Metaboston

Wikipedia REvolution Discussion at Berkman

Andrew Lih has written the first book on the culture and history of Wikipedia: The Wikipedia Revolution.  He'll be discussing the book with the always-interesting David Weinberger at Harvard's Berkman Center so it should be a compelling interview about the issues surrounding the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia.

"The Wikipedia Revolution is the first narrative account of the remarkable success story of the "encyclopedia anyone can edit." Andrew Lih, a Wikipedia editor/administrator, academic and journalist, tells how the Internet's free culture community inspired its creation in 2001, and how legions of volunteers have emerged to create over 10 million articles in over 50 languages. The book recounts colorful behind-the-scenes stories of how obsessive map editors, automated software robots and warring factions have come to shape a complex online community of knowledge gatherers. Learn about the historical underpinnings of Wikipedia, of how a Hawaiian vacation and a fringe piece software from Apple Computer inspired the wiki concept, and realized the original read-and-write capabilities of the Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web. "

If you can't get over to the event, it will also be webcast.

Info:
Wednesday, March 25, 6:00 pm
Griswold Hall 110, Harvard Law School

Goodbye to the Three Aces

Harvard locks the doors on local hangout the Three Aces.

Will they have the cash to carry through on whatever plans they had or will the block be shuttered indefinitely as Harvard claims poverty?

Happy Darwin Day!

Celebrate the 200th anniversary of his birth with a lecture by Darwin biographer Janet Browne.

Darwin at 200: Rethinking the Revolution

On February 12, cities and universities around the world will celebrate “Darwin Day.” But what is being celebrated, the achievements of a single individual or the acceptance of his controversial theory of evolution? Harvard's Janet Browne, Aramont Professor of the History of Science, will explore Charles Darwin’s cultural significance and what he has come to represent over time: the idea of scientific progress.

Free and open to the public in the Geological Lecture Hall, 24 Oxford Street.
Thursday, February 12, 6:00 pm

Other events and exhibits will also be taking place at Harvard.  You can still participate in the marathon reading of The Origin of Species.

Nesson: Stream RIAA Trials

Harvard law professor Charles Nesson is defending BU student Joel Tenebaum in a file-sharing suit brought by the RIAA and he wants the trial to be streamed online.

The judicial process is essentially an exercise in civil discourse. Given the keen interest of the diverse parties following this litigation closely, and the potential learning value of this case to a broad audience beyond, this case presents an ideal instance in which judicial discretion should be exercised under the auspices of the rule to admit Internet to the courtroom.

This would be another round of bad publicity for the RIAA even as it is backing away from trials themselves and other media companies like those in the movie industry are using RIAA strategy as a negative example.

Carol Chomsky (1930 - 2008)

Carol Chomsky, wife of Noam, has died.  Although her husband's linguistics achievements are enormously influential, Ms. Chomsky was also a significant academic in linguistics.  It's interesting that acadmeic career was inspired by the potential need for her to earn a salary if Chomsky was jailed for political activities.

As Noam Chomsky's political activism raised the possibility that he could end up spending time in jail, he and Dr. Chomsky made a decision that set the course of her professional life. Carol Chomsky went back to school and received a doctorate from Harvard, writing a dissertation on early childhood language acquisition.

Sylvia Schatz, who was a teacher, said, "We shared a lot of common concerns about kids and their learning.

Dr. Chomsky's work helped children who were having difficulties learning to read to experience life-changing moments in their classrooms, Schatz said.

Not only did it help the kids with their learning, but it also gave them a great sense of accomplishment," Schatz said. "She not only contributed the mechanics of how to read, but brought them out so they felt accomplished and were recognized in the classroom, where before they had been considered the low end. That is very hard for little kids.

(Image:  The Chomskys in the 1950s:  UPenn)

Harvard: Only a Poor Old University

Boston Daily rightly takes an irreverent look at Harvard's handwringing over their still-enormous multi-multi-multi-billion dollar endowment.

"I guess it would be out of line to point out that 70 percent of a $36.9 billion endowment is still almost $26 billion.

After all, their endowment is now only a few billion below where it was in 2006 (pdf). So the aberration might not be the drop but rather the peak of $39.6 billion the endowment did reach in 2007.

Maybe they should start jettisoning their sports teams and athletic department.  There's got to be some savings there in a decidedly non-essential area.

Ferran Adria at Harvard: Dec. 9th

Ferran Adria, the El Bulli chef who is the most famous exponent of molecular gastronomy will be speaking at Harvard Tuesday evening in a free presentation at the Engineering Department. 

Adrià, called by Gourmet “the Salvador Dalí of the kitchen,” will trace the birth of molecular gastronomy, manipulating the physical and chemical processes of cooking, and then discuss his own adventures in what he calls “molecular cooking.”

