If you are in the area and are into the law of free software, then this conference is for you. It is free and open to all, but make sure to register by the 12th

This documentary on Walmart is showing tonight. You can also download the movie on the site.

Denied citizens

Mental health and human rights

World Health Organization (WHO) Exposes
a Global Emergency of Human Rights
Violations in the Mental Health System.

MindFreedom Welcomes WHO’s Announcement,
Calls for “International Mobilization.”

The World Health Organization announced they
are dedicating International Human Rights Day,
10 December, to all people diagnosed with
mental disorders “and the all-too-prevalent
violations of their basic human rights.”

To draw attention to this crisis the World
Health Organization (WHO) has created a new
online photo essay called ‘Forgotten People:
Mental Health and Human Rights,” along with
other new materials and a press conference.

MindFreedom International, as a
Non Governmental Organization (NGO)
accredited by the UN, has worked
with WHO for two years encouraging
a focus on the topic of human
rights and mental health.

MindFreedom director David Oaks
said, “While we have so very much
that we seek to change about the
mental health system, including
at WHO, we are gratified to see
that WHO is exposing the emergency
of human rights in the mental health
system to people internationally.”

MindFreedom issued a call for an
“International mobilization of
resources for a nonviolent
revolution throughout the mental
health system.”

Lawyers Evaluate Censure of Merck
# As jurors deliberate in one Vioxx trial, experts say Merck will be hurt in the many other cases.

By Lisa Girion, Times Staff Writer

Jurors continued deliberating Friday in the latest Vioxx trial as some legal experts said Merck & Co.’s defense against thousands of similar lawsuits would be hurt by an accusation that company scientists had downplayed the pain reliever’s heart attack risk.

A rare “expression of concern” posted online Thursday by New England Journal of Medicine editors chastised Merck scientists for failing to report three nonfatal heart attacks among Vioxx users who were at low risk of cardiac problems.

The editors said two scientists employed by Merck knew about the three heart attacks more than four months before the journal published an article by the scientists about a Vioxx study conducted in 2000. The editors said they determined that information about the heart attacks had been deleted two days before the article was submitted.

The editors also said the three heart attacks would have led to different conclusions about the risk of Vioxx, particularly among users who were not predisposed to heart problems.

Merck representatives did not return calls Friday. The company issued a statement Thursday saying the heart attacks had been reported after a cutoff date for data for the study. Merck also said it promptly disclosed the three heart attacks to the Food and Drug Administration, as well as in a news release.

….

Whether it is the Incompatible Timesharing System from the early days at the MIT lab, Unix, or the Internet, it is clear that hackers encode and realize values through the making of various technologies. But this encoding is not always straightforward and it tends to embody a multiplicity of potentialities that get realized in sometimes conflicting modes.

As interesting is that geeks theorize this, and do so in a dialogically, enganged manner. The following 2 blog entries are by Debian developers and they are about Debian, Unix permissions, and the ways in which openness/opaquness foster different forms of access and possiblities. I don’t have time now to give any analysis but here they are:

From From Joey Hess’ Blog:

I could give many more examples of subsystems in Debian that exist at different point in the spectrum between locked down unix permissions and a wiki. There seems to be a definite pull toward moving away from unix permissions, once ways can be found to do so that are secure or that allow bad changes to be reverted (and blame properly assigned). Cases of moving in the other direction are rare (one case of this is the further locking down of the Debian archive server and BTS server after the server compromise last year).

Anyway, the point of this is that, if you survey the parts of dealing with the project where Debian developers feel most helpless and unempowered, the parts that are over and over again the subject of heated discussions and complaints, you will find that those are the parts of the project where unix permissions still hold sway. This can range from simple cases such as a cron job that only one person can look at and modify[1], to various data files that could perhaps be kept in svn, but aren’t, all the way through to stuff like the Debian keyring. I would love to see a full list developed, although many of the things that remain are obscure little corners like certian blacklists in the BTS, bits of the buildd infrastructure that only a half dozen people know about, etc.

And then a reply from former Debian release manager, Anthony Towns:

One interesting approach, to my mind, is worrying less about permissions and more about space – so that different people with different ideas on how to do things can do them independently. That’s part of the idea behind usertags and usercategories: rather than having people try to find an imperfect compromise, let them work on the same stuff in the way they actually prefer. That reduces the risk of carelessness, in that you stop having any reason to bother other people, and also reduces the problem of restrictions, in that if you don’t have permission to work in someone else’s area, you can just setup your own area and work there.

Perhaps the worst problem is if the drawbacks feed on each other: a restrictive system turns away contributions, which causes prospective contributors to get frustrated and hence careless, which then reinforces the reasons that the restrictions were put their in the first place and diminishes the chance they’ll be reconsidered. That’s a hard cycle to break, but it’s not one where anyone really wins.

Yesterday Peter Jaszi who was at the forefront of the critique of authorship project in the early 1990s, came to visit at the Center for Cultural Analysis. During his seminar presentation as well as public talk on his project he brought up some very interesting points about the limits of the Creative Commons project when discussing copyright activism aimed at building a strong fair use foundation for documentary film makers.

His critique of the Creative Commons was the following: In affirming the creation of a commons through individual choice and voluntary gifting, it trivializing the importance of public rights and access that are built in to the copyright system. The danger is that we will end up with two different systems in which the commons material will only arise from those creators willing to relinquish some of the exlusive rights of copyrights. This is quite valid and perceptive. But in many ways, given the seemingly unstoppable movement of copyright law toward greater protections, I think the only way to put a stop to it was through the creation of an alternative model. In this case, legislation and policy was not going to do the trick.

