Chris Peterson

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

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.

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!

I don’t normally post about pingbacks, but I got a shoutout from the Nudge blog today about my “Saving with Shoeboxes” post describing design improvements that might improve money management in online banking.

I’m posting to say that (wholly separate from the shoutout) if you haven’t read Nudge by Dick Thaler and Cass Sunstein you should. It’s a more developed version of their “Liberatarian Paternalism is Not An Oxymoron”, and compelling argues that certain tweaks – or “nudges” – to the defaults of different laws could enhance social welfare without limiting freedom. Good book, good argument, good way of thinking about the things public policy should concern itself with.

If you read my earlier post about mapping banned books you’ll know that I put out a call for people to submit banned books to the Google Map I made. I figured it would an awesome opportunity for collaborative distributed social production among many decentralized but responsible netizens, straight out of a Yochai Benkler article.

My glorious plan was upstaged when a brilliant and talented [and, full disclosure, very close friend of mine] at the ABFFE named Alita Edelman mapped every book in the ALA records over the past two years.

It’s cool (if scary) stuff. Check it out.

A friend of mine is working over at American Booksellers for Free Expression helping them prepare for Banned Books Week. In case you are not familiar with Banned Books Week, the ALA sez:

Banned Books Week (BBW): Celebrating the Freedom to Read is observed during the last week of September each year. Observed since 1982, this annual ALA event reminds Americans not to take this precious democratic freedom for granted. BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where the freedom to express oneself and the freedom to choose what opinions and viewpoints to consume are both met.

The ABFFE has a list of the most challenged books from years past. These are real books that real Americans are trying to ban from real libraries. For most of the books, they provide background information, including where and by whom the book was challenged. There is also a PDF of the most challenged books over the last year or so. No news yet on the most challenged books from 2009, but I’m told that’s coming.

Some of the challenged books are old standbys of censorial aggression – your Huck Finns, your Harry Potters, your Brave New Worlds, and so forth. Some are new to me, like the potentially adorable “Uncle Bobby’s Wedding”, which apparently documents the struggles of a small guinea pig as she learns to adapt to her uncle Bobby getting gay guinea pig married. Others just confuse, bemuse, amuse, and unsettle me, such as the challenge to Esther Drill’s Deal With It, a sex-education novel for girls which was challenged on the grounds of being – and I am not making this up – “happily nonphallocentric.”

These are enlightened times.

Anyway, I’ve created a Google Map to map out the book challenges. I think it might be an interesting exercise to visualize whether there are hotspots of censorship in the country. Anyone can edit the map, so if you’d like to help, feel free to join in. You can either refer to the ABFFE’s detailed list or add your own, but please supplement them with corroborating evidence!

Zack Parsons (also known as elpintogrande) of SomethingAwful.com has written a fantastic book. It’s called Your Next Door Neighbor Is A Dragon.

As Zack writes, it is a colorful guide to Internet subcultures and the people who live them. Not in the sense of people who make cat macros, but people who believe they are dragons.

From his description:

Pretending that any author could write a comprehensive guidebook to the Internet is the sort of dumb crap that publishers dream up. “Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon” is not a comprehensive guidebook, it’s a travelogue about the Internet in which I visit and talk to people outside the Internet. I focused on the subcultures and fetishes I was familiar with and I took the dangerously stupid step of leaving the Internet and going outside.

Your Next-Door Neighbor is a Dragon details my encounters with otherkin, vores, furries, and erotic fan-fiction authors. It includes interviews and adventures that reveal the truth about aspartame, self-diagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, the Ron Paul blimp, and how much white power you can download. I even risked my life and visited a doomsday religious cult in Texas against my will.

I am through the first few chapters and it is one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. Does it provide deep insight into the cultural anthropology of the Internet? No. That’s not the point. The point, the book puts it, is that the Internet is a spectacle, like Caligula’s brain swimming around in a fish tank, and he pokes the glass a bit.

Buy the book. It’s funny as hell and Zack is a good guy too.

Re-reading Marshall’s article, there is one clarification I want to make. After quoting me saying that Facebook information is decontextualized (as danah boyd has exhaustively noted), Marshall writes:

Perhaps no longer! The new Facebook publishing feature lets users share things with just a particular list of their friends. (Or with the public at large if they so choose.) The contexts are un-collapsed. Communication is human again. That’s a very big deal and is the kind of change that could make far more people comfortable sharing far more information about their lives on Facebook. It’s also a feature that no major competitor (namely Twitter) offers.

I share his hope, but I am not sure that the Publisher by itself reconstructs contexts. Certainly, it is a powerful tool with which one may take steps to rebuild the walls that separate social situations.

However, the tool itself doesn’t help much if it is to be exercised in an unhelpful environment. As I wrote on page 52 of my paper:

(continue reading…)