Chris Peterson

Just stumbled across this nice shoutout about my thesis from last summer. A good analysis from Henry Jones of Sun.

It was nice to see it pass the muster of an expert in the social and computer sciences, and gave me some good stuff to think about going forward.

I’ve been swamped with work at work, but soon I’ll be posting the “final” draft of my thesis Article just before I ship it off to law reviews. And I’ll be teaching a class at MIT SPLASH this weekend, which should be fun too.

Soon after the WSJ article criticizing the Banned Books Map, I was approached by one of the administrators of the Barnes & Noble Unabashedly Bookish blog community. He wanted me to write about my experiences setting up the map, what I had wanted, and what I thought I could achieve.

The article is now up (and reproduced below the fold). Furthermore, I have a special announcement:

Today, I’m launched the Mapping Banned Books project. As you can read below, the project intends to create a grassroots, ground-up documentation of all the book bans and challenges that go on in the U.S. today. The website is still under heavy development – I’m rolling this out very quickly – but please, check it out, contribute what you can, and help us along the way. I’ll have more in the next few days.

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The Grey Ladyruns a profile on our MIT Admissions site. Great read – glad they did it.

I’m thinking a lot about this banned books project. More to come in the next few days.

As I mentioned, last week the Wall Street Journal published a really exceptionally stupid critique of a) the ALA, b) Banned Books Week, and c) the Google Map of Banned Books that I created with Alita Edelman from ABFFE’s records of book bans and challenges.

I contacted their letters editor, who today ran an edited version of my rebuttal bookended by a lengthier piece from the President of the ALA. Because their letters page is impermanent, I’m posting the full thing here below the fold.
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And with it, the LA Times features our “Mapping Banned Books” mashup. The Lake County Record-Bee had a nice piece too, as did trueslant, the School Library Journal, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and The Nation.

I am, of course, devastated that the WSJ doesn’t think too highly of it. But I suppose you can’t please everyone.

If you want to celebrate Banned Books Week in style, please feel free to check out the eponymous website and, as IO9 advocates, do your part by filling your head with subversive filth today!

Via Lifehacker: Mint adds ‘enveloping’ budgeting tools.

I updated my media page today with a Radio Berkman episode asking whether Twitter is a revolution. The audio comes from a Berktern debate held earlier this summer. I wanted to give some background on the whole affair.

The question at issue was whether or not Twitter is a “revolution in communication.” And, as was to be expected from an Oxfordian debate, the resulting conversation consisted mainly in a shifting of the goalposts, with the sides continually redefining “revolution” to suit their purposes.

My position, as it was then, is still this: not yet.
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Via JZ –

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School is hiring a research fellow for broadband policy, effective immediately:

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University is actively seeking a resident fellow to join the Center immediately and lead its ongoing project examining the role of broadband access in society and the policy decisions that affect its nature. Working closely with the project leadership and others in the Berkman community, the fellow will be responsible for coordinating all aspects of the broadband project, including: shaping research questions and focus, reviewing extant literature, supervising research assistants, performing data analysis, writing case studies, coordinating with outside researchers and soliciting input, communicating with entities like the FCC, monitoring new activity in the space, and relationship-building. In particular, through early fall of 2009, Berkman will assist the Federal Communications Commission in reviewing worldwide broadband studies, and the fellow’s first and immediate responsibilities will be joining affiliated project researchers in finalizing and bringing to fruition this review. The project is a collaborative effort including Harvard faculty, Berkman Center fellows, and student researchers. This fellowship is also positioned for dynamic participation in the broader Berkman Center Fellowship Program, including interacting with, supporting, and learning from and with fellow fellows and the larger Berkman community. As with all Berkman appointments, this is a term position ending June 30, 2010. Continuation is contingent on program needs and resource considerations.

Bachelor’s Degree with strong background in communication policy, with an emphasis on broadband.

Great place to work if you’re smart and want to work on cyberlaw stuff.

When I advocated some money management tools levering the bracketing effect in “Saving With Shoeboxes” I thought I was taking some obscure academic research and applying it in a novel, original way.

I should have known better.

Commenter “kevin” pointed me to mvelopes, an online third party money-management service that provides little envelopes in the way I described. Googling it, I found the Wikipedia page for “envelope system.” Turns out that, like so many things, our ancestors knew something we didn’t. The envelope system has been around for cash management since the 1930s.

There are several applications that will bring the bracketing effect to your banking. Someone even wrote a spreadsheet for it.

Check them out – and thanks Kevin!