Post Peeves

Why a punch in the face^* is the appropriate response to use of the phrase “business model”^†

Saturday, January 8th, 2011

The utterer of “business model” has attempted to raise their status with a superfluous word and has only confused whatever the issue at hand. The utterer is probably among the confused. The listener obtains only entropy and lower relative status. A punch serves to equalize the situation.

In inappropriate conveyance of status, “business model” bears likeness to beginning a statement with “So, ”:

Starting a sentence with “so” uses the whiff of logic to relay authority.

Ugly stuff.

Vivek Wadhwa, my favorite TechCrunch writer, seeks to educate the confused (strikethrough added):

Developing the right product is hard. But what is harder is building a good business ~~model~~.

However, this and other uses throughout the article only demonstrate the superfluousness of “model”.

^*metaphorically
^†with scare quotes, or snarky tone, is ok; beware of inadvertent homage

Posted in Economics, Peeves | 12 Comments »

Notability, deletionism, inclusionism, ∞³

Tuesday, January 4th, 2011

For the past couple years there has been an article about me in English Wikipedia (archived version). It is an ok article. Some that I’d include isn’t, and some of what is seems kind of tangential, e.g., talking at a NASA event, that besides a citation, netted spending the day with an unholy mix of the usual social media suspects and entirely retrograde “we gotta put man humans into space because it makes me feel proud to be an American and my daughter might do her math homework!!!” boosters (get real: go robots!) and a sketch. However, overall it is fairly evocative, even the NASA event part. It would be uncool of me to edit it directly, and I’ve been curious to see how it would be improved, translated, vandalized, or deleted, so I haven’t made suggestions. It has mostly just sat there, though it has been curious to see the content copied in various places where Wikipedia content gets copied, and that a fair proportion of the people I meet note that I “have a Wikipedia page” — that’s kind of the wrong way to think about it (Wikipedia articles have subjects, not owners), but good to know that people can use web search (and that I can tend toward the pedantic).

!#@!@^% deletionists are ruining Wikipedia. They’ll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
— http://memesteading.com/2010/03/15/dialectical-inclusionism/

The one thing that I have said about the article about me on English Wikipedia, until now, has been this, on my (not precisely, but moreso “mine”) user page on English Wikipedia: “I am the subject of Mike Linksvayer, which I would strongly advocate deleting if I were a deletionist (be my guest).” I’ve thought about pulling some kind of stunt around this, for example, setting up a prediction market contract on whether the article about me would be deleted in a given timeframe, but never got around to it. Anyway, last week someone finally added an Articles for Deletion notice to the article, which sets up a process involving discussion of whether the article ought be deleted (crickets so far). When rough consensus is reached, an admin will delete the article, or the notice will be removed.

I’m not a fan of deletionism (more below), but given the current rules around notability, I am either somewhat questionable as an English Wikipedia article subject (using the general, easy to interpret charitably summary of notability: “A person is presumed to be notable if he or she has received significant coverage in reliable secondary sources that are independent of the subject.”) to unquestionably non-notable (any less charitable interpretation, which presumably any “deletionist” would use, thus my user page statement). The person who added the Articles for Deletion notice may not have done any research beyond what is already linked in the article (more on that general case below), but I must admit, his critique of the citations in the article, are fairly evocative, just as the article is:

We have three sources from Creative Commons (primary), a paragraph in a CNET news article where he does his job and encourages scientists to use CC licenses, one IHT article about veganism that mentions him for a couple of paragraphs, and a link to his Wikipedia userpage. That is not enough for notability, in my opinion.

The IHT (actually first in the NYT) article was about calorie restriction, not veganism, but that’s a nitpick. Most of the “media” items my name has appeared in are indeed about Creative Commons, i.e., me doing my job, not me as primary subject, or in a few cases, about calorie restriction, with me as a prop. Or they’re blogs — ok that one is even less notable than most blogs, but at least it’s funny, and relevant — and podcasts. The only item (apart from silly blog posts) that I’ve appeared in that I’m fond of and would be tickled if added as a reference if the current article about me squeaks by or some future article in the event I as a subject become a no-brainer (clearly I aim to, e.g., “[make] a widely recognized contribution that is part of the enduring historical record in his or her specific field”, but even more clearly I haven’t achieved this) is in Swedish (and is still about me doing my job, though perhaps going off-message): check out an English machine translation.