In particular, he will explore the use of hydrocolloids, or “gums” that enable a delicate fruit puree to be transformed into a dense gel, and deconstruct techniques like sferificacion, creating a resistant skin of liquid (as in a pea soup held in a pod of nothing more than itself).

Considered one of the most creative individuals in any profession, Adrià views preparing food as a language “to transmit impressions, feelings, sensations, and experiences.” He says, “Cooking is a language with its own special alphabet. From one alphabet, each cook creates his or her own unique conversation. Our role as chefs is to expand this dialogue, offering the world new forms of culinary expression.”

It's an interesting opportunity to see Adria considering how hard it is to actually get in to the restaurant.

If you go, plan on making restaurants months in advance. El Bulli serves only dinner, has less than 50 seats, and only makes one sitting. They are also closed from October to March. Of the approximately 2,000 bookings every year, they receive over 400,000 applications. Expect to pay about $150 per person, not including wine.

Info:
Time:  Tuesday, December 9 at 6.30 p.m.
Place:   Physics Department, Jefferson Hall 250, Harvard, Cambridge, MA (Directions)
Cost:  Free.  Seating is first-come first-served. No exceptions.

More on Nesson v. the RIAA

Alex Beam considers what it means for the RIAA now that Charles Nesson is defending a BU grad student accused of illegal downloading.

"Background: In the past few years, the RIAA has sent out about 30,000 letters to individuals and families, demanding payment for illegal downloads. You really don't want one of these letters in your mailbox, because (1) the RIAA is probably right - someone in your house has been downloading, and (2) it's an offer you can't refuse. Generally, the RIAA wants between $3,000 and $5,000 to go away, along with your assurance that the illegal downloading will stop. "Parents get these letters, and they are thinking, 'Omigod, how can I cover my [expletive],' " says Boston University graduate student Joel Tenenbaum.

Most people pay the money and run. But Tenenbaum and his mother, Judie, a family lawyer for the state of Massachusetts, chose to fight the RIAA in court, representing themselves. This summer, Judge Nancy Gertner - another of Boston's outsized legal personalities - found more than 130 defendants like Tenenbaum clogging her court, practically all of them without lawyers. "There is a huge imbalance in these cases," Gertner said at a status hearing. "The record companies are represented by large law firms with substantial resources. The law is also overwhelmingly on their side. They bring cases against individuals who don't have lawyers, who don't have access to lawyers, and who don't understand their legal rights."

Audubon's Early Drawings

Harvard has its collection of early drawings by John James Audubon online as he worked toward becoming the artist he is now known to be.  The drawings are also available in the book Audubon: Early Drawings.

Buy:  Audubon: Early Drawings.  (Image:  Crested Mergansers by Audubon from the Harvard collection).

Second Life and Education at Harvard

Harvard's Berkman Center is hosting an event on education in the virtual world Second Life led by the interesting law professor Charles Nesson and his daughter Rebecca who have co-taught courses in Second Life.

Second Life: Open Education and Virtual Worlds

Millions of people worldwide have flocked to a virtual environment known as “Second Life” during the past few years. There, they create three-dimensional representations of themselves, known as “avatars,” that buy, sell, teach, build, and relate in a world totally created by its residents. 

Join us for a thought provoking evening, at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with Harvard’s father-daughter team of Charles Nesson and Rebecca Nesson as they examine Second Life and the opportunities and problems that this virtual environment confronts.

Info:
Wednesday, November 12, 6:00 pm
Langdell North Classroom, Langdell Hall, Harvard Law School (Map)
RSVP Required
This event will be webcast live at 6:00 pm ET.

Turning Harvard Law Around

How Elena Kagan has helped Harvard Law School overcome its daunting reputation for dysfunctionality,

Its critics - and even its students, grimly joking - called it "the factory," a boot camp of big classes and remote professors that funneled bright young minds into corporate legal work. The school was seen as hobbled by ideological clashes, or by its unwieldy size, or simply by ossified ideas about teaching law. Its students felt estranged; its faculty was fractious, aging, and unable to agree whom to hire or how to modernize.

and start to make it a more attractive place to attend and work and not just have graduated from.

Goodbye to 02138 Magazine

02138 Magazine, the Harvard-centric lifestyle publication, has stopped publishing in the current difficult economy.

Exposing Your Genome Through Harvard's Personal Genome Project

A project at Harvard, the Personal Genome Project, is publishing the complete genomes of 10 volunteers including Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker.  The project is experimenting with the consequences of revealing one's genome.

The goal of the project, which hopes to expand to 100,000 participants, is to speed medical research by dispensing with the elaborate precautions traditionally taken to protect the privacy of human subjects. The more genetic information can be made open and publicly available, nearly everyone agrees, the faster research will progress.

In exchange for the decoding of their DNA, participants agree to make it available to all — along with photographs, their disease histories, allergies, medications, ethnic backgrounds and a trove of other traits, called phenotypes, from food preferences to television viewing habits.

