Berkman Buzz, October 27, 2014

On Wednesday, October 22, members of the Digital Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI) community gathered to hear from members of the seven DPSI teams. DPSI teams feature a diverse group of learners (students, faculty, fellows, and staff) working on projects addressing problems and opportunities across the university. DPSI participants have had the novel opportunity to enhance and cultivate competency in various digital literacies as teams engage with research, design, and policy relating to the digital world.

Each team had 3 minutes to present its progress and 9 minutes of feedback from the DPSI community audience.

Projects include: AccessEd: Accessibility in Online Education, Big Data, eyeData:Data Visualization and Exploratory Tools Applied to Real-World Research Data, Farmer's Market: Building A Self-Sustaining Harvard Farmer's Market, Safe Campus: Dealing With Sexual Assault on Campus, #DocShop: Interactive Documentary Workshop, and OA2014: Open Access.

Open Data is an important public policy that contributes to achieving greater transparency and broader access to information, more citizen participation and engagement, while also supporting innovation and economic growth. The pace at which the Open Data movement is spreading in different fields of endeavour can be taken as an illustration that society is evolving towards greater openness, transparency and accountability. Yet, several constraints and legal uncertainties subsist beyond the façade of Open Data. This article investigates different layers of rights that regulate the use and re-use of data: from the copyright vesting in the content and/or structure of a particular dataset, to the sui-generis right protecting against the substantial reproduction and/or extraction of the content of a database. The objective is, ultimately, to illustrate the conflictual relationship that subsists between the underlying principles of Open Data, which purports to promote the free use and re-use of information, and the underlying legal system, whose provisions are increasingly relied upon to establish an exclusive right on public sector information.

The existing harms of social scripts we ran while in smaller, geographically-constrained groups are being amplified due to network effect. Tiny unchecked errors, scaled, become large harms as people find ways to exploit them, in life just as in software.

I propose we hold a 2-day event to understand "weaponized social" historically, tangentially, neurochemically, and technically - and to arrive at ongoing ways of addressing them. These challenges are not new, they are simply arising in space we consider new. Given the erosion of trust online, I see meeting in person as vital to rebuilding trust. You can suggest when and where the event takes place via http://goo.gl/forms/2iBJbHXD5E

There was a time when the hacker and academic circles I run in had the default assumption of "it's better to have your idea broken by your friends than by someone else." The implicit assumption being that we'd build even better ideas, together. I *hate* that loving dissent is disappearing from my corners of the internet, when I used to dream it would spread.

For the past three years, I've been using methods to identify gender in large datasets to support research, design, and data journalism, supported by the Knight Foundation, with an amazing group of collaborators. In my Master's thesis, used these techniques to support inclusion of women in citizen journalism, the news, and collective aciton online. Last February, I was invited to give a talk about my work at the MIT Symposium on Gender and Technology, hosted by the MIT Program in Women's and Gender Studies. I have finally written the first part of the talk, a practical guide to methods and ethics of gender identification approaches.

I am helping coordinate three and a half day-long workshops in November for anyone interested in learning how to use programming and data science tools to ask and answer questions about online communities like Wikipedia, free and open source software, Twitter, civic media, etc. This will be a new and improved version of the workshops run successfully earlier this year.

The workshops are for people with no previous programming experience and will be free of charge and open to anyone.

Our goal is that, after the three workshops, participants will be able to use data to produce numbers, hypothesis tests, tables, and graphical visualizations to answer questions like: Are new contributors to an article in Wikipedia sticking around longer or contributing more than people who joined last year? Who are the most active or influential users of a particular Twitter hashtag? Are people who participated in a Wikipedia outreach event staying involved? How do they compare to people that joined the project outside of the event?

The agglomeration of rules and regulations over time has produced a body of legal code that no single individual can fully comprehend. This complexity produces inefficiencies, makes the processes of understanding and changing the law difficult, and frustrates the fundamental principle that the law should provide fair notice to the governed. In this article, we take a quantitative, unbiased, and software-engineering approach to analyze the evolution of the United States Code from 1926 to today. Software engineers frequently face the challenge of understanding and managing large, structured collections of instructions, directives, and conditional statements, and we adapt and apply their techniques to the U.S. Code over time. Our work produces insights into the structure of the U.S. Code as a whole, its strengths and vulnerabilities, and new ways of thinking about individual laws. For example, we identify the first appearance and spread of important terms in the U.S. Code like "whistleblower" and "privacy." We also analyze and visualize the network structure of certain substantial reforms, including the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, and show how the interconnections of references can increase complexity and create the potential for unintended consequences. Our work is a timely illustration of computational approaches to law as the legal profession embraces technology for scholarship, to increase efficiency, and to improve access to justice.

In an image resonant of a Hollywood movie, attendees at the cremation of former deputy House speaker Apiwan Wiriyachai held up the three-finger salute to the former Prime Minister of the country Yingluck Shinawatra, in what could be seen as a silent message of hope for Thailand.

The image, which was originally posted on the BBC Thailand Facebook page has been shared on that platform over 650 times and shared on Twitter over 70 times, including re-tweets from Thais with large followings such as @toyubomm. The BBC set up this Facebook page in an effort to avoid the systematic attack on the rule of law and liberties which followed May's coup, including the banning of political gatherings and arresting and detaining hundreds of politicians and anti-coup activists.