All those topics that i wish i had time to pursue more earnestly.
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More Everyware

More Everyware:

How to design systems that respect prerogatives of civil liberties, privacy, etc.? AG suggests five ethical principles:
Default to harmlessness. Everyware “should default to a mode that ensures their users’ safety.” It’s beyond graceful degredation, because everyware takes so much responsibility upon itself to take care of people.
Be self-disclosing. You should be able to see what systems are operating in a space, both to geeks and to people who aren’t wired up. This requires “a new universal vocabulary of signs” for everyware; and the ability to look under the hood.
Be conservative of face. Everyware should not “unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate or shame their users.” Nor should it completely dissolve the boundaries of privacy that people expect.
Be conservative of time. Don’t “introduce undue complications into ordinary operations.” Having physical equivalents of Clippy the Office Assistant would be a pain.
Be deniable. Everyware “must offer users the ability to opt out, always and at any point.” If ubicomp systems offer some functionality and benefit, opting out should just turn those off. (How do you opt out of being photographed by surveillance cameras?)

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I think these are fine principles for private-private relationships. I do not think they work for individual-state relationships. Also they seem to be a bit devoid of the economic relations in favor of social relations. Time for instance is as much an economic relation as a social relation.

June 28, 2006   No Comments

A Wikipedia Warning [2]

A Wikipedia Warning [2]:
In May Katherine Tredwell, a professor at the University of Oklahoma, nabbed 16 students who plagiarized sections of their final papers for a history of science course. Nine of those students, the professor found, had copied entries on Wikipedia virtually verbatim.

Since then, Ms. Tredwell has made it her mission to convince her colleagues that they must teach students how to use—and, in many cases, how not to use—the popular open-source encyclopedia. Devoting a class session to the dangers of Internet research is a good start, the professor told Oklahoma Daily. But she also recommends that professors give students small class assignments that ask them to use Wikipedia—and, hopefully, to see how easily information on the site can be altered or edited.

Should professors hold crash courses in Wikipedia at the start of every semester? Or is that a job best left to librarians speaking at campus-orientation sessions? —Brock Read

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before wikipedia they were just using the web before using the web they were using paper encyclopedias and books. i don’t think that a ‘crash course’ in wikipedia will change anything. I do think that teaching students a bit of wisdom in general might be in order.

June 28, 2006   No Comments