That said, now that there is a robust alternative, now that the hegemony of IP assumptions have been punctured, it does seem more imperative than ever to foment a copyright culture that respects, much more than it does now, the idea of public access and goods.

This is where in fact Jaszi is channeling his energy. He is one of the folks behind the Best Practices in Fair Use at the Center for Social Media. It is a project aimed at cultivating an ethic for greater access and set of best practices among documentary filmmakers who are being strangled financially because of licensing fees for music and other materials.

According to his talk last night, in the last decade there has been a “fair use renaissance” honoring the principle. This project fosters this awakening in the realm of documentary film by creating a set of best practices that are presented to courts who apparently are quite interested in what communities of practices do in regard to their craft. On top of it, they are using this material in film schools which seems so essential. So much of our professional ethics derive from educational socialization so this is vital component to this project.

Infants need mental health checks .

tenth of two to five-year-olds have a serious psychiatric illness, yet most cases are being missed, warn experts.

The problems go beyond tantrums and bad behaviour and impact negatively on all aspects of an infant’s life, the Institute of Psychiatry will hear.

And failure to spot and treat these conditions early is causing unnecessary distress and suffering.

Mental health services need to be geared towards very young children as a matter of urgency, they said.

The news comes as a survey of 1,000 young people aged 12-19 by The Priory Group finds as many as one in five teenagers has considered or actually harmed themselves purposefully because of feelings of failure and social inadequacy.

If there is one thing that drove me a little nuts about my fieldwork, it was trying to get a very precise handle over the reasons that hackers loved to joke about the existence of a cabal. On the one hand, the joke’s significance was obvious: hackers distrust centralized authority so any whiff of it will attract attention, and joking about the so called existence of a cabal is at once a reflection of this unease and a mechanism to remind those with power that they must always act with good intentions and defer to the group when it comes to technical decisions.

But in fact joking about the cabal opens up into a much vaster savanna related to the tensions between elitism and populism in hacking, as well as the general potential for meritocracies to degrade into corruption. While hackers distrust centralized authority, they do happen to trust those who have proved their worth to peers (though a combination of talent and dedication) and dole out respect and recognition to them. Often this means that some folks will eventually be entrusted with some sort of technical role, and thus, power and this is fine so long as he does not block the process of open ended debate and deliberation by which they achieved power in the first place. I address the question of the cabal and meritocracy in Debian here and am soon going to release another chapter of my dissertation that takes a closer look at the tension between populism and elitism.

But of course there is a much longer history of the general corruptibility of meritocracy (check out Plato’s Republic for an old examination of this problem and if anyone knows of more current accounts of it, please feel free to email me) and of cabal joking within hacking. Just recently I came across a really good piece on free speech, populism, and elitism by Bryam Pfaffenberger: If I want it, it’s OK: Usenet and the (outer) limits of free speech

This piece is not only a solid history of early Usenet, but gives us a clear window into how the value for freedom and free speech grew on the Net, and through very particular conditions (behind the backs of academic, corporate managers and administrators, for example), the enablers and constraints of newsgroup technologies, and of course the unavoidable fact of contingency. Moreover, this commitment to openness grew in the midst of a tension between what he calls the “ethos of collaborative egalitarianism” and the elitism of the wizards who controlled the backbone of Usenet. He sums it up nicely here:

“In spite of Usenet’s implicitly antibureaucratic ethos, it was soon apparent that sites could not function unless someone took responsibility for the many administrative tasks involved, such as placing the late-night calls (and disguising phone charges). UNIX system administrators (abbreviated sysadmins) soon came to have more or less officially recognized Usenet-supervision roles within companies, organizations, and universities they served. This role has never been a particularly happy or easy one. Sysadmins had to balance the needs and interests of their organizations against the ever-more-voracious appetite of Usenet—and later.., they had to deal with the conviction of many Usenet users that Usenet gave them the right to speak and distribute anything they liked” p. 370

For anyone interested in how the net became such a hotbed for the fever of the flavor for the free(dom/speech), this is a must read. In this piece, what comes out so strongly is that the tension between elitism/hierarchy and populism/openness is of course not just a function of social norms, but emerges out of the very contradictions of technology but technology-in-use. Though Usenet was first envisioned as a forum for discussing Unix and providing technical support, it soon burst out of the early seams of its intended birth to become a more global, unwieldy entity. But there were still those with the technical power in charge to manage the network, assign accounts, delete controversial newsgroups and so on. Eventually geeks themselves led a mini-revolution to democratize access (which meant really control over the means of production).

The problem between elitism and populism has not left the halls of geekdom yet but there are certainly more technologies than ever that tend to allow, in potentia at least, for a type of equality than before. And getting a hold on this early history helps clarify the problems and issues of today.

So I collected many life histories and now there is a place where geeks can write about how they got into computers. Geekrific.

Thanks to the efforts of Bryan Pfaffenberger (thanks Bryan!), there is now an STS wiki. Here is a note from Bryan:

I’m writing to announce (somewhat earlier than I had planned) the STS
Wiki, located at http://www.stswiki.org . I had hoped to build lots of
content before getting the word out — but the word’s out anyway
(thanks, Google). In the last 24 hours the content has been expanded by
something like 200%. The rocket, it seems, has left the pad. So take a
look – and:

(1) add yourself to the worldwide directory of sts scholars;
(2) add your program to the worldwide directory of sts programs;
(3) upload a bibliography
(4) help build the link directory
(5) think of more ways to use the site!
(6) keep an eye out for vandalism
(7) forward this message to other STS scholars

If you know how to use Wikipedia, you know how to use STS Wiki. It uses
the same software. Do please visit and contribute regularly.