)

[7] 3/12: Cloud Computing Conference // Berkeley Center for Law & Technology // Berkeley, CA (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/institutes/bclt/cloudcomputing/about.html

[8] 3/19-3/21: LibrePlanet Conference // Harvard Science Center (http://groups.fsf.org/wiki/LibrePlanet2010)

[9] 3/26: Fourth Law and Information Society Symposium: Hate Versus Democracy on the Internet // Center on Law & Information Policy (http://law2.fordham.edu/ihtml/cal-2uwcp-calendar_viewitem.ihtml?idc=10320)

The Computers, Freedom & Privacy Conference has extended its deadline for proposals to March 1 (http://www.cfp2010.org/submissions/)

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 with JOEL REIDENBERG on "Transparent Citizens and the Rule of Law" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/lawlab/2010/02/reidenberg)

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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.

2/16: Berkman Luncheon Series: "Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle" with Jure Leskovec, assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/02/leskovec)

2/22: "Minds for Sale" with Berkman Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/02/zittrain)

2/25: Wireside Chat with Lawrence Lessig: Fair Use, Politics, and Online Video (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/02/lessig)

4/30-5/1: ROFLCon II at MIT (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/roflcon)

6/28-6/30: COMMUNIA Conference 2010: Universities & the commons/cyberspace (http://cyber.harvard.edu/node/5608)

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.