Thanks! A number of folks have sent me the Science articles. Many many many thanks. Now I am on hold from hell with earthlink trying to cancel the create dialup I had in PR. They just proudly announced that the current hold time is less than 15 minutes (and I already had waited 15 minutes, got through, and was disconnected mysteriously).

Despite my claim that I would post the Science articles on money once I got access via the U of A library, well, they have a 5 year moving wall, so I won’t be doing that anytime soon.

If anyone does have access to the article because they are subscribed to the magazine or are a member of AASS, please feel free to pass along copies to me. My contact info can be found on my CV.

Within 36 hours of my return to Edmonton, from the blowing Caribbean winds to the still calm of white snow, I have fallen sick with a cold, that while not a flu (at least not 24 hrs later), is still a severe cold, knocking on flu’s door. But ever since I had various horrible experiences having to work with horrible colds (like during my qualifying exams), I don’t mind colds so long as I can stay at home and let the cold run its course, which at least is my current predicament.

Because I have been parked at home, I have spent a fair amount of time on the computer today playing catching up with blog entries and emails and I came across a few potentially interesting articles about the effects of money on tieguy’s blog (run law student who knows a heck of a lot about tech, law, and free software but his blog seems to be down at the moment). He linked to pair of articles on the psychological effects of money. I have not read the articles yet (and will post them, hopefully tomorrow once I get access to them via my U of A account), but I bet this will be of interest to some Debianista’s given the recent debates and controversies over the injection of money into Debian via the Dunc-Tanc project.

Now a disclaimer: I don’t have a position on Dunc-Tanc, and this is so for many reasons–the primary being I have not delved deeply into the issues an all of the debate and discussion and well, I also experience the ethical issues somewhat more of an outsider, though I do want to see Debian survive well into the future. So I have keep mostly mum on the topic but later I may have more to say.

I also have yet to read the articles and am usually a little suspect of psychological experiments that purport to have universal applicability (and am not sure if these fall into this class) so I am not sure how relevant these will be to this particular case. But nonetheless, here they are, and hopefully someone will find some use in them (and sorry if they have been posted here, I am very behind on planet, thanks to dial-up for a month).

On a somewhat related though different note, check out Joseph Reagle’s excellent summary of how online communities work well.

Now time for much needed sleep.

So so so so I am in the airport in Minneapolis, about 2/3 into my mega-trip from PR to Edmonton and decided to jump online since I have over 3 hrs in the airport. And today is the first day in about a month I have used high speed Internet access and it is, well, beautiful, at least compared to the dial-up I was using at home, which was pretty painful, especially because the slowness was compounded by the mosquitoes flying above me, reminding me of how annoying it was to be online. So I usually ditched the whole experience in favor of the more reliable meat world.

Here and nw the speed almost feels magnified. It is like faster, better.. plainly hotter. It reminds me of the time that I quit coffee for months and then I started again. It was like drinking coffee and caffeine for the first time all over again. So I gues what I should try next is to quit coffee and high speed internet together for a few months and then start them together.

When I was on the job market last year, by far the toughest hurdle was convincing interviewing eyes and ears that my hacker and survivor project were connected in some fundamental ways. I think in the end, I was successful at times but it was difficult for some folks to see the connection in part because most professors knew little or zilch about survivor politics so I had to lay that ground work and then toss out the connections, which included free speech, the politics of freedom and self-determination, attacks on corporate/closed science. Now with the Zyprexa scandal and the support coming from Free Culture, these two worlds have indeed moved even closer together than before. (Thanks Jonah for pointing out).

So this is a little old news but it is still interesting news about freeing the suppressed zyprexa documents. Here is some additional background information .

I am about 2/3 over with my haul from Edmonton to San Juan, PR (laying over in the beautiful JFK) and am too tired to blog anything much of substance but do check out Furious Season’s impassioned and excellent commentary on the recent NYTimes article (and this one )that reveal how Eli Lily knowingly downplayed the risks of Zyprexa. And if you read the second article, you will find out what Viva Zyprexa means.

Here is Eli Lily’s press release, which I have included on the next page as these things tend to vanish…

(more…)

So one of the darling drugs for bipolar disorder (and I believe schizophrenia) has been Zyprexa.. Marked by the pharmaceutical company as a wonder drug, for being safe and effective, it has just come out that Eli Lilly, maker of the drug, hid and downlplayed the severity of side-effects.

This is big because critics from survivors to academics and journalists and have been attacking pharmaceutical science for this very reason… This explicit revelation is thus pretty gynormous.

I am frantically getting ready to go to PR, so that is I can say but more later…

By informing us of a new list, WikiChix Joe Reagle offer’s some insight as to why gendered spaces don’t always sit easily alongside or with liberal ideologies of equality:

Formally excluding anyone from the larger community prompts questions of: is this fair?, is this discriminatory?, shouldn’t we ensure the common space is accessible rather than spinning off groups?

Of course, much of liberal theory since it hones in on “formal” dimensions of equality, does not do so well with accounting for or accomodating those forms of biases and exlcusions that are either informal (i.e. cultural) or often structural (i.e. economic).

So I am back to le study of le hackers, trying to write a super-secret paper that I will present in January and then of course I am back with and to my beloved book (which for now has the following title: “Freedom’s Pleasures: Hacker Practice And The Limits of Liberalism” but I am sure it will morph, endlessly).

As part of my transition I just finished re-reading one of my favorite articles on the history of Usenet: If I want it, it’s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech by B. Pfaffenberger (available here for download.

When I released one of my dissertation chapters where I addressed the phenomenon of the Cabal, Bryan was nice enough to write me and point me to his article, which also examines the existence of Backbone Usenet Cabal.

The artile, which provides just the right mix of history and commentary, analyzes how a free speech ethic came to be valued on Usenet and the ways in which technological and social factors co-mingled to facilitate and dampen the free flow of expression.

You are provided with classic Usenet quotes like:

Usenet is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea–massive, diffi-
cult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling
amounts of excrement when you least expect it. (Spafford, 1993b)

You learn about the early attempts to control spam by the likes of “CancelMoose:”

In 1995, a secret, shadowy figure known as the CancelMoose
devised a spam-canceling program called a cancelbot.”

And then in the end, he provides his challeng to one of the dominant STS theories of the time, SCOT:

“It should be noted that this picture is at odds with the predictions of the social construc-
tion of technology (SCOT) theory (Pinch & Bijker, 1987), in which the outcome of a period
of technical controversy is ascribed solely to social factors. Underlying SCOT’s dogmatism
is a justifiable aversion to technological determinism, the doctrine that a technology’s con-
tent leads irresistably to predictable social consequencesÐ a doctrine that is simply the re-
verse of SCOT’s insistence on social causation. Two wrongs, as we were taught in kinder-
garten, do not make a right. What we see in the history of Usenet is a contingent outcome
that is shaped neither exclusively by social nor by technical factors, but rather is best under-
stood as a long process in which contesting groups attempt to mold and shape the technol-
ogy to suit their endsÐsometimes successfully, and sometimes not. They are as likely to be
blindsided by technological developments as they were to succeed in changing the system
to meet their ends. As this article attests, it is one thing to create new technologies with a
coherent social vision, and it is quite another to control the way it grows and develops.”

I could not agree with him more. I think what he is highlighting is that if we dip into the historical record, we have instances in which technology can trump the social and vice-versa (and often instead it is a co-mixture), so in the end, understanding the impact of technologies is less about theories of technology and more of a historical question…