Berkman Buzz: June 22, 2012

We are delighted to announce that, with the generous support of the Corydon B. Dunham Fellowship Fund of the Harvard Law School, the Berkman Center has named our own staff attorney, Andy Sellars, as the inaugural Dunham First Amendment Fellow.

Andy received his J.D. with high honors from the George Washington University Law School, where he was awarded the Peter D. Rosenberg Award for Patent and Intellectual Property Law, and the American Intellectual Property Law Association’s Jan Jancin Award, honoring the nation’s top intellectual property law student. He joined the Berkman Center as a Employee Fellow in July 2011, after having served as a summer intern at Berkman's Cyberlaw Clinic in 2009 and 2010.

My selections this time around all incorporate the phrase “old wine in new bottles.” By the numbers, this phrase may not blow away the Iron Laws, Manhattan Projects, invisible hands, frailties, and tangos of the world, but it nonetheless seems to push authors to comparably dizzying heights of rhetorical inspiration.

My favorite examples all share a little bit of extra oenological boldness – instead of merely tacking the phrase “old wine in new bottles” onto a given topic (there are, literally, thousands of paper titles following that model), these authors take the liberty of ever-so-slightly altering the formula. The result is more than just old wine in new bottles – maybe “old wine in slightly cracked, twisted, and re-labeled bottles,” ….or something like that.

Hearing about very impressive Philippines social news service, Rappler. Journos everywhere should take a look at this. http://rappler.com
—Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

I downloaded Brad’s novel New Jersey’s Famous Turnpike Witch with trepidation, figuring I’d have to say something nice to him about it while technically salvaging my integrity through some clever, noncommital choice of words. But NJFTPW is just wonderful. I’m only 70% through, and I’ll let you know how the whole thing goes, but I’m loving it so far. Brad has created a skewed world in which the NJ Turnpike is its own realm, with its own culture, sociology, and politics. The fulcrum of the story is Alice, a performance artist who — implausibly, until you realize that this is not the NJ Turnpike you’re used to driving — is beloved by the long lines of cars she ties up with her antics. The story is brimming with characters, none stock, most somewhat over-the-top, each richly imagined and each with her or his own unexpected history — funny short stories on their own. Brad, it turns out, is endlessly inventive. You would never ever read back from this book and figure it was probably written by a Harvard-MIT lawyer.

In a send-off of the Comedy Central classic Mystery Science Theater 3000, two teacher-educators sit in front of a Khan Academy video on multiplying and dividing positive and negative integers and offer their critical commentary. Dave Coffey and John Golden are the hosts here (they really do need at least one talking robot), and they clearly are not big fans of Mr. Khan or his patron Mr. Gates.

The two teachers systematically dissect the video, noting a variety of missteps. There are a few unquestionable errors of mathematics: Khan uses incorrect terminology at a couple of points. Khan is also inconsistent in his language about positive and negative numbers (using plus when he means positive, or minus when he means negative), which is perhaps a lesser sin, but poor practice and misleading for students. He's also inconsistent in his use of symbols, sometimes writing "+4", sometimes writing "4", never explaining why he does or doesn't. He making the kind of mistakes that would reduce his score on the Mathematical Quality of Instruction observational instrument, used in the Gates-funded Measures of Effective Teaching Project.

I’ve met Matt a few times, but I don’t know him well enough to make a broad, sweeping statement about his evolution as a human being. Still, I’m going to argue that sometime between 2006 and 2008, he grew up. In the 2005 and 2006 videos, he’s travelling around the world to places he’d always wanted to see, asking his traveling companions or bystanders to hold the camera. For the 2008 video, he’s travelling with Melissa Nixon, his girlfriend (now partner/wife/coparent), and they’re very consciously making a viral video. Reading Matt’s book about the experience, he and Melissa argued about the significance and ethics of the project throughout, making the decision to start inviting people from the background into the frame, and finding ways to appropriately thank people for being part of the video.

Tracking the trackers: interview with Mozilla's Ryan Merkley ?#Collusion? ?#surveillance? http://ow.ly/bLkev via @networkworld
—Herdict (@herdict)

Netizens are watching Sudan closely, following rumours that the Sudanese authorities intend to cut off the Internet - a chilling reminder of Egypt's attempt to silence activists and contain the January 25 revolution when it pulled the plug off the www on January 27.