Not Quite a Blog 2.0

Architects and urban planners take note: we desperately need cellphonebooths.

“Huh?”, you ask. Well, think about it. How long has it been since you’ve last used a pay phone in a phonebooth? Most payphones don’t even have booths these days... take a look around next time you're in a city. You’d be surprised how many payphones have non-working payphones or no phone at all.

However, with the increasing use of mobile devices and cell phones, there is a growing need for sound isolation, even in places where traditional phonebooths haven't existed. For example, in open-plan office spaces, it can often be a nuisance to take a phone call. I hardly need to mention taking an important phone call while you’re walking down a busy street.

Architects could design cellphonebooths into office floor plans and office furniture firms, like UC’s supplier Steelcase, could produce modular cellphonebooths. Urban planners could design public versions, even with a charge and timer of some sort (power and internet access for an additional fee?).

The new cellphonebooth should probably be designed differently, though. For example, to first order, just an old phonebooth without the phone would be ok. However, what if you need to pull out your laptop or have a reasonable working surface? Maybe they could offer a place to sit and a working surface on a slightly larger footprint.

UPDATE [2008-05-07T13:53:44]: A Steelcase employee responds in the comments to the effect that Steelcase does have such a thing, called the Cell Cell:

OFFICE CONFIDENTIAL: Conversations are hush-hush in the Cell Cell, designed by Steelcase to give cube dwellers cell-phone privacy and spare the rest of us from TMI. It lights up when occupied, and boosters aid phone reception

I’ll be giving my PhD thesis talk in 202 South Hall (UC Berkeley) on 5/14 (Wed) at 10am. Abstract below...

Public Policy Mechanisms for Increasing Transparency in Electronic Voting

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, UC Berkeley School of Information

Abstract:

In the early years of the American republic, only white male landowners could vote, and then typically by expressing their preferences in a public setting, for all to witness. Our electoral system has changed drastically since that time; now almost all Americans cast votes with the assistance of computerized equipment. While much good stems from the use of computerized equipment in elections---notably increased efficiency, enfranchisement and flexibility---unintended consequences of this mechanization have left us with complicated, insecure and opaque voting systems.

My PhD thesis focuses on the issue of transparency in e-voting; that is, what public policy mechanisms can serve to make our voting systems less opaque? After exploring what we mean by “governmental transparency”, I examine the question of e-voting transparency on three fronts. I analyze the role of disclosed and open source software in election systems and conclude that, while fully disclosed source code is a valid goal, limited disclosure to experts serves many of the same goals in the short-term while preserving vendor trade secrecy. I investigate how contractual provisions between local election jurisdictions and voting system vendors serve to frustrate transparency and find that election officials need to be more careful in these negotiations. Finally, I turn to the question of auditing black box elections systems; that is, since we cannot know how these systems work in the full-disclosure (“white box”) case, possibly because of contractual provisions that limit investigation, what methods and procedures can we use for “checking the math“ behind our elections?

I am no longer in New York during passover and a papal visit (which means the chance of my actually being able to say “Good yontiff, pontiff”, has now dropped back from astonishingly faint to none).

-- Neil Gaiman (“Fair Use and other things”)

Some of you may know that I've been working, for over two years now, with a bunch of other people to develop a set of generic procedures that California counties can use to conduct their manual tally. (The manual tally is a legally-mandated "automatic recount" of ballots cast in 1% of precincts.)

Well, I've finished this set of procedures and you can find them here:

http://josephhall.org/procedures/ca_tally_procedures-2008.pdf

Comments welcome!

I have an academic paper outlining how we constructed these procedures but I can't yet share that document.

Note that we worked closely with officials in San Mateo county and more indirectly with Alameda, Marin and Yolo counties to do this research. San Mateo uses a more specific set of procedures in their elections, adjusted for their county and voting system.

Everyone out there, take a page from LQ and hype up a stupid-ass movie, Expelled, by linking to where people can get the real information when it comes out tomorrow.

Intelligent design is for prosimians.

If you don't like new flickr videos playing automatically when you open a bunch up in tabs:

1. Click on your name in the upper-right corner of flickr.
2. Click on the “Privacy & Permissions” tab.
3. Scroll down and change the “AutoPlay Videos” setting to “No”:

It's official, the final cylon is John Frakkin' McCain!

Ashkahn pointed me to this great minimalist free and open source software license:

           DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
                   Version 2, December 2004

Copyright (C) 2004 [YOUR NAME]
 [YOUR ADDRESS/EMAIL]
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long
as the name is changed.

           DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
  TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

The wikipedia entry points out that it could use an indemnification clause (explicitly stating that the authors of the software are not responsible for any issues). To do this, I'd add:

1. We're NOT RESPONSIBLE WHEN IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK.

To read more like a generic license (like the BSD), I'd change it as such

DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO AND DON'T BLAME US PUBLIC LICENSE
                   Version 3, April 2008

Copyright (C) 2004 [YOUR NAME]
 [YOUR ADDRESS/EMAIL]
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified
copies of this license document and accompanying software, and 
changing either is allowed.

           DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
  TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION

0. You just DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.
1. We're NOT RESPONSIBLE WHEN IT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK.

We're such fatasses we're starting to need heavy duty gurneys!

NYU’s Helen Nissenbaum gave a lecture entitled, “Privacy in Context” at the School of Information yesterday as the last Distinguished Lecture of the semester. You can find audio of her talk here and photos here.

Abstract

Contemporary practices of gathering, analyzing, and disseminating personal information have placed impossible demands on the concept of privacy. The weight of these demands, in turn, is reflected in norms, laws, policies, and technical requirements that frequently seem to miss the mark, failing to negotiate a reasonable course between unbridled opportunism, on the one hand, and suspicious intransigence, on the other. This talk will present key elements in the theory of contextual integrity, which builds upon structural aspects of social life to enrich our understanding of privacy and its importance as a moral and political value. Allowing context-relative social norms and context-based social values into the scope of analysis enables nuance and subtle discrimination, often missing in other dominant approaches, in modeling and theorizing privacy as well as adjudicating and justifying particular privacy claims.

Bio

Helen Nissenbaum is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, where she is also a Faculty Fellow of the Information Law Institute. Grants from the National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, and U.S. Department of Homeland Security have supported her research on privacy, trust online, security, intellectual property, and several projects investigating moral and political values embodied in computer and information systems, notably, search engines, video games, and facial recognition systems. She has produced three books, Emotion and Focus, Computers, Ethics and Social Values (co-edited with D.J. Johnson), and Academy and the Internet (co-edited with Monroe Prince), and co-founded the journal Ethics and Information Technology. Before joining the faculty at NYU, Nissenbaum served as Associate Director of Princeton University’s Center for Human Values and has held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. She earned a B.A. (Honors) from the University of Witwatersand, Johannesburg, and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford.

After Gov. Culver signs the legislation today, Iowa will become the 30th state to require the use of paper records with their voting systems (8 more use paper records statewide without a specific legislative requirement).

Bravo!

There's much more work to be done, of course...