The Longest Now

Today CERN and FERMILAB announced 5σ confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson [1], inspiring a burst of heady live coverage from the Guardian. (CERN had leaked a video about the discovery the day before, so everyone knew what was coming, and turned up for today’s Higgs seminar. All of the scientists who had worked on early versions of the theory that pointed towards such a boson also flew in the the seminar, which continues tomorrow.)

CERN has posted and archived beautiful 360-degree photos of the day, a video of the press conference (rather dull), and will soon post a recording of the day’s seminar (which was live-streamed and amazing; come back for it tomorrow).

The media as usual tries valiantly to explain things in a down-to-earth way that is both simplistic and true, but is generally failing. As with a few other recent scientific breakthroughs, I am grateful that Wikipedia offers solid explanations of the topics at hand, and through the magic of hyperlinks (which news agencies are still struggling with 🙂 allows exploration of the topics in as much depth as you like.

Related reading: supersymmetry, scalar field theory, htlhcdtwy.

[1] Note the careful, conservative trend in particle physics: the labs making the discovery are all quick to say they’ve discovered the existence of at least one new particle, which matches the profile of the Higgs boson; it could be one or more of its sibling bosons that have been discovered – supersymmetry suggests there could be 5 of them.

Happy Independence Day!

A few good pieces on the Declaration of Internet Freedom:
* Christian Science Monitor: The Internet needs its own ‘declaration of independence’
* Forbes: Freshly-Minted Declaration of Internet Freedom Demands ‘Free and Open Internet’
* ABC News: For July 4, a Declaration of Internet Freedom
* And an excellent, long piece by The Verge: How the net’s minutemen plan to protect the future

And ACTA was just rejected by the EU Parliament:
* Controversial anti-piracy agreement rejected by EU

Kudos to everyone involved in that turnaround.

For ages, learning was assumed to be social, interactive, oral. Written knowledge, where available and somewhat portable, was a specialized complement that few scholars, recordkeepers, explorers and other specialists used or needed.

As long as you needed a tutor or guide to learn, whether or not good static (lifeless) written material was available was a lesser concern.

In the last three millennia, it gradually became cheaper to produce text, commonplace for scholars to learn to write concisely and convey ideas so that others could learn them on their own. In every field, books eventually replaced ritual and oral record as the standard for precipitating knowledge into a lasting, canonical form, and passing it on. This was driven forward by personal memorials and finance and law – pillars of clan- and city-building.

Certain forms of knowledge were considered a shared good of society – from how to find resources to social and practical norms. And some were actively disseminated as necessary, such as legal and religious dictates. Other knowledge was something that could be sought out, or bought and sold. During the time when knowledge about the world was a scarce resource, yet easy enough to write down and transmit, even basic information about the shape of the planet was bartered and sold like any other good.

Today we both have bounteous knowledge, and pressing problems that better global education can address. The opportunities that could result from a more broadly educated world society are far greater than the short-term opportunities of a commodity market for practical texts.

And we will get more thorough, more accurate, and better texts of all sorts – once we think of general knowledge as a part of culture and civic infrastructure, not as something that can be owned and hoarded. We made this transition with scientific discoveries centuries ago, with mathematics before that, and today we reap tremendous benefits from that. It is time for all knowledge to join their ranks as a cornerstone of our civilization.

How can we help this come about? Take a piece of awesome, inspiring, practical knowledge that you currently buy or rent as a commodity, and make a free version of it. Publish it to a shared commons that makes it easy to maintain and update over time. Tell others who get it from the same source you did. Stop using general knowledge that you can’t repurpose, and your use of the alternative will make it the best in the world in its niche.

Reed Elsevier’s received a scathing critique by The Street’s Jared Woodward this week, who bets heavily against its stock [RUK] :

“We regard the common stock as an implicit naked short put option because, while the upside potential from the publishing division is limited, the downside risk from any revolt by its customers (libraries), laborers (academics), or funders (governments) is not.“

Woodward incisively covers everything from the academic-run The Cost of Knowledge campaign countering the Elsevier-backed Research Works Act, the Federal Research Public Access Act proposal to enshrine Open Access as a requirement of all government funders, a similar EU mandate, the UK recruiting Jimbo to help draft a similar policy for all UK-funded research by 2014, Harvard’s faculty memo on deep and broad Open Access support, the stunning successes of PLoS One and Rockefeller University Press, and @FakeElsevier‘s tweets and blog.