…

I’m not a fan of deletionism, largely because, as I’ve stated many times, thinking of Wikipedias as encyclopedias doesn’t do the former justice — Wikipedia has exploded the “encyclopedia” category, and that’s a wonderful thing. Wikipedias (and other Wikimedia projects, and projects elsewhere with WikiNature) need to go much further if freedom is to win — but I’m partisan in this, and can appreciate that others appreciate the idea that Wikipedias stick close to the category defined by print encyclopedias, including strong limits on what might be considered encyclopedic.

It also strikes me that if Wikimedia movement priorities include increasing readership and participation that inclusionism is the way to go — greatly increase the scope of material people can find and participate in building. However, I’m not saying anything remotely new — see Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia.

Although I’m “not a fan” I don’t really know how big of a problem deletionism is. In my limited experience, dealing with an Articles for Deletion notice on an article I’ve contributed to is a pain, sometimes motivates substantially improving the article in question, and is generally a bummer when a useful, factual article is deleted — but it isn’t a huge part of the English Wikipedia editing experience.

Furthermore, reading guidelines on notability closely again, they’re more reasonable than I recall — that is, very reasonable, just not the radical inclusionism I prefer. To the extent that deletionism is a problem, my guess now is that it could be mitigated by following the guidelines more closely, not loosening them — start with adding a {{notability}} tag, not an Articles for Deletion notice, ask for advice on finding good sources, and make a good faith effort to find good sources — especially for contemporary subjects, it’s really simple with news/web/scholar/book/video search from Google and near peers. I’m sure this is done in the vast majority of cases — still, in the occasional case when it isn’t done, and initial attempts to find sources and improve an article are being made during an Articles for Deletion discussion, is kind of annoying.

…

I also wrote some time ago when thinking about notability the not-to-be-taken-very-seriously Article of the Unknown Notable, which I should probably move elsewhere.

…

The delicious “dialectical inclusionism” quote above is from Gordon Mohr. Coincidentally, today he announced ∞³, a project “to create an avowedly inclusionist complement to Wikipedia”. There’s much smartness in his post, and this one is already long, so I’m going to quote the entire thing:

Introducing Infinithree (“∞³”)

Wikipedia deletionism is like the weather: people complain, but nobody is doing anything about it.

I’d like to change that, working with others to create an avowedly inclusionist complement to Wikipedia, launching in 2011. My code name for this project is ‘Infinithree’ (‘∞³’), and this blog exists to collaborate on its creation.

Why, you may ask?

I’ll explain more in future posts – but in a nutshell, I believe deletionism erases true & useful reference knowledge, drives away contributors, and surrenders key topics to cynical spammy web content mills.

If you can already appreciate the value and urgency of this sort of project, I’m looking for you. Here are the broad outlines of my working assumptions:

Infinithree will use the same open license and a similar anyone-can-edit wiki model as Wikipedia, but will discard ‘notability’ and other ‘encyclopedic’ standards in favor of ‘true and useful’.

Infinithree is not a fork and won’t simply redeploy MediaWiki software with inclusionist groundrules. That’s been tried a few times, and has been moribund each time. Negative allelopathy from Wikipedia itself dooms any almost-but-not-quite-Wikipedia; a new effort must set down its roots farther afield.

Infinithree will use participatory designs from the social web, rather than wikibureacracy, to accrete reliable knowledge. Think StackOverflow or Quora, but creating declarative reference content, rather than interrogative transcripts.

Sound interesting? Can you help? Please let me know what you think, retweet liberally, and refer others who may be interested.

For updates, follow @_infinithree on Twitter (note the leading underscore) or @infinithree on Identi.ca.

Infinithree is already very interesting as a concept, and I’m confident in Gordon’s ability to make it non-vapor and extremely interesting (I was one of his co-founders at the early open content/data/mass collaboration service Bitzi — 10 years ago, hard to believe). There is ample opportunity to try different mass collaboration arrangements to create free knowledge. Many have thought about how to tweak Wikipedia culture or software to produce different outcomes, or merely to experiment (I admit that too much of my plodding pondering on the matter involves the public domain↔strong copyleft dimension). I’m glad that Gordon intends ∞³ to be different enough from Wikipedia such that more of the vast unexplored terrain gets mapped, and hopefully exploited. As far as I know Freebase is probably the most relevant attempt so far. May there be many more.