Including phenotypes, which most other public genetic databases have avoided in deference to privacy concerns, should allow researchers to more easily discover how genes and traits are linked. Because the “PGP 10,” as they call themselves, agreed to forfeit their privacy, any researcher will have a chance to mine the data, rather than just a small group with clearance.

The project is as much a social experiment as a scientific one. “We don’t yet know the consequences of having one’s genome out in the open,” said George M. Church, a human geneticist at Harvard who is the project’s leader and one of its subjects. “But it’s worth exploring.”

A new federal law prohibits health insurers and employers from discriminating against individuals on the basis of their genetic profile. But any one of the PGP 10 could be denied life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance, with no legal penalty. And no law can bar colleagues from raising an annoyed eyebrow at a PGP participant who, say, indulges in a brownie after disclosing on the Internet that she is genetically predisposed to diabetes.

Harvard Square's Wind Turbine

In a symbolic gesture, Harvard will install a wind turbine above the Holyoke Center in Harvard Square.

The turbine will be a symbol of green aspirations at Harvard more than a highly productive energy asset

Harvard is planning to install small-scale wind turbines on top of the Holyoke Center and a parking garage, according to a media report.

While the wind turbines are not expected to generate a significant amount of electricity for Harvard, they will function as “outward symbols of our commitment to renewable energy and sustainability here on campus,” James Gray, associate vice president for Harvard real estate services told The New York Times.

Interestingly, the Holyoke Center itself was built to improve a passageway that was described as a "wind tunnel." (Image of the Holyoke Center by Paul Kelleher)

Hedge Fund Strategy: Imitate Harvard's Endowment Fund

Hedge funds are seeking to imitate the strategy of successful university endowment funds like Harvard's despite the difficulty and dilution issues for the imitator funds.

"Cue, Switzerland’s Gottex. The Lausanne and London-based hedge fund, which manages about $16bn, is starting a “global multi-asset investment program that will invest in both alternative and traditional investments similar to the successful US ’super endowments’ ” like Harvard:

"The investment program will apply the investment principles of successful US university endowment funds and will allocate an average of 60 per cent or more to alternative assets. The program will be actively managed and will pursue both strategic and tactical investment opportunities across all asset classes: hedge funds, private equity, commodities, long-only equity, fixed income, real estate and other real assets.

Ahead of the Curve: Inside Harvard Business School with Philip Broughton

Philip Delves Broughton, a journalist, took his experience at Harvard Business School and turned it into a book when his MBA didn't get him a job.  He seems to have some funny anecdotes.

“Many of his peers, he says, hailed from one of the “three M” backgrounds: Mormons, former military officers, and former McKinsey & Company consultants.

As might be expected students are able to turn financial aid programs to their advantage.

“Mr. Broughton also details a scheme for acquiring “financial aid BMWs”: Upon being accepted at the business school, some students deliberately emptied their bank accounts to buy BMWs for themselves. Since they were not required to list vehicles among assets on their financial aid applications, they often qualified for extra financial aid. “So basically, Harvard buys you a BMW” a classmate informed Mr. Broughton.

You can see him at Harvard Book Store on September 4th.

Eileansiar's Photos of Harvard Square

Eileansiar has a huge and interesting collection of images in and around Harvard Square with great little details of the neighborhood.

Videos too.  (Above, cool time lapse video of people lining up in Harvard Yard for a ritualistic touch of the John Harvard statue's toe).

Why is Harvard's Werner Otto Hall Being Torn Down?

An interesting article about why Werner Otto Hall, the building housing Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum of German art, is being torn down.

"Today, 17 years later, its exterior walls have deteriorated so badly that Harvard says the only way to repair them would be to take them off entirely and start over.

Yet this disaster was created by the best and the brightest.

The client was Harvard, or more specifically, its Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The architect was the firm Gwathmey Siegel, known for its superb 1992 addition to another museum, the Guggenheim in New York, among other buildings. The general contractor was Walsh Brothers, a Boston firm now in its fourth generation that has long been regarded as one of the region’s best.

***

"So what happened? What’s the diagnosis? To put it simply, the guys who worried about the museum’s art were not the guys who worried about the weather. It was a classic failure of communication. We'll call them the art guys and the weather guys."

In author Robert Campbell's terms, the art guys are the curators and museum officials (the clients) and the weather guys are the architects, engineers and builders. 

Failure to communicate does seem clear but the article seems to come down more on the architects' side or at least that a failure to communicate means both sides are equally at fault.  This seems strange given the unequal levels of knowledge about construction    It seems like the architects, etc. are the ones who really have to communicate though.  Clients can make their demands, suggestions, requests but the architects need to explain what is doable.  The clients aren't going to know what the moisture effects are going to be.