@FakeElsevier is a pseudonymous academic who has been sharing satirical posts and tweets about Elsevier since February. The subject above is from one of the more popular blog posts: “Dear Elsevier Employees, With Love, From @FakeElsevier.”

Take a look at Woodward’s report: It’s an exhausting and exhilirating read.

Federal Research Public Access Act

AFP breaks down her successful kickstarter project to support an album:

it means i’ll probably buy an abandoned church somewhere and turn it into a free 24-hour circus brunch bar for everybody.

we’re all investing, dollar by dollar, pledge by pledge… not just in the future of my little record and band, but in an idea whose time has come.

David Gerard recently pointed out that despite recent expansion of the global commons of “freely-licensed knowledge”, all license terms still last for much too long. “Free licenses” still rely on copyright laws which impose restrictions on reuse for unreasonably long term lengths: currently “Life of the author + 70 years” in most countries — roughly 10-50x as long as the average commercial lifespan of a new work.

Economists and researchers studying copyright have often noted that copyright terms have been extended with little justification, always on the request of the publishing industry, since the first copyright term (14 years) was set centuries ago.  And that there is no data to suggest that longer copyright terms are good for society or useful in encouraging creative work.

The social memes of “free culture” and “free knowledge” have been shaped in large part by a community that bought into the idea of copyleft in the past decades: a derivative of copyright law which defines the copyrights the author wishes to exercise in a way that lets people reuse their work, as long as they release the result under the same license.

We should figure out a reasonable maximum term for the sort of rights that are currently covered by copyright – say, something no more than 14 years – and embed that term into the most-recommended free culture licenses. That includes all Creative Commons and free-culture and other FOSS licenses. All of these licenses should explicitly transition to the Public Domain before the ultralong default term enshrined in international law.

(In practice this could mean automatically switching to a CC0 license at the end of the shorter term.)

Related discussions about license reform

David’s comments started a recent discussion on the Wikimedia-l mailing list, about whether Wikimedians should help push for a saner copyright term.  Mike Linksvayer noted similar discussions on the Creative Commons licenses list from last December – part of brainstorming how to improve those licenses.

Two people made comments along these lines: “Shortening the copyright term is totally infeasible in the near term; instead we should encourage people to switch to free licenses.”

This misses two key points. Firstly, free culture groups are now some of the largest around; they include major content providers and platforms; and Creative Commons itself is a powerful global brand. Secondly, while convincing slow, conservative national governments to change their laws is hard, almost everyone who is not working/lobying for content publishers — including the vast majority of content creators — feels copyright terms are too long.  So this is an obvious place for citizen innovation to come first, and legislation second.

A few publishers are already adopting limited terms.  O’Reilly Books uses a license that switches to CC-BY after 14 years.
Some free culture groups have taken a position here as well: Sweden’s Pirate Party advocates for a maximum term of 5 years.  Richard Stallman of the FSF recommends a maximum of 5 or 10 years (though only for society as a whole; and only if it comes with open source requirements for proprietary software).

What can we do?  Won’t this make free licenses harder to use?

Adding an explicit term after which works become PD should not complicate the “opt-in commons”, to use Mike’s term. This could be implemented with a few simple changes (I am imagining how CC could implement this; as they have great authority to recommend licensing norms):

• Define “PD-friendly” licenses as those which become PD in at most N years.
• Define the PD-date of a composite work as the latest of its component sources.
• Ask people to use a PD-friendly license.

Within that framework, people can use terms that make sense to them; some may want a license with a fixed PD date, so that a large group can collaborate on a shared work which is set to become PD in 2020.  Ongoing collaborations like Wikipedia could use a license set to become PD after 8 years – so the latest version of a project would always be under a CC-SA license, but one from today would become PD in 2020.