Posted in Bitzi, Creative Commons, Health, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Wikipedia | 3 Comments »

Retaining the right to censor is an act of hate

Tuesday, December 14th, 2010

Nina Paley (I highly recommend all her animations and appreciate her free culture activism) has an idea called the copyheart:

Use it wherever you would use the ©copyright symbol. Instead of

© Copyright 2010 by Author/Artist. All Rights Reserved.

you could write

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying is an act of love. Please copy.

I love the sentiment. Mike Masnick thinks the copyheart is cool. Unsurprising, since he doesn’t appreciate public copyright tools. That’s a problem, since cool without the aid of rigorous public copyright tools fails to build a commons that everyone can use. We don’t need help with materials that can be used by those with a low level of legal exposure: that’s everything that isn’t held in secret.

Expanding on the problem: unfortunately one automatically obtains copyright the moment one produces an original expression in a fixed form (e.g., this blog post). Copyright is a poor name, for it isn’t the right to copy; rather it is the exclusive right to restrict others from making copies (including altered copies, performances, and an ever-growing list of nearby uses, essentially forever). Copyrestriction would be better. However, others aren’t restricted automagically (and when attempts are made to do so, restrictions are usually massively over-applied); the copyright holder must take action, must play the role of the censor. Censorright would be even more apt. Not granting rights to the public in advance means one is retaining the right to censor.

Why would Paley want something that grants the public no rights in advance, while complaining loudly about some Creative Commons licenses for not granting enough rights in advance? Probably because she’s skeptical of public licenses, period, claiming they legitimize copyright. I almost completely disagree: copyright exists, is automatic, and is ever-increasing in scope and restrictiveness; public copyright tools are just a reality-based response that allow opting out of some or all of one’s right to censor, can offer limited protection (in the case of copyleft) from downstream censors, and also signal that some or all of a censor’s right is not desired, and most importantly help build substantial projects and bodies of work that do not rely on censorship (eventually evidence has to matter).

Now Paley is well aware of these arguments, and addresses some of them in the Copyheart Manifesto (which is more like a FAQ) and elsewhere. She says that free licenses “aren’t solving the problems of copyright restrictions.” That’s something that needs debate. I’d argue they’re one of the few rays of light against censorship, and they are creating space for “solutions” to be developed (see “most importantly” previous paragraph). She even almost directly addresses the problem that copyheart-like mechanisms (Kopimi is very similar; “all rights reversed” is more opaque simple statement that has been used occasionally for decades that Paley notes):

Q.Is the ♡Copyheart legally binding?

A. Probably not, although you could test it:

Mark your work with the ♡Copyheart message.
Sue someone for copying it.
See what the judge says.

We really don’t think laws and “imaginary property” have any place in peoples’ love or cultural relations. Creating more legally binding licenses and contracts just perpetuates the problem of law – a.k.a. state force – intruding where it doesn’t belong. That ♡copyheart isn’t a legally binding license is not a bug – it’s a feature!

Sadly, when the right to censor is the automatic default, it is not using a legally binding license that perpetuates the problem, but I repeat myself. I appreciate offering the test above, but it is far too easy a test (though I don’t know how it would turn out). Takedown notices, other chilling effects, and just plain avoidance, are far more common than actual suits. A better test would be this:

Mark your work with the ♡Copyheart message.
Have someone else upload the work to Wikimedia Commons, not mentioning that you asked them to.
See if the Wikimedia Commons community is willing to rely on your copyheart message to make and keep available your work.

One reason the work probably won’t remain on Wikimedia Commons (note I’d be very happy to be proved wrong) is that copyheart doesn’t clearly say that altering the copyhearted work is ok with the copyhearter. Permitting adaptation is a requirement for free culture; Paley agrees.

The situation may not be totally hopeless for copyheart. Kopimi started as an equally simple exhortation to copy. There are some works on Wikimedia Commons labeled as Kopimi (though I’m not sure how many if any are only relying on Kopimi; many works on Wikimedia Commons are multi-licensed), though the template used for Kopimi uploads on Wikimedia Commons goes beyond simple exhortation to copy:

This work is labeled as Kopimi, meaning that the copyright holder of this work does not only release it, but specifically requests that this work be used and copied for any purpose, including unlimited commercial use and redistribution. It is believed in good faith that a work classified as Kopimi is free to use in any way, including modification and the creation of derivative works.

