MITPressLog

Internet Censorship in Turkey

John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is in Turkey discussing that country's struggle with the prospect of internet censorship. Palfrey is the author of our recent book Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering, which is the topic that's brought him to Turkey. In a blog post, John writes that "the state is on the knife’s edge, between one world and another, just as Istanbul sits, on the Bosporus, at the juncture between 'East and West.'"

He elaborates:

As Turkey looks ahead toward the day when they join the European Union once and for all, one of the many policy questions on the national agenda is whether and how to filter the Internet. There is sensitivity around content of various sorts: criticism of the republic’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk; gambling; and obscenity top the list. The parliament passed a law earlier in 2007 that gives a government authority a broad mandate to filter content of this sort from the Internet. To date, I’m told, about 10 orders have been issued by this authority, and an additional 40 orders by a court to filter content. The process is only a few months old; much remains to be learned about how this law, known as “5651,” will be implemented over time.

Read the whole of John's fascinating post here.

BotTV

Maja Mataric, author of The Robotics Primer, got a visit from the Cyberguy - aka Kurt Knutsson of KTLA, a Los Angeles TV station. As you can see from this clip, it was love at first sight -- between Cyberguy and the robots, that is. Hey, the idea that a robot can save you the trouble of cleaning your gutters - if that isn't grounds for love, it ain't far off.

Video of Cyberguy's visit to Maja's lab is here.

Maja Mataric, YouTube Star

The Viterbi School of Engineering at USC has created a nifty little video about the joys of robotics, starring USC computer science professor Maja Mataric and her recent book The Robotics Primer. Besides being a smart researcher, Maja is a very gifted communicator, especially in front of general audiences. That comes through in the video, which, like the rest of the universe, is available on YouTube. You can see it here.

Wednesday Blog Watch - rankings

Economics blogger Aaron Schiff recently calculated a ranking of popular economics blogs on his 26econ.com blogsite.  Here is his listing of the top ten.  He also recommends viewing Brian Gongol's Traffic ratings for economics websites, found here. 
In other "top ten" news, if you've ever wondered about the top-selling programming books in any given programming language, Antonio Cangiano from the blog Zen and the Art of Ruby Programming has compiled a list based on Amazon sales.  Would we be mentioning this if the MIT Press title The Little Schemer weren't the winner in the Scheme programming language category?  View the top programming book list here.

Protecting America or making it more vulnerable?

Susan Landau, coauthor of Privacy on the Line, has an op-ed in today's Washington Post, commenting on the recently passed Protect America Act, which updated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Among the more noteworthy features of the Act is the fact that it allows the NSA to tap foreign nationals' internet and phone communications that are routed through the U.S., without obtaining a FISA warrant. Landau points out that the infrastructure needed to accomplish this task effectively would likely be subject to misuse by others:

"Grant the NSA what it wants, and within 10 years the United States will be vulnerable to attacks from hackers across the globe, as well as the militaries of China, Russia and other nations."

Read the entirety of "A Gateway for Hackers" here. More information about the new edition of Privacy on the Line is here.

Diffie on Computerworld

Over on Computerworld, you can find a substantial excerpt from the revised and expanded edition of Privacy on the Line by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. Since the first edition was published in 1998, it's become a standard work on the politics, policy, and law on wiretapping and encryption. Accompanying the excerpt is a podcast of an interview with Whitfield Diffie. Here's a snippet from the interview:

“The reason that we brought out Privacy on the Line in this revised and expanded edition is to reflect this shift in the policy argument – and in particular our concern that if [wiretapping] is applied to internet telephony in the same way that the law now applies it to conventional telephony, it may both stifle innovation and present unprecedented threats to national security…”

Read the excerpt and hear the podcast here.

Obama's Uncertain Journey into MySpace

Politicians and political campaigns are still tentatively feeling their way around cyberspace, and nowhere has that sense of first steps and their attendant pitfalls become clearer than in the recent imbroglio involving the fate of Senator Barack Obama's MySpace page.