Creative Commons and others could then promote the use of PD-friendly licenses.  Collaboratives like Wikimedia communities, and publishers like O’Reilly, could switch to those licenses for their projects and works.  Together we would return to building a true intellectual and artistic Commons — something which in the US has been starved of almost all works produced in the past 35 years.

Via Béria Lima:

The Wikimedia chapters have, by voting, selected the following two people to serve on the Wikimedia Foundation board, replacing Arne Klempert and Phoebe Ayers:

* Patricio Lorente is the current President of Wikimedia Argentina. He had worked as Project Manager of the Association for Social Development in Argentina. At present, he serves as General ProSecretary of the National University of La Plata.
* Alice Wiegand is an IT specialist for system administration in the public sector, and a former board member of Wikimedia Deutschland, the largest Wikimedia chapter. She runs the IT department of a German municipality, and is starting a Master’s program in Public Policy and Governance.

Congratulations to Patricio and Alice, who will join the Board in mid-June; I look forward to working with both of you.

And much gratitude to Phoebe and Arne, who have helped us all to stay focused on what matters, for their amazing work over the past years.

Spurred by a discussion of language learning and pronunciation, I revisited my favorite English-language poem this weekend: Gerard Nolst Trenité’s “Dearest Creature In Creation” (a.k.a. “English Pronunciation”, or “The Chaos”). I cleaned up my composite version, fitting in most of the remaining couplets that have appeared in one of the author’s revisions, marking where the various versions start to diverge, and adding pronunciation notes for a few more words.

If you haven’t read it recently, it’s worth a few minutes of your time. And if someone with a melodious voice feels like recording a reading of it, that would be a boon.
Update: Jacob Rus points me to this recording he made of a different version of the poem. Awesome! A British version would be grand too.

Finally, which rhymes with enough:
Though, through, bough, cough, hough, sough, tough‽
Hiccough has the sound of ‘sup‘ …
My advice is: give it up!

Meteor: The future of web-apps?

Congrats to deberg and others for pulling off an inspiring soft-launch.

I am spending most of the day in literacy and library discussions, helping define the audience of the Digital Public Library [of America].  It is a fantastic project.  And I am warmed by the society-spanning groups that come together aound this vision for the evolution of libraries.

We should to bottle this type of shared sense-making, social diplomacy, and brainstorming.  “How do we solve the collective action problem for all of us who share these common goals?”  It must unfold from an institution-managed process to one that is low-cost, almost entirely online, and driven by the passion of its crowds.  That would revolutionize planning for many walks of modern life.

I will be posting discussion transcripts where I can; keep your eye on #dplawest for pointers.

Here is an edited/clarified version of a mailing list thread many weeks ago, in which Wikimedians were discussing starting a Q&A site, or setting up a hosted solution for same.

I drafted a post about this to reprise here, but am just now finishing it off.

It is a disappointment… that Stack Overflow uses proprietary software
(not least because it is so wonderful) because in all other respects, as
a community, they do a great job. I have had wonderful experiences with
them and would urge anyone to get behind them.

I like their spirit and community too. I would be happy to see a StackExchange site for Wikipedia/MediaWiki questions exist. [that was the context of this email thread.] But it won’t contribute to the global free toolchain for collaborative knowledge, which we are part of. So the templates and environments for discussion that we build by customizing those tools will have only limited long-term value.

} Sure, they do things slightly differently — but that doesn’t mean
} they do things wrong.

From the perspective of Wikimedia’s mission, they are indeed doing things wrong. [.From the perspective of running a small business, they may be doing just fine.]

Effective access to collaborative knowledge is important to a harmonious society. As a result, basic knowledge-sharing tools and toolchains should be free, for any sort of use, customization, and improvement. The universal value of a Q&A system is directly tied to the importance that good free tools should be available to set one up.

We want to support these free toolchains, which is why we release all of our own code. This is also why, when there are good free versions of proprietary tools, we should support them and help them grow. That support is one of the ways we contribute to long-term knowledge development, in everything we do.

