Stocking Leviathan's utility belt

Sunday's Washington Post had an article about "Xtreme Defense," a Madison Avenue term for non-conventional, non-lethal weaponry. Seems Rumsfeld is all over these, buying everything from handheld lasers (to cause "temporary" blindness), to large-scale (i.e., multi-target) stun guns, low-power, targeted microwave beams (auditory hallucinations), and more.

The author describes such technologies as "what happens when the war on terror meets the entrepreneurial spirit."

Seems a lot more like what happens when the Stanford Experiment meets the entrepreneurial spirit.

Cybercultural studies

The Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies promotes the academic study of emerging online communities. Their website includes essays and book reviews, as well as links to course syllabi, conferences, and other resources.

Courses include:

• Barret McCormick's "Politics of the Internet" (Marquette)
• Kirsten Foot's "Communication and Information Technologies and Politics" (U Washington)
• Arthur Morin's "Public Policy, Law and Ethics in Information Networking" (Fort Hays State)
• David Watkins' "Politics and Technology" (U Washington)
• Paul Harwood's "IT and Society" (U Maryland)
• Jonathan Zittrain's "Internet and Society: Technologies and Politics of Control" (Harvard)
• Bruce Larkin's "Politics of the Internet" (UC Santa Cruz)
• Alexandra Samuel's "The Internet and Politics" (U British Columbia)
• Michael Froomkin's "Internet and the State: Social and Political Regulation" (U Miami)
• Larry Martinez's "Cyberspace Citizenship" (Cal State-Long Beach)

... and oodles more. Clearly, many departments see this as relevant. Competitive edge, anyone?

Forum e-démocratie

The first Worldwide Forum on e-Democracy is scheduled for September 28-29 in Paris.

Registration if FREE for students and faculty, but participation is limited to 2,000, on a first-come, first-served basis (September 21st deadline).

A full program of events in English is available here (also in Portuguese, Spanish and French).

Making history

In that vast wasteland that is the Interweb, a gem: misbehaving.net is a blog by and about women and technology - their contributions, opportunities, and challenges.

Anyone studying feminist politics in the wired age?

Also a good source for other female-authored blogs.

Software as a public good

Sri Llanka has declared September 5th-11th National Free and Open Source Software Week.

You may remember India's statement at last April's meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva:

"The primary rationale for Intellectual Property protection is, first and foremost, to promote societal development by encouraging technological innovation. ... The rationale ... is not that extraction of monopoly profits by the innovator is, of and in itself, good for society and so needs to be promoted. Rather, that properly controlled, such a monopoly, by providing an incentive for innovation, might produce sufficient benefits for society to compensate for the immediate loss to consumers as a result of the existence of a monopoly market instead of a competitive market."

"Neither intellectual property protection, nor the harmonization of intellectual property laws leading to higher protection standards in all countries irrespective of their level of development, can be an end in itself. ... Even though the intended beneficiary of IP protection is the public at large, the immediate beneficiaries are the IP rights holders, the vast majority if whom are in developed countries."

What's that noise? Could it be a movement afoot?

A world apart

For those teaching (or researching) global issues (e.g., health, environment), GAPMINDER provides a number of Flashmedia animations on various world statistics.

Mind the gap.

Online interlocking directorates

This is an old one, but frankly, I thought I'd already mentioned They Rule before. Apparently not.

Better late than never, I suppose. TR is a flash- based interface for bi-modal social network data, in this instance, major corporations or institutions, and the persons serving on their boards.

If you haven't seen it (or if it's been awhile), the website might get you thinking about datasets in a new way. Highly recommended.

Create online surveys

Turns out, faculty and staff of the University of Maryland have access to an online survey delivery system, courtesy of OIT.

The following question formats are available: multiple choice, multiple selection, Likert- scaling, true-false, yes-no, short or long answer, and fill in the blank.

View survey results online, or have them emailed. Nifty. Kudos to Radha for the tip.

S for SNA in R

Carter Butts recently made available a documented collection of S Routines for Social Network Analysis in the R Environment. R, for those new to the party, is a powerful open-source programming language - designed for statistics - that runs on virtually any platform and includes routines for graphic presentation, as well as linear and nonlinear modeling, time series, parametric and nonparametric tests, and clustering and smoothing.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys.

e-Social Science in the UK

The National Centre for e-Social Science runs a series of workshops to help establish an agenda for IT-supported research. Topics have included GIS and Grid Technology, e-Infrastructures for Social Simulation, Collaboration, Confidentiality and Ethics, Quantitative Methods, Video and other Technical Innovations, and the Digital Record for e-Social Science.

