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Category Archives: paper ideas

all the cool kids are writing about the google book search settlement

19-Apr-09

Samuelson
Picker
Grimmelman
Perhaps some day before the case settles I’ll actually be able to read them all. In the meantime linking here so that I can find them all later.

computer usage data bleg (update: and server market share)

22-Sep-08

Hey, all. I’m in need of data about ‘typical’ computer usage- i.e., ‘in 2007, the average computer user spent X% of time on the internet, Y% of time doing word processing, Z% of time listening to music, etc.’ The ideal data set would have this information for a number of years- ideally going back at [...]

interesting research on ‘conditional cooperation’

10-May-08

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 [...]

morning link bits

24-Jan-08

All too short and insubstantive piece on the Amazon ‘top reviewers’. Reminds me a bit of the wikipedia cabal discussion. We will eventually demand transparency in these institutions, I think. (via the awesome furdlog- must-read if you want to keep tabs on some of the big picture tech policy issues, especially as understood by the [...]

wesabe ‘data bill of rights’

14-Jan-08

Wesabe’s Marc Hedlund is speaking at the Princeton Cloud Computing seminar I’m at. Their ‘data bill of rights’:
This Data Bill of Rights is our promise to you.

You can export and/or delete your data from Wesabe whenever you want.
Your data is your data, not ours. Our job is to help you understand and act on your [...]

Voting With Your Feet and Other Freedoms

06-Dec-07

This Post In A Nutshell (aka, the Murray Version)
No one should be surprised that social network users can’t ‘vote with their feet,’ because most users give up a portion of their autonomy when they choose to use web services. This post will suggest that protecting autonomy is desirable and should be designed in to software, [...]

hypothetical copyright exam question

02-Oct-07

[picture: 'Unsolved Mystery', by ButterflySha, used under a CC-BY license.]
Hypothetical copyright exam question for your late-night pondering: If a poem is derived from statistical analysis of 22 books, but contains no actual direct sequences from those books longer than 2-3 words, is it a derivative work of those 22 books?
Thou shalt be I. . .
Thou [...]

freedom ‘for users’- which users did you mean, exactly? (or, of users, user-deployers, and user-consumers)

07-Aug-07

“Free software… refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software…”
–Free Software Definition, emphasis mine
“closing the [ASP] loophole would infringe on certain peoples rights and he [Moglen] didn’t see any way to preserve everyone’s rights…”
– Eben Moglen, as paraphrased here

[The rest of this post is not based on any conversations with FSF/SFLC [...]

thoughts from afar on OSCON

26-Jul-07

I’m obviously interested in what is going on at OSCON this year, since the overlap between web 2.0 and free/open software seems to be a major theme. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go, so I’m left lurking from afar.
John Eckman has some of the best notes I’ve found, at least on Eben’s talks- read his notes on [...]

evaluating a Free/Open Service Definition (rough draft)

22-Jul-07

Thinking about the Open Service problem
As Havoc mentioned, I’m putting in some time on thinking about what an Open Service Definition (to parallel the Open Source and Free Software Definitions). I present here a rough draft of a framework for evaluating such a definition. It is not the definition itself, nor a license/technology/business model/etc. which [...]

This work by Luis Villa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.