Whether we host the result ourselves is a totally separate question. Both OSQA and Question2Answer offer hosted services. But any solution we use must be one that we could choose to host ourselves, if necessary.

Thomas wrote:
} the main advantage is that your putting it under a name and community
} who are already experienced at doing really good QA – so your seed of
} volunteers is going to be that much better! SE have nailed that vibe.

I agree that they have a good shared vibe. Quora have as well. It is a valuable thing, and also one deeply rooted in human nature, like wiki editing. 🙂

For precisely the reasons you mention, it is important for us to have a better in-house QA tool. We need a better channel for the people who are in that zone to shine on Wikipedia — beyond simply manning the Reference Desk and similar pages in various languages (which many hundreds of them already do), or removing themselves to other sites where inter-article linking to WM articles is difficult, answers are not directly editable, there is a new framework for logging in, messaging, &c.

We have some stellar community groups to seed such a site with ourselves — and this will offer a place for many more who like Q&A work but not other wiki editing to become involved in a rewarding way.

Much of my work recently has been about community creation, capacity, identity, energy, and relation to partnership-building and vision-setting. And how to listen carefully and plan well for that hindsight-enabled possibility-space we call the future. This affects everything from how we define the future we want to live, how we chart our own course in groups of all sizes, to how we raise funds, forge volunteer or sponsor relationships, and enable those around us to do work we’d like to see done.

I got excellent feedback on these ideas at last week’s OER meeting, where most projects wanted to be community-driven or maintained. A few people asked if I was writing a book, with varying levels of arm-twisting. So I’d like to get into better writing shape. Inspired by Cool Cat Teacher’s tireless blog and ideastream, I have been thinking about ways to publish thoughts and essays dozens of times a day. I enjoy writing short essays, and linking them to practical works or implications. I do this in some format – often on email lists or in response to private requests – every day. But I don’t currently do it methodically, publicly, in an archived or editable way. And there is a backlog of practical thoughts in my unintentionally-private tomboy notes about how my current communities could work better / internally and together.

So in the spirit of doing ten thousand times whatever you want to eventually do well, I am taking on a personal Steel Blogger Challenge – publishing a post for every day this year. Retroactively. That gives me a bit of catching up to do. I don’t know quite how to coordinate this with tweeting and writing essays of various lengths – the ideal length here would be 100-200 words to capture the idea, with a few links, but editable. And I’m not sure how to make my writing editable, though I would like to let you all make revisions and post updates and links and cross-references.

And for the first time recently I feel let down by my blogging platform. I want a better way to publish many times a day, in many formats at once. Including quick personal notes, 140-char summaries, blog posts, longer monographs. Preferably with wiki-style versioned editable backend for every format. If you have toolchain suggestions, please let me know.

Hewlett Hack Day last Friday was an energetic stone soup affair. Erhardt Graeff, Andrew Magliozzi and I planned it with Amar and Nathaniel from Berkman, and Josh Gay. Erhardt emcee’d the event, and Meredith Beaton, Una Lee, Becca Nesson, and Matthew Battles all helped make it happen. Some 40 people attended over the course of the day.

The past two days had seen the development of two dozen project ideas, many of them hackable, by the Hewlett grantees. We spent the first hour condensing those and some new proposed hacks down to 10 that seemed compelling and doable. People self-selected into groups to tackle these (in hindsight: we should have set a max team size of ~6). 7 projects were attempted, and 6 produced a hack – a pitch or minimum product that could inspire others to move it forward. At the end of the day, everyone gave 2-minute pitches to a panel of judges (a schoolteacher, a highschool student, and two berkman staff) who reviewed the results for hackability and near-term usefulness for OER.

Result: two new github repositories, a ‘Learning metacognition via Poker‘ course up on P2PU, a mobile app for ‘Free Pencils’, a hackable version of FreeRice for standardized test problems, a plan for a high-profile annual OER Awards, a wireframe for a cleaner student portfolio platform, a new OER WikiProject on Wikipedia, and a draft design for Octocat a variation on github for OER materials. The PokOER concept drew the most attention – almost ten team members and three different ideas merged – and many hackers agreed they would love to take a P2P course on the topic. And a hack to make it easy to generate your own Mozilla-friendly badges made partial progress, including testing and filing helpful bugs against the badges API.