The March of Women: Mathematics to Computer Science

In honor of Women’s History Month we’re proud to present a weekly column this month, “The March of Women,” which will highlight some of our books that focus on women in the arts, technology, history, and sciences.

To get us started, here are two MIT Press classics that compliment each other: Women Becoming Mathematicians discusses the struggles of women pursuing Ph.D’s in the rapidly expanding field of mathematics during the post-World War II era. Mathematics would later give birth to the field of computer science, where women now face similar problems in gaining an equal education. Unlocking the Clubhouse looks at women’s current struggle in this burgeoning, male-dominated field of computing, and makes a strong case for letting women into the “boy’s clubhouse.” Both books are based on extensive interviews with women who pursued degrees in these fields, against the odds, with both success and failure, in order to pave the way for other women. Below are two excerpts from these important books:

The women mathematics Ph.D.’s of the forties and fifties lived in a turbulent time of social, political and cultural growth and change…the rigid and inflexible model of career development put forward in the myth of the mathematical life course was never a viable model for them to follow. Indeed changing times and circumstances require courage, flexibility, resilience, and the willingness to strike out in new directions. The experiences of the women mathematicians of the postwar generation provide a model for both men and women, in mathematics and in many other fields as well, who must face the challenge of building a meaningful personal and professional life at the turn of a new millennium. 

- Women Becoming Mathematicians: Creating Professional Identity in Post-World War II America by Margaret A.M. Murray (2001)

 

In this book, we lay out the blueprints—the doors, walls, and windows—of the “boy’s clubhouse” of computing education. We show how rarely girls’ interest in computing is kindled and how women who do develop an interest in computing often have it extinguished in school. We discuss what is necessary to remodel education so that girls and women who are or could be interested in computing can find a home in the discipline.

- Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher (2003)

 

Scholarpedia

Wikipedia is useful for finding quick information, answering trivia questions, and for getting up to speed on things you think you should know.  But whether Wikipedia ought to be used for an academic citation is another story. 
One scholar, Eugene M. Izhikevich (author of Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience), has decided to harness the concept of Wikipedia into a format that is more likely to please academics:  he has founded Scholarpedia, a peer-reviewed version of Wikipedia.  Each article in Scholarpedia has a "curator", usually a leading researcher or scholar in that field.  The initial version of an article is submitted for a peer review process, and each successive version is permanently saved for purposes of citation.  While (in the spirit of a Wiki) anyone can propose changes to an article, the curator is responsible for approving these changes. 
Scholarpedia's current content focuses on Computational Neuroscience, Dynamical Systems and Computational Intelligence, but it plans to move in other directions if all goes well. 
An exciting aspect of Scholarpedia is that some articles are written and curated by the very people who discovered the concept - as in the case of Lotfi Zadeh, who has written about Fuzzy Logic, or Mandlebrot, who is slated to write the article on Mandelbrot sets.   And who can argue with that kind of citation?

An Electorlal College End Run

In graduate school, John R. Koza and fellow  students invented a complicated board game based on the often misunderstood Electoral College that became a bit of a cult hit.  He also was the co-inventor of the scratch-off lottery ticket. He wrote the MIT Press classic, Genetic Programming: On the Programming of Computers by Means of Natural Selection. Now, a prominent Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, he’s come up with a way to legally get around the Electoral College, which would insure victory to whichever presidential candidate received the most votes. 

It’s true.  A recent New York Times article outlines his plan, which stems from his experience working with state lotteries and the interstate lotteries that states developed for multi-state lotteries like Powerball.  It involves states working together to form interstate compacts on issues which are important to them (pollution, nuclear waste, etc) in an effort to get around the electoral college.  A bill based on Koza’s idea was approved by the California legislature but vetoed by Governor Schwartzenegger yesterday.   The group remains hopeful, however, as they have found sponsors in 22 states for next year.  Ultimately, Koza hopes that his plan will force candidates to campaign nationwide, not just focus on battleground states. 

We’ll keep you updated on how it all goes.