There also seems to be a bit of a disconnect on the "weather guys'" side as to how buildings will be used.  One expert Campbell talks to refers to problems at "the Davis Museum at Wellesley, a building by another Pritzker-winning architect, Rafael Moneo, the curators themselves caused problems. They ruptured the vapor barrier by drilling holes to hang artworks."  But couldn't this action be anticipated by the fact that it is a museum?

It seems like Werner Otto Hall represents the product of a time when architects considered exteriors and use of space more than the actual use of the building.  (Image:  Harvard)

Edward O. Wilson's Novel and Other News

79-year old Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, who caused controversy in the '70s with the idea (now conventional wisdom) that genetics influenced human behavior) is at work on his first novel and causing new controversy with the idea of group-level selection that "natural selection operates at many levels, including at the level of a social group" rather than with genes alone.

Odd image of philosopher, pioneering psychologist and theorist of religion and prolific writer William James from the Wall St. Journal:

'William . . . appears as the original dilly-dallying graduate student, hanging around Harvard Square to teach, marrying at 36 and not publishing his breakthrough work, "The Fundamentals of Psychology," until age 48."

It seems hard to argue with his approach considering what he accomplished.

Harvard's Psychedelic Flashback

Decades after Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert and the controversial Harvard Psylocybin Project, researchers at Harvard and elsewhere are trying to do serious research with psychedelics.

"[Creator of LSD Albert] Hofmann, who died this past April at the age of 102, watched it all play out, horrified by the behavior of both drug users and opponents. He winced as the hippies took LSD with wild abandon, and wrung his hands as the government, here and abroad, criminalized LSD and other psychedelic compounds. But Hofmann also lived long enough to see it all come full circle. By the time he died, legitimate above-ground psychedelic research was alive and well at places like Johns Hopkins and, even more telling, at Harvard University, the latter under the guidance of Dr. John Halpern. Sitting a little to the left and outside of Halpern is Rick Doblin, founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), a nonprofit research group that, through the support of members and donors, helps fund scientists to do bona fide work with psychedelics in the hopes of legitimizing their therapeutic use. Together, the two men form a kind of psychedelic odd couple: Halpern is young but traditional and cautious, a scientist first and foremost. Doblin is a veteran in this world, a little rougher around the edges, and speaks openly about his own psychedelic adventures and his vision for less drug prohibition.

Harvard Finally Gets an Engineering School

An interesting exploration of how Harvard's relatively new engineering school (the first in about 70 years) came into being and the checkered history of engineering at Harvard.

[A]s for “that small school down the road,” as [founding Dean] Narayanamurti jokingly refers to MIT, Harvard isn't interested in direct competition. Rather than cover the whole engineering universe, it plans to focus strategically on a few areas—nanotechnology, bioengineering, energy and the environment, computers and society—that, he says, “can leverage Harvard's strengths.”

***

If Harvard now appears ready to embrace engineering, it wasn't always so, says Frederick Abernathy, a professor of mechanical engineering and the engineering school's unofficial historian. Over the past century and a half, he says, engineering came close to disappearing from campus on several occasions."

More on What Should Be Done with Harvard's Endowment

Matt Yglesias suggests "A university that rich ought to either embark on some kind of ambitious expansion program and start educating substantially more students, or else decide that it would unduly alter the character of the place to expand that much and just close up the development department and enjoy the luxury of being able to focus single-mindedly on the university's core teaching and research functions."

Harvard's pile of wealth is attracting a lot of attention and it doesn't seem like the their tuition reductions are quieting the critics.

Harvard Zombie Attack Movie?

The script has sold but will the movie actually be made?

"Warren Zide ("American Pie") has decided to bring to life "The Harvard Zombie Massacre," snapping up the comedy-horror spec by tyro scribes Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit. 

Zide will produce through his Parallel Zide banner with Ryan Lewis exec producing. Shooting's planned for early next year.

Story centers on a scenario in which Harvard is overrun by the undead and America's most brilliant minds fend off America's most brilliant zombies."

Everybody at Harvard Wants to be Mark Zuckerberg

Well probably not . . . but at least more there's more interest in startups at Harvard now.

"Facebook has become a model for these start-ups on many fronts, from the look of company Web sites to their corporate strategies. "I would not hesitate for a second to say Facebook's a motivator," says Paul Bottino, director of Harvard's Technology & Entrepreneurship Center. "Facebook creates would-be Facebooks." He says a start-up contest this year attracted 55 entries, up from 10 to 18 for past contests

***
"Harvard, though, has long had a relatively sleepy start-up culture and has shunned a cozy relationship between academics and industry. "Harvard is very noticeably behind," says Paul Graham, a partner at Y Combinator, a Cambridge, Mass., and Mountain View, Calif., company that invests in start-ups, including Scribd and Kirkland North."

ROFLCon Travelling Show

The success of ROFLCon, the internet meme conference, held at MIT in April is prompting plans for a series of events from San Francisco to NY.