The Free Pencils and OER Awards projects won judges’ awards’. They were specific and partly implemented (Becca garnered the admiration of all for producing a working prototype in 4 hours), and addressing particular needs raised in the brainstorming the day before. Their hackers have free passes to the Open Ed conference in Vancouver, thanks to sponsorship by hackday participant David Wiley.

Richly red, complementing the joys of tryruby and the like.

From Haldane‘s 1941 essay in Eureka #6 on “The Faking of Genetical Results“, reproduced here with appropriate corrections and hyperlinks.

Two closing comments by T. W. Körner, who found Haldane’s essay worth reprinting in his brilliant textbook on Fourier analysis:

“The reluctance of the scientific community to accept the possibility of fraud is illustrated by the fact that Moewus was still cited in the literature (and even spoken of as a possible Nobel prize winner) until 1953. However, no one else ever succeeded in repeating his experiments…

Unfortunately the statistical war against fraud is now over and the cheaters have won. The kind of tests proposed by Haldane depended on the fact that ‘higher order faking’ required a great deal of computational work. The invention and accessibility of the computer means that the computational work involved has ceased to be a problem for the dishonest scientist. In the physical and biological sciences the possibility that others will attempt to replicate experiments may act as a sufficient deterrent but in purely statistical subjects like sociology and experimental psychology the poblems raised by potential fraud have still to be faced.”

See also Part 1 … and Part 3.

Act 2

Colbert: What do you think of the current state 
of children's lit?
 Sendak:  Abysmal.
Colbert: There's so much of it though!
 Sendak:  That's what makes it abysmal.

Let's talk about some of your competition.  
  Ok.
Give me your reviews.

Green Eggs and Ham?
  Good.  
Good. Green Eggs And Ham, "Good".
  Everything by Seuss is good.
Really?
  yeah.  

Give A Mouse A Cookie.
   Euh!
I'm with you on that one.  Cause, 
you shouldn't give a mouse a cookie, 
Mouse should *earn* the cookie.
  You should open the door and say 
  'get the hell out of my house!'
The mouse should be exterminated. 
  Yeah.
I'm with you on that one.

Curious George?
  Great.
Curious George, ok.  
I don't believe in monkeys in the house either.
  You don't like it?
No, no.  they throw their feces.
  They do, they do throw--
Monkeys bite your jaw off, they will bite your face off
  He wouldn't have done that.
No, no, but he could have at any moment.
 
So have I changed your mind on Curious George?
  no.
So you're in favor of children 
getting their faces bitten off.
   I'm in favor of --
ok, you- you've made it clear.

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?  you know that one?
  Isn't that an adult novel?
That's kind of prejudiced of you, to say that a book 
has to be adult, or a book has to be child.
Someone who's been so ghettoized in their work, would say 
that a child couldn't read a book about murder 
and sadomasochism...
  You trapped me!  you trapped me!  
Checkmate, sir.  Check...
  You're wrong, but you trapped me.
Am i? Am i? 
  Yeah!
Oh, so other people can be pigeon-holed, but 
you can't do that to Maurice Sendak.  That's a crime.
  How about that!
H'm!, interesting.
  Don't I deserve that?
Double-standard much, Mo?
  (laughs)

Let's shift gears.  Every celebrity is out there 
cashing in on children's books.  
And I want in.   
What does it take for a celebrity to make 
a successful book?  What do I gotta do?
  Well, you've started already by being... an idiot.  
  That is already the very first demand.  
Ok, idiot.  
  First is idiot.
How do you spell that?
  (laughs)
  After that, you know the formula.
You just need, like an animal, and... 
something they've lost.
  Well yes, I mean most books for children are very bad.
The Squirrel Lost Its Mittens.
  There you go.
The Buffalo... Lost Its Gun.
  You've just written two children's books!

