the executive summary:
Nutshell: if you’re a law firm considering hiring me, and you stumble across this blog, please don’t get nervous. Instead, talk to me, and/or read the rest of this post. I’m eager to explain why I blog, and why I think it may make me a better lawyer and a good addition to your firm.
[Image by Hugh Macleod of Gaping Void fame; used with permission under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 1.0 license. For more on why Hugh licenses his images this way, see here.]
the full story:
Interspecies cooperation by Barry Rogge. License: 
For those interested in some of my previous writings on intrinsic motivation, this survey paper by Simon Gächter may be of interest.
Key sentence:
[W]e find strong evidence that many people’s attitude toward voluntary cooperation is conditional on other people’s cooperation… Moreover, the fact that many people contribute more the more others contribute also speaks against pure altruism explanations, because they predict that people reduce their own contributions when informed that others already contribute to the public good.
Basically, the paper argues (and justifies through a survey of experimental evidence) that a majority of people are ‘conditional cooperators’ who cooperate in community projects (voting, paying taxes, charity work, etc.) if and only if other people cooperate. If they think others are ‘defecting’ (i.e., not cooperating) then they will stop cooperating as well.
The paper also has some more detailed observations that come out of the experimental work; among them that voluntary cooperation is fragile; group composition matters (i.e., groups with more conditional cooperators will be healthier); and that ‘belief management’ maters- i.e., if people think that they are in a group with more conditional cooperators, that group will be more robust. None of these will come as a huge surprise to anyone who has been involved with volunteer communities, but still interesting to see it experimentally confirmed.
I’ve always suspected that something like this is the case, and that it explains in part why the GPL is so successful, since it uses copyright to force cooperation and penalize defection, and (importantly) makes a clear public statement that that is the case, which serves a signaling function (everyone in the community knows these are the ground rules) and a filtering function (people who aren’t interested in collaborating don’t join as much as they join other groups.)
The paper is only 25 pages and fairly readable; if you’re interested in the dynamics of volunteerism I recommend it.
Those of you who aren’t into economists and their fancy ‘measurements’ may also want to look at this related early paper, which is somewhat dated (the concept of low and high authoritarians is sort of discredited at this point) but still possibly of interest in explaining some of the psychological mechanisms at work here.
(Came to this by way of this paper on tax evasion, which looks to have many other interesting citations that I should investigate once exams are done. Only Telecoms left…)
Altlaw, the restoring-caselaw-to-the-public-domain-where-it-belongs project I’ve been involved with on and off since last year, just got a new feature; it now parses the cases that are cited and shows them as sidebar links. It hasn’t propagated to all cases yet, but you can see an example here. (I stumbled across this by looking up that case for my exam tomorrow, rather than because anyone actually told me what was going on. Clearly I should be subscribed to the site’s news feed. :) Still needs some love, but it is great to see it getting there- impressive what can be done these days on a very serious shoestring.
Televisions from days gone by by Neil Anderson. License:
Clay Shirky on how small wikipedia is, relative to the way we’ve spent our culture’s free time for the past fifty years:
So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.
The whole thing is worth reading, but that particular bit just jumped out at me like a lightning bolt.
On that note, back to my cave to work on passing Corporations and E-Commerce exams.
I’ve been waiting for this. (It isn’t the first time; see wikitravel, but it appears to be a higher-profile publisher.) It is obvious that to some people and institutions, stable and vetted is good. It is true in software, and in specific areas (textbooks, guidebooks, possibly encyclopedias) it is probably true in written books as well, so it is only a matter of time before this model (take unpolished, cutting edge community version and turn it into something ‘enterprise-y’) becomes relevant in publishing too.
Now, hopefully wikitravel has an Istanbul book before the summer…
I got interviewed last week for a linux.com piece. I also got LASIK over spring break, after 22 years of glasses. (It’s been a month without them and I’m still pretty psyched.) The result of the above two facts is a new headshot, in best chinposin style:
Next necessary step: new hackergotchi, possibly from this picture (almost certainly not from the chinposin one.)
(And yes, I’ll get one that is slightly less swarmy/businessy at some point. If that’s what you need, you probably still want this one. :)
This dialog gets points for being graphical, and loses many, many, many points for presenting no information that any reasonable user could possibly get any use from unless they already previously understand (1) what FUSE is (2) how to get FUSE plugins (3) who the ‘first user’ is (4) what the ‘fuse group’ is and (5) how to add users to the ‘fuse group.’ And if you know all those things, you didn’t need the dialog, so kudos for being both useless and intimidating.
The worst dialog was actually a terminal wrapped in the upgrader GUI which stalled my entire upgrade in order to ask me what my terminal encoding was, helpfully presenting a list of 28 possible encodings, of which UTF-8 was 27th and the default was some obscure encoding I’d never previously heard of. (The other times the upgrader stalled the upgrade to ask for input it told me I’d modified config files I’d never previously heard of, much less modified, but at least those had basically the same useful-ish debian config file dialog I’ve been used to for ages.)
Linux has come a long way (the upgrader helpfully offered to do a partial upgrade instead of complaining and dying like previous debian/ubuntu upgrades), but still has a long way to go too.
(These weren’t the only problems I saw; Gerv has a good list of some of the other ones, though I didn’t see all of the ones he did.)
Suspending the protection of the laws in favor of executive power: it makes the trains run on time gets fences built on time.
Brought to you by the people who decided we didn’t need that pesky fourth amendment anyway.
(Why yes, this did provoke me to finally renew my ACLU membership. Read more about what they are doing to make us safe and free here.)
Good news: I’ve been selected as Editor in Chief of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, 2008-2009 edition. I’m excited to be able to work with a great team to release a solid issue of the journal, and also to spend some time thinking about where journals might go next.
Bad news: Lots of work to be done, and big questions like these to be dealt with. I can already feel my hair getting greyer. ;)
Overall: very excited, I just hope I get to sleep some next year. :)
[This happened a couple weeks ago; I keep forgetting to blog it for the record, but with journal recruiting starting in earnest this week, it was hard to forget.]