Now it would be possible to take copyheart in this direction, say:

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying and adaptation are acts of love. Please copy and adapt for any purposes.

One may as well finish the job and back this sentiment with a rigorous legal tool that takes every step possible to rid oneself of the right to censor, worldwide:

♡2010 by Author/Artist. Copying and adaptation are acts of love. Please copy and adapt for any purposes without any restrictions whatsoever.

The link is to the backing legally rigorous tool, CC0.

…

Speaking of censorship, the EFF has been doing a fantastic job in fighting many of its forms. Please join them in saying no to censorship.

Not only does EFF fight censorship, they also retain almost no right to censor works they produce. They use a Creative Commons Attribution license, which only requires giving credit to make any use (well, any use that doesn’t imply endorsement). You should also join them is saying no to censorship in this way — no to your own ability to be a censor.

You should also make annual donations of $ to both CC and EFF, and send ♡.

Posted in Creative Commons, Free Speech, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves, Public Domain | 15 Comments »

Creating a Culture that maximizes welfare gains from Sharing

Sunday, May 2nd, 2010

Thursday I’m on a Web 2.0 Expo panel that should be interesting, as I just wrote on the Creative Commons blog.

I post here because I’m pleased that the Web 2.0 Expo blog asked my fellow panelist Jack Herrick a version of the obvious question (once they went off-topic into copyright policy):

Kaitlin: Let’s imagine a world without copyright or the need to attribute your content source. Do you think artists and writers would be hesitant to create or able to if they can’t make money on it? How do creatives cope in this world?

Jack: There are lots of reasons people create things in this world that don’t include money. People create for personal joy, to share with others, to build reputation and myriad other reasons. I doubt the artists of the beautiful cave drawings in Lascaux, France were paid. I doubt that all artists in our future will be paid. Yet creativity won’t stop. The beauty of what the combination of open licenses and the web brings is that creators who wish to create for non-monetary reasons can now reach a broad audience and a willing body of collaborators. I don’t think we need to fear that non-monetary creation will completely replace paid creative work. But we should all rejoice that the web is offering an venue for non-professional creativity that wasn’t drawing such a large audience before.

Why isn’t this question asked more often? Note this is far from an ideal phrasing — the nut should be global welfare, not how the class we currently deem creators might cope.

Posted in Creative Commons, Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Peeves | 3 Comments »

Collaborative Futures 3

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

Day 3 of the Collaborative Futures book sprint and we’re close to 20,000 words. I added another chapter intended for the “future” section, current draft copied below. It is very much a scattershot survey based on my paying partial attention for several years. There’s nothing remotely new apart from recording a favorite quote from my colleague John Wilbanks that doesn’t seem to have been written down before.

Continuing a tradition, another observation about the sprint group and its discussions: an obsession with attribution. A current drafts says attribution is “not only socially acceptable and morally correct, it is also intelligent.” People love talking about this and glomming on all kinds of other issues including participation and identity. I’m counter-obsessed (which Michael Mandiberg pointed out means I’m still obsessed).

Attribution is only interesting to me insofar as it is a side effect (and thus low cost) and adds non-moralistic value. In the ideal case, it is automated, as in the revision histories of wiki articles and version control systems. In the more common case, adding attribution information is a service to the reader — nevermind the author being attributed.

I’m also interested in attribution (and similar) metadata that can easily be copied with a work, making its use closer to automated — Creative Commons provides such metadata if a user choosing a license provides attribution information and CC license deeds use that metadata to provide copy&pastable attribution HTML, hopefully starting a beneficient cycle.

Admittedly I’ve also said many times that I think attribution, or rather requiring (or merely providing in the case of public domain content) attribution by link specifically, is an undersold term of the Creative Commons licenses — links are the currency of the web, and this is an easy way to say “please use my work and link to me!”

Mushon Zer-Aviv continues his tradition for day 3 of a funny and observant post, but note that he conflates attribution and licensing, perhaps to make a point:

The people in the room have quite strong feelings about concepts of attribution. What is pretty obvious by now is that both those who elevate the importance of proper crediting to the success of collaboration and those who dismiss it all together are both quite equally obsessed about it. The attribution we chose for the book is CC-BY-SA oh and maybe GPL too… Not sure… Actually, I guess I am not the most attribution obsessed guy in the room.