I've got a story. can I read it to you!
  (winces in pain)  
  Do you *really* have to?
It's called "I am a Pole, and So Can You!"
  Ok, yes! I can't wait to hear it.

== [Colbert reads] ==
I AM A POLE AND SO CAN YOU

I am a pole, that much is clear to me.
But just what type of pole could I possibly be?
I tried to be a pole for vaulting, 
but I couldn't seem to bend.
I would love to be a ski pole, 
but for that I'd need a friend.

I wished I was the North Pole, 
and marked the home of Santa,
Or even just a Gallup Poll calling voters in Atlanta.
I considered fireman's and fishing,
Was a totem for some time.

And even tried to be a stripper pole, 
but I couldn't stand the grime.
But then one day, in my depths of despair, 
Some scouts brought me Old Glory as something to wear.
And while she danced and she waved,
It became clear to me, 
I am the best kind of pole you can possibly be.
I am an American Flag pole.

Now pledge allegiance, or else.
==

  (laughing)
What do you think?
  The sad thing is, I like it!
Can I get that as a blurb?  
  Oh, absolutely!
"The sad thing is I like it..."
  The sad thing is I like it.
"...  --Maurice Sendak."
  That's a good blurb!

  And all you need to do is get a popular illustrator 
  who has a horrible sene of design, no taste for type
  nothing about the aesthetics for 
  what a picture book could look like,
  and you will probably make a lot of money.

Will you teach me how to draw?
  No.
Well that is a lovely offer, I accept.
  (laughs)
   
== Cut to Sendak's studio ==

So this is where you do all your work?
  Yeah, I'm afraid so.
Well I'm trying to figure out how to draw a pole.  
I'm not very good at drawing.
Let me draw a pole here...
You ever uh, sniff your marker?  
  No... is that good?  a good thing?
It's a cheap high.  be careful...
  It does, it does!
Go ahead, go ahead.  
I assume you were huffing these things 
when you drew Where The Wild Things Are
  "I remember Pearl Harbor... 
  ta da da da da da da... ya da da da, ya da da da, 
  Ya Da DA DA DA DA DA!"
See how great these markers are?  no really.
  That pulled the song right out of me, 
  right out of my nose!

I got a mountain, got some
  clouds
and half a sun...
You drew a Polish woman with a pole!  
  Holding a pole
Pole with a pole.  She could be a Polish stripper.
  That's right

Any advice, any advice here?
  No... just, I would leave it alone, because it has 
  a kind of delicacy, and irrationality, and, and... 
  terrible quality of -- ordinariness.
"Terribly ordinary!" - Maurice Sendak
That's another great blurb!  
  Supremely ordinary!

Well, Moishe... I think with my fantastic book idea, 
my words, my drawings and your blurb, 
I think we've got a hit here.
  I've- I know we do. 
Thank you, sir.


== Colbert recaps ==
Folks, once I get a publisher, 
I AM A POLE (AND SO CAN YOU!) 
will be available in bookstores everywhere!
In hardcover, paperback, maybe even in ebook.  
what do you say about that, Maurice?

[Flashback to earlier interview]
  Fuck them is what I say!  
  I hate those ebooks.  
  They *cannot* be the future.  
  They may well be, I will be dead, I won't give a shit!
[/Flashback]

Three cheers for participatory democracy! The percentage of stated opposition to SOPA and PIPA in Congress changed dramatically over the past two days, from 28% to 61%. [If you count people who are “leaning No”, by ProPublica’s estimate, this goes up to 69%.]

How many politicians announced they would be co-sponsoring or otherwise outright supporting SOPA/PIPA on Wednesday? By our count: Zero.

Update: Harry Reid releases Dems in the Senate to vote against PIPA if their conscience demands. And Chris Dodd, former Senator and current MPAA Chairman, just called for a summit between Internet and traditional ‘content’ companies, convened by the White House, to reach a compromise. (He hasn’t yet realized that major content companies today are Internet companies.)

We are experiencing the growth of social unity and a certain moral sense across the Web, among people who have found something wonderful, worth defending with all their heart. This is a small piece; it is thrilling to be part of it. I hope you feel it too.