Zuneral with Pictures

Harvard Free Culture held a funeral for digital rights management this weekend symbolically interring DRM-laden devices like Microsoft's Zune (hence the Zuneral) and Apple's iPod.

(Images:  (top Wendy Seltzer; above Harvard Free Culture).

Harvard's Baby Brain Lab

What do babies understand about what's going in the complex world around them? Elizabeth Spelke's lab at Harvard suggests quite a bit.

"[T]he Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, run by the cognitive psychologist Prof Elizabeth Spelke, ... is dedicated to understanding what shapes the most powerful known learning machine - the infant mind. Great philosophers have mused for millennia about human consciousness and how it makes sense of its surroundings. Like any good scientist, Spelke has turned philosophical hot air into firm experimental data that suggests that we are born with a significant amount of core knowledge' hardwired into our brains.

***

The hub of Spelke's empire occupies half of the 11th floor of William James Hall, a brutalist 1960s tower block named after the pioneering American psychologist. James himself once referred to the blooming, buzzing confusion' of a newborn's senses. Spelke's studies have revealed that, in fact, there is order in the chaos: from the moment we first open our eyes, we possess the essential mental equipment to make sense of the confusion around us."

The Archeology of Harvard Yard

The Harvard Yard Archeology Project investigates the ground beneath Harvard Yard for remains of the original 17th and 18th century buildings of the college as well as the institution that was focused on Native Americans:

"Harvard, founded in the reign of Charles I and named after John Harvard, a Cambridge graduate who left his books to the young college, is centred on Harvard Yard, a series of grassy quadrangles enclosed by red-brick buildings such as Massachusetts Hall, built in 1718 and the oldest surviving structure. “Seventeenth- century Harvard Yard included not only the Old College, which was the oldest university building in the country, but also the Harvard Indian College,” said Professor William Fash, the director of the Harvard Peabody Museum.

“Built around 1655 as a place to train Native students within Harvard, the Indian College is of special interest as the first university-level institution in the Americas focused on Native people,” said Professor Fash, although several centuries of activity mean that “the yard is a very dense and overwrought landscape.”"

More on the Paul Revere Battalion

Yesterday's post about helicopters over Harvard Square talked about the Paul Revere Battalion, the local collegiate ROTC.  Here's a promotional video that talks more about the group.

Zittrain Discusses "The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It"

Jonathan Zittrain who helped found Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet &  Society and is now a professor at Oxford will return to Cambridge tonight to discuss his new book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It:

"With the unwitting help of its users, the generative Internet is on a path to a lockdown, ending its cycle of innovation—and facilitating unsettling new kinds of control.

IPods, iPhones, Xboxes, and TiVos represent the first wave of Internet-centered products that can’t be easily modified by anyone except their vendors or selected partners. These “tethered appliances” have already been used in remarkable but little-known ways: car GPS systems have been reconfigured at the demand of law enforcement to eavesdrop on the occupants at all times, and digital video recorders have been ordered to self-destruct thanks to a lawsuit against the manufacturer thousands of miles away. New Web 2.0 platforms like Google mash-ups and Facebook are rightly touted—but their applications can be similarly monitored and eliminated from a central source. As tethered appliances and applications eclipse the PC, the very nature of the Internet—its “generativity,” or innovative character—is at risk."

There's a free reception as well.

Info:

Friday, April 18
6:00pm
Langdell North Classroom, Langdell Hall
Harvard Law School
Map: Map Cost: Free

Harvard Teaches Open Source

The Harvard Business Review presents readers with an open-source case study. 

"Amp Up, a wildly popular electronic-music game, is the brainchild of KMS's cherished programmers, who now spend their time trying to keep customers dazzled with upgrades. But a couple of start-ups have ripped off the idea using their own code--which is open source. Now they're demanding that KMS float with the rising tide and join the open-source community. How could the company make money without its IP? And why should it try? "

CNET notes "It's about time that United States elite academic institutions finally got around to not only using open-source software, but also teaching it" but Sameer Verma at San Francisco State jokes that they must not be "elite enough" because they've been teaching courses on managing open source issues for 3 years.

Harvard's Political Surveillance Unit

The ACLU accuses Harvard of maintaining a political intelligence unit within their police department according to this interesting article by the Crimson:

"The nation’s preeminent civil liberties group is accusing the University of maintaining a political intelligence unit within the Harvard University Police Department (HUPD), an allegation that comes after two protesters were arrested during a demonstration in the Square.

The protesters allege that undercover HUPD officers were photographing the demonstration, according to John Reinstein, the legal director of the Massachusetts division of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

“What we found really quite surprising and disturbing is that the Harvard police department has an undercover, plainclothes, political intelligence unit which so far as I know has never been acknowledged by them before,” Reinstein said.

HUPD spokesman Steven G. Catalano declined to comment, and a University spokesman did not comment as well.