Science 2.0

Science is a prototypical example of collaboration, from closely coupled collaboration within a lab to the very loosely coupled collaboration of the grant scientific enterprise over centuries. However, science has been slow to adopt modern tools and methods for collaboration. Efforts to adopt or translate new tools and methods have been broadly (and loosely) characterized as “Science 2.0” and “Open Science”, very roughly corresponding to “Web 2.0” and “Open Source”.

Open Access (OA) publishing is an effort to remove a major barrier to distributed collaboration in science — the high price of journal articles, effectively limiting access to researchers affiliated with wealthy institutions. Access to Knowledge (A2K) emphasizes the equality and social justice aspects of opening access to the scientific literature.

The OA movement has met with substantial and increasing success recently. The Directory of Open Access Journals (see http://www.doaj.org) lists 4583 journals as of 2010-01-20. The Public Library of Science’s top journals are in the first tier of publications in their fields. Traditional publishers are investing in OA, such as Springer’s acquisition of large OA publisher BioMed Central, or experimenting with OA, for example Nature Precedings.

In the longer term OA may lead to improving the methods of scientific collaboration, eg peer review, and allowing new forms of meta-collaboration. An early example of the former is PLoS ONE, a rethinking of the journal as an electronic publication without a limitation on the number of articles published and with the addition of user rating and commenting. An example of the latter would be machine analysis and indexing of journal articles, potentially allowing all scientific literature to be treated as a database, and therefore queryable — at least all OA literature. These more sophisticated applications of OA often require not just access, but permission to redistribute and manipulate, thus a rapid movement to publication under a Creative Commons license that permits any use with attribution — a practice followed by both PLoS and BioMed Central.

Scientists have also adopted web tools to enhance collaboration within a working group as well as to facilitate distributed collaboration. Wikis and blogs have been purposed as as open lab notebooks under the rubric of “Open Notebook Science”. Connotea is a tagging platform (they call it “reference management”) for scientists. These tools help “scale up” and direct the scientific conversation, as explained by Michael Nielsen:

You can think of blogs as a way of scaling up scientific conversation, so that conversations can become widely distributed in both time and space. Instead of just a few people listening as Terry Tao muses aloud in the hall or the seminar room about the Navier-Stokes equations, why not have a few thousand talented people listen in? Why not enable the most insightful to contribute their insights back?

…

Stepping back, what tools like blogs, open notebooks and their descendants enable is filtered access to new sources of information, and to new conversation. The net result is a restructuring of expert attention. This is important because expert attention is the ultimate scarce resource in scientific research, and the more efficiently it can be allocated, the faster science can progress.

Michael Nielsen, “Doing science online”, http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/doing-science-online/

OA and adoption of web tools are only the first steps toward utilizing digital networks for scientific collaboration. Science is increasingly computational and data-intensive: access to a completed journal article may not contribute much to allowing other researcher’s to build upon one’s work — that requires publication of all code and data used during the research used to produce the paper. Publishing the entire “resarch compendium” under apprpriate terms (eg usually public domain for data, a free software license for software, and a liberal Creative Commons license for articles and other content) and in open formats has recently been called “reproducible research” — in computational fields, the publication of such a compendium gives other researches all of the tools they need to build upon one’s work.

Standards are also very important for enabling scientific collaboration, and not just coarse standards like RSS. The Semantic Web and in particular ontologies have sometimes been ridiculed by consumer web developers, but they are necessary for science. How can one treat the world’s scientific literature as a database if it isn’t possible to identify, for example, a specific chemical or gene, and agree on a name for the chemical or gene in question that different programs can use interoperably? The biological sciences have taken a lead in implementation of semantic technologies, from ontology development and semantic databsases to inline web page annotation using RDFa.

Of course all of science, even most of science, isn’t digital. Collaboration may require sharing of physical materials. But just as online stores make shopping easier, digital tools can make sharing of scientific materials easier. One example is the development of standardized Materials Transfer Agreements accompanied by web-based applications and metadata, potentially a vast improvement over the current choice between ad hoc sharing and highly bureaucratized distribution channels.