Fascinating. How long before we catch up on this side of the pond?

AOIR

The Association of Internet Researchers is just that - a cross-disciplinary effort to advance critical study of the Internet.

Whether you choose to become a member or not, their website includes conference announcements, a blog, and online fora on a range of Internet and scholarship issues.

More web studies

WebArchivist, a joint project of the University of Washington and SUNY's Institute of Technology, has several projects likely of interest to political scientists.

The Election 2002 Web Archive indexes almost 2,500 websites, produced by a range of groups.

The September 11 Web Archive covers 25,000 related websites, collected in the first three months following that disaster.

Other projects include the Internet and Elections Project Web Archive, which has collected over 4,000 websites from more than 20 countries in North America, Europe, and Asia from 2004-05.

Studying the Interweb's impact

The UK's Economic and Social Research Council has funded e-Society, billed as "the largest ever academic research programme to investigate the impact of digital technologies, particularly the internet on society."

Includes links to publications, events, and other resources.

Cartographic craze

Want to keep up on the latest map mashups*? Google Maps Mania is the unofficial blog of all things GoogleMaps. New georeferenced applications are emerging almost daily - some goofy, some more serious.

Whether this is the sort of thing that floats your boat or not, it's worth keeping an eye on. Sooner or later, someone's likely to hit on an application you can't imagine ever living without.

* Mashups are hybrids of older applications and/or content (e.g., GoogleMapping Craig's List). There are some interesting musical experiments along these lines, as well.

Google wildcards

According to Google Blog, it is now possible to replace full words with the "*" wildcard.

Cool.

Yet another trove

Economist Jay Tate has put together a very impressive list of Windows-based Software for Research. He includes sections of organization (including information management), search and acquisition, and qualitative, quantitative, spatial and simulation software, as well as applications to support the communication of results.

Really, this was a LOT of work - kudos to Jay.

The motherlode of text mining

The Network of Excellence in text Mining and its applications in Statistics (NEMIS) is a European portal to all things text-mining.

Content rich (includes conference announcements, reports, and other resources), this will be on my watch list from now on. Especially useful is the page of text mining software, listing dozens of quantitative and qualitative applications.

A true treasure trove.

More method resources

The University of Miami's library has also put together a nice list of Research Methods in the Social Sciences.

Includes subsections on measurement, surveying, quantitative and qualitative approaches, dictionaries, data sets, and software, et al.

Heterodox social research

For those interested in triangulating research strategies, there's an online Glossary of Mixed Methods Concepts, based on Tashakkori and Teddlie's Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioral Research (2003).

Given that the book costs well over $100 (even used), this is a good alternative for those who just need a quick refresher. Oddly, the text cuts out about 15 entries from the end, but it's good while it lasts.

Open source unstructured text analysis

Computerworld is reporting that IBM has made their Unstructured Information Management Architecture fully open to the public. Essentially a text mining application, UIMA was designed for very large data sets where metaformating is non-existent.

Why would this be relevant for political scientists? Because this sort of tool might also be used to identify and track patterns in other large, unstructured (or semi-structured) datasets, like online news, blogs, webpages, or other heterogeneous electronic collections.

Protecting personal information overseas

It's official - personal information protection is enormously more difficult than the "conventional wisdom" has claimed. According to CNET News, reporters for the Australian Broadcasting Corp were able to acquire the personal data of Australian customers from an Indian call center (repeating an earlier feat written up in The Sun).

The report is controversial (it involved planting a "mole" in the call center), and no customers have actually claimed damages yet, but it does suggest that security protections are weak.

Given that international call center outsourcing is so common, this also suggests that national efforts to protect privacy will have only limited effectiveness, without parallel bilateral or multilateral agreements.

i-register for the i-free i-conference

Penn State's Information Sciences and Technology Program is hosting the first i-Conference, a multi-school, multidisciplinary effort to address the challenges and opportunities posed by integrating IT into education and research.

Topics include: basic concepts of info science; interdisciplinary challenges; academic communities and IT; and the "i-School" identity.

Held this Sept 28-30th in State College, PA, registration is FREE, though attendees still need to cover their housing costs.

Malware

Ubiquity, the online magazine of the Association for Computing Machinery, has an interesting article by M E Kabay on the underbelly of the digital world.

It provides a good, brief introduction to viruses, worms, trojans, sniffers, chipping, spyware, bugs, etc. Though most of us have encountered a few of these in the field, I doubt many non-computer geeks really understand the variety of threats out there.

Well written, well researched.

Human subjects, international

The US Dept of Health and Human Services has documented Human Subjects protocols for 55 countries, worldwide.