The protesters, Patrick Keaney and Lisa Nieves, were arrested March 3 in front of the Holyoke Center according to the HUPD’s police log. The log said that “officers were monitoring a demonstration” prior to the arrest."

The arrest came when one of the demonstrators took her own picture of one of the "undercover" officers.

"Reinstein said that Nieves noticed a bystander in plainclothes taking photos of the protest and decided to go photograph him. When she did, the man informed her that he was an undercover police officer with HUPD and placed her under arrest for refusing to delete the photos."

Cambridge Common also notes some examples of apparent surveillance:

"I have heard stories from people who were involved in the 2001 Living Wage Campaign that corroborate such activity. During the time of the sit-in, campaigners had planned an action that was coordinated partially over email but not advertised publicly at all. When they showed up to the location of the action, HUPD was waiting for them. It seemed that the only way that HUPD could have known the action was taking place was if the authorities had been spying on the group, either electronically or by other means.

More shadiness of this kind took place during the Stand For Security Campaign last year. During the hunger strike and the daily actions that accompanied it, a plainclothes man with a nice camera was taking pictures of us almost every day. I went up to him one day to see what he was taking the pictures for and he told me that they were for the Harvard Gazette. I am sure the Harvard Gazette has photographers, but this guy was there almost every day and he was not taking pictures of things that you would really put into a magazine."

(via Cambridge Common)

Harvard's Gym Problem

Harvard has received a lot of criticism and commentary for its decision to close one of its gyms to men so that .  Sahil Mahtani, a Harvard student, makes the interesting point that there apparently wasn't a lot of student demand for the policy despite the claims of "appeasement":

"One of the most surprising aspects of this story is how detached Harvard's Islamic community was from a decision for which it is being castigated. The impetus came from Howard Georgi, the master of one of Harvard's residential houses, who told me via e-mail that he was approached by one of the house administrators--he couldn't remember which--who had been contacted by "some of the Muslim women in the House." He then sent an e-mail to Susan B. Marine, the Director of the Harvard College Women's Center, asking her to look into the policy. Ola Aljawhary, the student Marine asked to confirm the interest on behalf of the Muslim community, told me that she casually consulted with friends "who certainly didn't mind the idea"--which administrators took as sufficient demand to adopt the policy. Neither Georgi nor Marine spoke directly to the women who requested the policy in the first place. The Harvard Islamic Society--the active campus organization for undergraduate Islamic affairs--did not know about the change until it was being formalized and in its final stages, according to the society's president. This clearly wasn't Harvard "capitulating" to Islam, considering how minimally Muslim students were involved in the decision.

 

But the decision put Harvard in the awkward position of having to arbitrate what constitutes legitimate religious practice. Marine claims there was a "moral and ethical responsibility" for the administration to act on this request, telling the Associated Press last month that "it's a pretty big breach of their moral and religious code ... and it's just not possible for them to be in a mixed environment." But according to Aljawhary, "It's not like we can't work out when men are around." In fact, "we were not 'demanding' women-only hours," Aljawhary said. If the administration had said no, she said, "it would have been okay

"

Lawrence Lessig to Speak in Cambridge: April 4

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons and author of books like Free Culture and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (both downloadable at those links) will be speaking at a free event  at Harvard on April 4th discussing his new project Change Congress.

"Change Congress is a movement to build support for basic reform in how our government functions. Using technological and internet tools, both candidates and citizens can pledge their support for basic changes to reduce the distorting influence of money in Washington. The Change Congress community will link candidates committed to a reform with volunteers and contributors who support it.

Change Congress organizes citizens to push candidates to make four simple commitments:

1. No money from lobbyists or PACs
2. Vote to end earmarks
3. Support publicly-financed campaigns
4. Support reform to increase Congressional transparency "

Important Info:
Friday, April 4, 2008
5:00 p.m.
Ames Courtroom, second floor of Austin Hall on the Harvard Law School Campus (map)
Free and Open to the Public

Campus Competitions Lead Collegiate Startup Competition

Companies started by Yale and Harvard undergrads are rivals in developing campus-based games of Risk.  The games played with teams of students who compete to capture territory on campus maps.

"[T]wo separate Internet companies, GoCrossCampus and Kirkland North, ... have sprung up to commercialize the concept behind Old Campus Tree Risk, a team-based online strategy game staged by a group of Yale undergrads in early 2007.

Both companies’ systems help college groups and other organizations mount simulated, massively multiplayer campaigns to conquer “territory” such as the campus green—or the entire Northeast, in the case of an Ivy League championship run by GoCrossCampus last fall. The games resemble the classic board games Risk or Diplomacy, but with the board transposed onto online maps representing real geographies inhabited by the players, and with the action coordinated in a combination of online sessions and real-world team meetings."

There have been suggestions of anger between the two start-ups but they seem to be overblown.