Somewhere between open science and business (both as in for-profit business and business as usual) is “Open Innovation” which refers to a collection of tools and methods for enabling more collaboration, for example crowdsourcing of research expertise (a company called InnoCentive is a leader here), patent pools, end-user innovation (documented especially by Erik von Hippel in Democratizing Innovation), and wisdom of the crowds methods such as prediction markets.

Reputation is an important question for many forms of collaboration, but particularly in science, where careers are determined primarily by one narrow metric of reputation — publication. If the above phenomena are to reach their full potential, they will have to be aligned with scientific career incentives. This means new reputation systems that take into account, for example, re-use of published data and code, and the impact of granular online contributions, must be developed and adopted.

From the grand scientific enterprise to business enterprise modern collaboration tools hold great promise for increasing the rate of discovery, which sounds prosaic, but may be our best tool for solving our most vexing problems. John Wilbanks, Vice President for Science at Creative Commons often makes the point like this: “We don’t have any idea how to solve cancer, so all we can do is increase the rate of discovery so as to increase the probability we’ll make a breakthrough.”

Science 2.0 also holds great promise for allowing the public to access current science, and even in some cases collaborate with professional researchers. The effort to apply modern collaboration tools to science may even increase the rate of discovery of innovations in collaboration!

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, Open Access, Peeves, Prediction Markets, Semantic Web | 1 Comment »

Collaborative Futures 1

Monday, January 18th, 2010

Day 1 of the Collaborative Futures book sprint was spent with the participants introducing themselves and their relevant projects and thoughts, grouping of points of interest recorded on sticky notes by all during the introduction, and distillation into a high level table of contents.

The other participants had too many interesting things to say to catalog here — check out their sites:

Incidentally, I was fairly pleased to see 5 participants running Linux (counting Adam Hyde, who doesn’t seem to have a blog, and me) and only 2 running OS X. All also are doing interesting Creative Commons licensed projects, not to mention mostly avoiding licenses with the NonCommercial term.

A good portion of the introductory discussion concerned free software and free culture, leading to a discussion of how to include them in the table of contents — the tentative decision is to not include them explicitly, as they would be referenced in various ways throughout. I believe the tentative high level table of contents looks like this:

Assumptions
History
Definition
Process
- Models of collaboration
- Other People’s Computers
Problems
Future

This doesn’t adequately give an impression of much progress on day 1 — I think we’re in a fairly good position to begin writing chapters tomorrow morning, and we finished right at midnight.

Also see day 0 posts from Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv, and me.

Posted in Books, Creative Commons, Open Services, Open Source, Peeves | 1 Comment »

Howto choose a religion

Saturday, December 26th, 2009

Why do you believe as you do? The proximate cause may be family or voluntary conversion, but what created the milieu in which your family or adopted god became one of a limited number of likely choices, as opposed to one of the thousands of religions that do or have existed and the infinite number conceivable?

The proximate historical cause seems to be violence — religious war, forced conversion, torture, slaughter or enslavement of believers in a slightly different myth.

I understand (from being told by several people who have done this, all in the U.S.) that adults who seek a religion or particular sect within a religion are as much choosing a congregation they like as a set of beliefs.

What if all religions were true, for this world and whatever mystical worlds each religion posits? Suspend disbelief for a second — the multiverse is a crazy set of places, so let’s allow it an infinite multitude of contradictory realities, including self-contradictory realities. Which religion would it be rational to choose? Presumably community would be a minor consideration for a rationalist, for the implications of the choice would be far greater than choosing a set of people to hang out, do business, and breed with.

Let’s evade all prohibitions on changing one’s religion by assuming one can choose to be born into the religion of one’s choice. Let’s also only consider religions that “exist” — a related fun game would be to design the best religion, assuming it would be true, but that’s a very different game.

Many religions have vindictive gods and offer a high probability of eternal torture — choosing any of those over the null choice (atheism) seems irrational. Which existing religions exceed this seemingly low bar? Which exceed it by a lot?

It would be hilarious if no existing religions beat atheism, even if they were true, but I doubt this is the case.

Posted in Economics, Peeves | 6 Comments »

Bow Copier

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

For the past few years the State Journal-Register, the only daily newspaper in Springfield, Illinois, where I grew up, has published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license as part of GateHouse Media.

