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:
I find myself with lots of podcast-appropriate car time1, and correspondingly my blog-reading time has cratered. And I was given an ipod on my first day of work.2 So… anyone have any recommendations for podcasts worth listening to? I’ll probably try to catch up on the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum music podcasts, these boneheads,3 and the Redmonk crew, but otherwise I really have never listened to podcasts and don’t even know where to start. Recommendations either technical or non-technical (like the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum feed, or good legal podcasts?) welcome.
Ironically, my internet access at home is spotty and obviously they’ll be keeping me distracted at the office. So if I’m responding to email very slowly/not at all for a while, you know why.
Spirals as eyes? by Brett L.. License: 
I have arrived in the south end of the Mission district in San Francisco, near Precita Park, and will be here (and/or near Menlo Park for work) until the beginning of August. Party invites for a housewarming will probably be going out soon for friends that I know are in SF, but if for some reason I’ve forgotten you or you’re here at some point over the summer, drop me a note and we’ll have a beverage of choice.
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. :)