Hacking Harvard Admissions (Fictionally)

In a sign of the obsessive nature of the college admissions game, a young adult novel centers on a competition to get an unlikely candidate into Harvard.   

Yvonne Trainer's review makes it sound like a fun read for the tense college applicant:

'Hacking Harvard deals with three guys (one already at Harvard who is a sixteen year old child prodigy easily talked into doing anything) who in a contest with three others decide to figure out what it takes to “get” someone accepted to Harvard. They use cameras, lasers, hidden microphones, and do computer hacking in order to obtain enough information and re-write records to allow a most unlikely candidate—one of their past school mates in."
***
"The entire novel is far-fetched, but there are enough twists and turns and surprise events to make it fun, even for those of us who are decades beyond the teen years."

Harvard Grad Students Hacked!

10,000 Harvard grad students' records were cracked by a hacker with data being exposed and epic headaches for the students.

"A Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Web server that contained summaries of GSAS applicant data for entry to the Fall 2007 academic year, summaries of GSAS housing applicant data for the 2007-08 and 2006-07 academic years, and administrator information was hacked by an outsider and compromised in a way that the data on the server could have been viewed or copied. The GSAS site was taken down from Feb. 17 until Feb. 21 in order to investigate the incident and to improve security.

The University’s initial examination did not reveal the full extent of the hack. As the investigation continued, it became apparent that some sensitive applicant data, including Social Security numbers, could potentially have been accessed. The University has informed the GSAS community, and has apologized for the error. At Harvard’s expense, identity theft recovery services are being made available to the people who might be potentially affected."

Over 6,000 of the students had their Social Security numbers posted online.

"The hacker made a portion of the server’s contents available for download through a popular BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing site, “The Pirate Bay,” where users can easily obtain large files.

The data made available through that site contained no personal information, [Harvard Chief Information Officer Daniel] Moriarty said, but the hacker would have had access to all the information on the server."

The economics of assassination and bribery with Harvard's Ben Olken

When is assassination productive?  According to research produced by Harvard economist Ben Olken the assassination of an autocratic ruler is more likely to produce change than that of a democratic leader.  Olken has also shown that the price of bribes increases when there are fewer extortionists in much the same way that a company might be able to charge higher prices when it has fewer competitors.

Kennedy School Professor Power Resigns From Obama Campaign

Kennedy School professor Samantha Power resigned after calling Hilary Clinton a monster and was forced to resign as an adviser to the Obama campaign:

"Samantha Power resigned as a foreign-policy adviser to Barack Obama yesterday, hours after the Scotsman newspaper quoted her as making a disparaging remark about Hillary Clinton-- although, immediately after uttering the comment, she asked the reporter not to use it. As the story recounted

" 'She is a monster, too -- that is off the record -- she is stooping to anything,' Ms. Power said, hastily trying to withdraw her remark.'"

Cass Sunstein to move to Harvard Law

University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein who has become a public intellectual with books on subjects from constitutionalism to the impact of the internet to the capacity of humans to make bad decisions will be calling Harvard home from now on joining other interesting new hires like Yochai Benkler.

FCC Hearing Continues Today at Harvard

An FCC hearing on net neutrality is going on today at Harvard Law School and still continuing with all the FCC commissioners and a variety of interesting experts like Tim Wu.  If you are constrained from attending you can follow David Weinberger's liveblogging of the event.

'“They must be conducted in an open and transparent way,” said Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, at a hearing on network neutrality and network management here Monday. “While networks may have reasonable practices, they obviously cannot operate without taking some reasonable steps but that does not mean they can arbitrarily block access to certain services.”

"The Commission has been considering complaints made by Vuze, BitTorent and several consumer groups that Comcast has violated a policy statement issued by the commission in 2005 that permits Internet service providers to engage in “reasonable network management.” The term has become a focal point in the revived debate over what is called network neutrality."

David Weinberger on Harvard's open research plan

David Weinberger on Harvard's open research plan:

I like this idea a lot. I only wish it went further. Faculty members will be allowed to opt-out of the requirement pretty much at will (as I understand it), which could vitiate it: If a prestigious journal accepts an article but only if it’s not been made openly available, faculty members may well decide it’s more important for their careers to be published in the journal. I would prefer to see the Harvard proposal paired with some form of official encouragement to tenure committees to look favorably upon faculty members who make their work widely and freely available.

Nothing is without drawbacks. A well-run, reliable, thorough peer-review system costs money. But there’s also an expense to funding peer review by limiting access to the work that makes it through the process. Likewise, while the current publication system directs our attention efficiently, but there’s a price to the very efficiency of such a system: innovation can arise from what looked liked inefficiencies. There’s value in the long tail of research.