Furthermore, at least relative to the newspaper industry’s low standards, the SJ-R site is excellent. (Latest indication I’ve noticed of how low newspaper site standards are — visit the Oakland Tribune‘s site, click on “home delivery”, and you’ll get the home page content again — actually you get “page not found” but the site returns the home page content for any page it doesn’t know about — see the archived home page and /services.)

Today’s paper has a curious feature that I’ll take advantage of the limited rights granted by GateHouse’s use of the most restrictive CC license to republish, as I did previously with the Google Chrome Comic.

Bow builder Bob Linksvayer has been constructing his own bows, arrows and other hunting equipment since he was a teen-ager. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

Bob Linksvayer makes all types of traditional hunting equipment including bows, arrows, knives and other gear. What he can’t make, he trades with other craftspeople. Chris Young/The State Journal-Register / CC BY-NC-ND

Bow Builder

By Chris Young (chris.young@sj-r.com)
The State Journal-Register
Posted Oct 10, 2009 @ 09:39 AM
Last update Oct 10, 2009 @ 10:13 AM
SPRINGFIELD —

For Bob Linksvayer, building his own bows and arrows is about more than living history and keeping a lost art alive.

Linksvayer, who has made his own archery equipment since he was 13 years old, marvels at those early hunters who calculated the trajectory of arrow flight without math and crafted their bows to compensate.

He shows how the art of making arrows requires patience — it takes up to one year for the wooden shafts to dry.

Ancient hunters needed knowledge. They were masters of the natural history of their area, choosing only the best wood (hickory) for bows and the straightest shoots (arrowwood viburnum) for arrows. They made stain from walnut husks and bowstrings from woven flax. A coyote’s jawbone makes the perfect knife handle — with options for both righties and southpaws.

“For every coyote walking around, there is a right- and left-handed knife handle in the lower jaw,” he says.

And he shows how it all works perfectly when everything is done right.

“These arrows have been through a lot of deer,” he says with a smile.

Linksvayer, who lives east of Springfield between Dawson and Mechanicsburg, has taught the art of building a bow for 20 years. He also participates in historical re-enactments.

He will be demonstrating the art of woodworking today and Sunday during Lincoln Memorial Garden & Nature Center’s Indian Summer Festival.

He’s a hunter who proves the worth of his wares. A pile of antlers testifies to his success rate. His arrows are fletched with the feathers of a turkey he shot.

“I’ve never had a deer mounted,” he says. “Instead, I use the antlers for tools.”

“When I see a buck walk up under my stand, I look at the antlers and wonder how many knife handles I can make.”

The big sporting-goods retailers probably are glad Linksvayer doesn’t have a lot of peers. He says he tries to make or trade for everything he uses.

“It takes me 10 to 12 hours of constant work to build a bow,” he says. “If I am teaching a class, it takes exactly 28 1/2 hours.”

It’s all in the details

Squinting at the trunk of a hickory tree, imagine the curve of the back of the bow just below the surface of the bark.

“The last ring of the tree — the outermost growth ring — is the back of the bow,” Linksvayer says.
He cuts staves from the log and removes all of the heartwood from the center of the tree, preferring a tree trunk at least 10 inches in diameter. The larger the tree, the flatter the back of the bow can be.

“A bow is nothing more than a handle with two springs on it,” he says. “In the process of building a bow, they have to be exactly the same. You can’t deviate from that.”

A bow on full draw has a lot of potential energy ready to be unleashed.

“You never draw back a bow and release it without an arrow,” Linksvayer says. “There has to be a load.”

When the string stops, shock waves of the release of the arrow surge back and forth through the bow. If it’s not constructed properly, it could fail.

Bows have to be carved in one piece, he says. Adding a handle later is no good, as the whole thing will be too weak.

The process of removing wood from the inside of the bow is called tillering.

“Wood is removed from the belly of the bow so you can bend it,” he says.

Ideally, enough wood is removed so both limbs will bend the same.

However, a bit of additional wood is removed from the upper limb to give the arrow a bit of higher trajectory, so as gravity pulls it towards the ground, it can strike its target at 20 yards right where it is intended.

“The falling arrow will cross the line of sight about 20 yards out,” Linksvayer says. “I try to keep my shots within 20 yards or less.”