VERY useful information.

Understanding ethnomethodology

The September issue of FQS 6(3), Charles Lee Cole reviews Paul ten Have's 2004 book, Understanding Qualitative Research and Ethnomethodology.

It's heavy sledding if you're not used to the dialect (e.g., "... accountability is reflexive, and that reflexivity is the self-explicating of common ordinary actions that become the core of social life"), but a quite interesting discussion, nonetheless.

Academic Commons

The Academic Commons focuses on the role of technology in liberal arts education. Hosted by Wabash College, with a prestigious editorial board, this is quality work.

Something in between a blog and a journal, AC includes pedagogical essays, interviews, technology reviews, and more. Really, it appears this could become a substantiantal resource.

Understanding the digital divide

The online journal IT & Society has published several issues that address issues of access to electronic resources.

Public Library of Science

Public Library of Science

As Ken points out below, there seems to little if any economic or moral justification for not adopting open source approaches to publishing scientific studies. Here's an effort to make medical studies freely and openly accessible.

e-latest e-issue of e-government

Electronic Journal of e-Government 2:3

Trust me, it's not going away - e-Government is coming to your polity. Check out a few of the articles in this issue:

e-Citizens: Blogging as Democratic Practice

The Risk of e-Voting

Ethical Problems for e-Government

Another thing to keep you up at night

Last Sunday's Washington Post had an article by Steve Coll and Susan B Glasser that claims al Qaeda has migrated from its Afghani training bases to an online environment.

It sounds like a bit more than just another Anarchist's Cookbook. Apparently, al Qaeda operatives have been using the Internet to plan, coordinate, and train jihadists.

I wonder who they use as an ISP?

It's that time again already?

The latest issue of First Monday August 2005 is out. There are a couple of interesting papers, by Roger Clarke and John Wilinsky, who both write on open access to scientific research.

My dog ate my PlayStation

My good friend Victor has always believed in the power of games to teach complex concepts, like international strategy and negotiation. He's a genius in the classroom, so I can't say he's wrong.

Anyway, the latest issue of Innovate - Aug/Sept 2005 1:6 focuses specifically on this issue - the pedogogical role of simulations and gaming.

I found it interesting, and I'm one of those who doesn't "get" video games.

Google meeting with Gutenburg's attorneys

CNET News is reporting that Google's library scanning project is on (temporary?) hold, while they work out copyright issues with the publishers of all those nifty books.

Perhaps we might step back, and think a bit about how digital technology can transform our present economic models. In the old days, only a few writers could expect an audience, since the costs of reproducing and distributing their works were, well - costly. Today, these costs have largely dissipated - duplication and communication is (or can be) effectively free.

True, material goods (e.g., food, water) are still significantly constrained by physical limits (e.g., raw materials, transportation), and as such are likely to rely on economies of scale in order to produce low-cost items. This means that the conventionial incentive theory will likely hold for the bulk of human activities.

But as Pekka Himanen and others have argued, the "Hacker Ethic" fundamentally changes the economics of intellectual contribution. Lower reproduction and distribution costs mean we needn't always be trapped by the "no free lunch" law. The statistical middle can be strongly affected by the clever few. Some will have bad intentions, certainly - but was it ever any other way?

The key is that the beneficial efforts of relatively few can be shared by many - all we need to raise all boats is to encourage these open, altruistic models. After all, the ultimate purpose of economic life is not to generate private profit, but to improve the human condition (sometimes through private profit, sometimes not).

Food for thought, no?

All you wanted to know about open access

Adrian K Ho and Charles W Bailey, Jr have put together the Open Access Webliography, a summary of online resources about the Open Access movement.

Something tells me that enclosure of the Internet won't be as simple as just adding sheep and starving the peasants into factory work.

Radio customs

ZDNet and the Seattle P-I are reporting that the US Dept of Homeland Security has experimented with embedding RFID chips in I-94A (Customs and Border Protection) forms.

They are also keenly interested in British efforts to use RFID-tagged license plates to track vehicle speeds, and registration or insurance status.

Again, what was the road to hell paved with?

Proceedings

The folks at England's ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science (see link, below) have papers and presentations from their First International Conference on e-Social Science available.

From June 22-24, 2005, dozens of researchers (mostly) European researchers gathered to discuss topics such as: e-social science research in practice; enhancing existing research methods through e-social science; socio-technical issues in e-social science research; new sources and forms of sociological data; and software for data mining, visualisation, analysis, modelling and collaborative research.

ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science

ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science

WANTED!! An organization like this in the U.S....