Harvard Votes in Favor of Open Access

In what could be very important move to open up academic publishing, the Harvard faculty voted to approve an open access plan for their research:

"The proposal (PDF), which was voted on yesterday, requires that faculty members 'make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles. In legal terms, the permission granted by each Faculty member is a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit.'  Authors will be able to request an exemption in writing, but the default state will be for new research to be made available to all."

In an editorial advocating the passage of the proposal Harvard library director Robert Darnton suggested that

"The motion gives Harvard the possibility of setting an example that could spread. In place of a closed, privileged, and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn—and also to contribute to learning, because the Office for Scholarly Communication could point the way toward a digital commonwealth, in which ideas would flow freely in all directions. Harvard’s motion represents only one step toward this goal. But it shows how the new technology can make it possible to realize an old ideal, a republic of letters in which citizenship extends to everyone."

Darnton also pointed out an illogical aspect of academic publishing:

"The motion also represents an opportunity to reshape the landscape of learning. A shift in the system for communicating knowledge has created a contradiction at the heart of academic life. We academics provide the content for scholarly journals. We evaluate articles as referees, we serve on editorial boards, we work as editors ourselves, yet the journals force us to buy back our work, in published form, at outrageous prices. Many journals now cost more than $20,000 for a year’s subscription."

Harvard considers open access

The Harvard faculty is voting on a proposal to make their research and writing available to the public through a new open-access plan.

Although the outcome of Tuesday’s vote would apply only to Harvard’s arts and sciences faculty, the impact, given the university’s prestige, could be significant for the open-access movement, which seeks to make scientific and scholarly research available to as many people as possible at no cost.

'In place of a closed, privileged and costly system, it will help open up the world of learning to everyone who wants to learn,' said Robert Darnton, director of the university library. 'It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.'

Under the proposal Harvard would deposit finished papers in an open-access repository run by the library that would instantly make them available on the Internet. Authors would still retain their copyright and could publish anywhere they pleased — including at a high-priced journal, if the journal would have them.

This could be an important step for Harvard to take and for other universities to consider.  An open-access policy represents an opportunity to consider  what the purpose of the research done at universities is, what purpose expensive journals serve, and the importance of creating access to the public who help to subsidize this research.

Charles Nesson on the Colbert Report

Stephen Colbert confronts Harvard Law prof Charles Nesson over the value of poker in education and in life.

A profile of Drew Gilpin Faust

A long profile in the Washington Post of Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust.

"There are a number of things that make Drew Gilpin Faust different from those who've come before her as head honcho of America's flagship university.

Faust is, for example, the only president of Harvard known to have produced an academic paper titled "Equine Relics of the Civil War," the research for which included attending a solemn burial ceremony for the cremated bones of Stonewall Jackson's horse.

She is, it seems almost certain, the only one among the anointed to talk about what inspires her by calling herself "an archive rat."

More seriously: None of Faust's predecessors ever stood up at a conference of her fellow historians and suggested -- as Faust did in Washington in 2004 -- that the war narratives they so lovingly create may endow chaotic slaughter with a coherence and purposefulness it does not deserve. Now she has backed up that suggestion by publishing a Civil War book that focuses on a deceptively simple question: How did bloody carnage on a scale unprecedented in this country change the society that had to cope with it?"

A profile of James and Devon Gray Booksellers in Harvard Square

A profile of James and Devon Gray Booksellers, a store in Harvard Square where you can pick up a copy of Musæum Regalis Societatis.  Or a catalogue & description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved at Gresham Colledge by Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) a collection of oddities belonging to England's Royal Society (like this nice armadillo image below) for a cool $3,500.

"Sixteen years ago, Roger Stoddard, then curator of rare books at the Harvard College Library, challenged Devon, who was studying English with him, to go into the business. “He romanticized the good old days of bookselling,” James recalls, “and asked, ‘Why can’t we do that now?’”    

When Devon—inspired by Stoddard and the curator of manuscripts, Rodney Dennis—began scouring auctions and book fairs on weekends to create a collection, bankrolled by about $8,000 in borrowed start-up capital, James was still working in industrial equipment sales. But soon she was reselling her acquisitions to Houghton and to other universities’ rare-book collections. Once the shop opened, James, who trained in anthropology and is something of an autodidact, worked mainly in the store while Devon focused on the catalogs and book repair."

Harvard Business School professor to become Barnard president

Harvard Business School  professor to become president of Barnard.  Deborah Spar, author of the interesting book on the fertility industry, The Baby Business, will take over the all-female Columbia affiliated college in July.

You can listen to Deborah Spar discussing her book on radio shows
To The Point; and Here and Now.

Film of John Harvard's last night

A film of Harvard benefactor John Harvard's last night has been directed by Somerville resident and Harvard graduate student Michael Van Devere and filmed at the Cambridge Historical Society andCambridge's Swedenborg Chapel and with choral music by the Harvard Glee Club.  Clips can be seen on YouTube and the entire film will be shown on Somerville Community Access Television.