Linksvayer became interested in bows as a boy of 13. His father wouldn’t turn him loose with a gun to hunt rabbits, but relented when he offered to use a bow.

“I read as many books as I could,” he said. One book was shipped in for him to read, but couldn’t be checked out. He went to the library every day to read, draw pictures and take notes.

“I came to the conclusion that the Indians and our ancestors did not have a written language when they developed bows,” he says — a bit of insight that makes the feat of engineering all the more amazing.

But while Linksvayer has accumulated years of experience building bows, he still can’t speed up the process.

“Nothing is fast by today’s standards.”

Article by Chris Young/The State Journal-Register used under terms of CC BY-NC-ND.

Posted in Creative Commons, Oakland, Peeves | 3 Comments »

Content layer infrastructure

Saturday, July 25th, 2009

Last Sunday I appeared (mp4 download) on a tech interview program called Press: Here. It went ok. Most of the questions were softball and somewhat repetitive. Lots more could have been said about any of them, but I think I did a pretty good job of hitting a major point on each and not meandering. However, one thing I said (emphasized below) sounds like pure bs:

this has been done in the open source software world for a couple decades now and now that people are more concerned about the content layer that’s really part of the infrastructure having a way to clear those permissions without the lawyer-to-lawyer conversation happen every single time is necessary

BobChao / CC BY-SA

I could’ve omitted the bolded words above and retained the respect of any viewer with a brain. What the heck did I mean? I was referring to an argument, primarily made by Joi Ito over the last year or so, using a stylized version of the layers of a protocol stack. David Weinberger’s live-blogging of Ito provides a good summary:

Way back when, it was difficult to connect computers. Then we got Ethernet, then TCP/IP, and then HTTP (the Web). These new layers allow participation without permission. The cost of sending information and the cost of innovation have gone down (because the cost of failure has gone down). Now we’re getting another layer: Creative Commons. “By standardizing and simplifying the legal layer … I think we will lower the costs and create another explosion of innovation.”

Protocol geeks may object, but I think it’s a fairly compelling argument, at least for explaining why what Creative Commons does is “big”. The problems of not having a top layer (I called it “content”, the slide photographed above says “knowledge” — what it calls “content” is usually called “application”, and the note above says “legal”, referring to one required mechanism for opening up permissions around content, knowledge, or whatever one wishs to call it) in which a commons can be taken for granted (ie like infrastructure) is evident, for example in the failure by lawsuit of most interesting online music services, or the inaccessibility of much of the scientific literature to most humans and machines (eg for data mining), as are powerful hints as to what is possible where it exists, for example the vast ecology enabled by Wikipedia’s openness such as DBpedia.

I didn’t make that argument on-screen. Probably a good thing, given the previous paragraph’s tortured language. I shall practice. Critique welcome.

…

Press: Here is broadcast from its SF bay area home station (NBC) and I’ve heard is syndicated to many other stations. However, its website says nothing about how to view the program on TV, even on its home station. I even had a hard time finding any TV schedule on the NBC Bay Area website — a tiny link in the footer takes one to subpages for the station with lame schedule information syndicated from TV Guide. I found this near total disconnect between TV and the web a very odd, but then again, I don’t really care where the weird segment of the population that watches TV obtains schedule information. Press: Here ought to release its programs under a liberal CC license as soon as the show airs. Its own website gets very little traffic, many of the interviews would be relevant for uploading to Wikimedia Commons, and the ones that got used in Wikipedia would drive significant traffic back to the program website.

Posted in Creative Commons, Music, Open Source, Peeves, Public Goods, Wikipedia | 11 Comments »

Speaking some of the truth to power suits

Saturday, February 7th, 2009

Mike Masnick posted video of a pretty good lecture on successful “music” business models based on the success of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV and other efforts. Earlier today I praised the lecture on the Creative Commons blog.

At the end of the video Masnick says that copyright isn’t even necessary for the model he describes (capture above), and that hearing this upsets people.

But this begs the question of whether any “business model” is necessary for music at all.

My other complaint (and I’m almost as guilty as anyone) is a near total failure to look at obvious examples slightly outside the contemporary first world milieu (i.e., the past, future, and much of the present world). This is a general unrelenting complaint, not directed at Masnick’s 15 minutes in front of an industry conference!

Posted in Economics, Intellectual Protectionism, Music, Peeves | 3 Comments »