Ethics: June 2008 Archive Page

I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris's Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote "Parasites on the Internet." Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke:

I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy in 2000 was the linchpin of a long form piece of conceptual art. Pseudo burned over $25 million in private and institutional capital over a span of seven years. Pseudo was a fake company.

This one makes the o'l head spin... here's the background. NBC journalist Tim Russert dies at work; NBC holds off on reporting the news until the family can be notified.  Someone who works for the company that supplies internet access to NBC updates the Wikipedia entry for Russert before NBC breaks the story. Scandal? Innocent mistake? Just cause for termination? (Silicon Alley Insider)

According to the NYT, the person who updated the Wikipedia entry 40 minutes before NBC reported it worked at Internet Broadcasting Services, a company that provides web services to TV stations including NBC affiliates. IBS says a "junior-level employee" changed the Wikipedia entry to reflect Russert's death because he or she thought it was common knowledge. When NBC discovered the entry--and freaked out about it--someone else at IBS deleted the date of Russert's death and changed all of the verb tenses back. And then IBS took care of the employee. NYT:

An I.B.S. spokeswoman...added that the company had "taken the necessary measures with the employee and apologized to NBC." NBC News said it was told the employee was fired."

Fired?

If the employee learned the news because NBC was officially distributing it to affiliates under embargo, that's one thing (the firing would be appropriate). If the employee heard about it unofficially, however, from friends at NBC or I.B.S., then the firing was outrageous.* UPDATE: An NBC exec disputes the NYT report, and says the IBS employee was merely suspended, temporarily. We'll update if we can confirm.

It's one thing for a news organization to decide to delay reporting news of a staffer's death out of deference to his or her family (this makes sense). It's another for the organization to expect other organizations to follow the same policy. And it is yet another thing for someone to deliberately strike accurate facts from a collective record to appease an upset client, which is what someone at IBS apparently did.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

Inside Higher Ed:

Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers -- sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable staff members -- have found themselves losing their jobs. (High school newspaper advisers are even more vulnerable.)

"All you have to do is look around the country to see how many conflicts there are," said Mark Goodman, the Knight Chair of Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University and former executive director of the Student Press Law Center. "This has really gained steam."

It was with several recent such controversies in mind, and numerous instances of censorship at high schools in California, that the state's Legislature overwhelmingly approved legislation this month that would prohibit a college or school district from firing, suspending or otherwise retaliating against an employee for acting to protect a student's free speech. Last week, with the measure, SB 1370, sailing for passage and a trip to the governor's office for Arnold Schwarzenegger's hoped-for signature, the University of California quietly revealed its opposition to the bill.

In a letter to State Sen. Leland Yee, the legislation's sponsor, a lobbyist for the university system "respectfully" warned Yee that the university did not expect to abide by the requirement if it was enacted.

Although the First Amendment doesn't apply to Seton Hill because we are a private institution, I'm happy to work under an administration that upholds the principle of academic freedom.

I was busy at the Hypertext '08 conference these past few days, so only now am I following up on the AP vs. Bloggers story. According to NYT blogger Saul Hansell:

one key issue is the A.P. wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its articles. He suggested that this will put The Associated Press in direct conflict with bloggers. "If AP's guidelines end up like the ones they shared with me, we're headed for a Napster-style battle on the issue of fair use," Mr. Cadenhead wrote on his blog.

Although The A.P. wouldn't talk to me, several people I interviewed who have spoken to A.P. executives this week said the organization appears to be internally conflicted and has not yet been able to come up with a clear fair-use position.

But unless something changes, Mr. Cadenhead's experience indicates that The A.P. is going to assert a much stricter interpretation of fair use than most people on the Internet are used to.

John Kleinberg

This year's conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking.

A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections).  (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005)

Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a university karate club in the process of splitting in two.  34 nodes in the social network, 2 years researching each of these nodes, big chunk of a PhD work to investigate the conflict.

Compare the 30-year-old study of 34 nodes to the kind of information we can get out of massive network datasets -- both more and less information. It's easier to measure, hard to pose nuanced questions about what the connections mean. We can hand-code small subsets, but not on the large scale.

Notes that the goal is not to accumulate huge amounts of data, but rather to find the point where these two lies of research converge.

Intrinsically missing from large-scale studies -- we need to enrich our notion of link structure, so as to be able to talk about more complex, subtle questions.

Social networks aren't static structures -- they are circulatory systems for ideas and information. Tension between the global reach of diffusion and the localized views that most datasets (even massive ones) provide.  You can watch one person adopt something and see who's influenced by that, but you can't really watch the first 1000 people to adopt iPhones. How to find a dataset that will let us watch something spread, not just locally in the neighborhood of a node, but on a larger scale.

Example: chain-letter petitions.

Quoted from Vannevar Bush on the associated trails running through documents, and people as trailblazers. A person blazes a trail through a network of documents... a chain letter is a document that blazes a trail through a network of people. The document follows the social structure.

Shows the traditional picture of information propagating along a neat tree.  But the full tree is unobservable. But a chain letter petition includes traces -- a signature of all people that this particular incarnation of the chain letter has passed through.

People change the list, changing spellings, or adding joke names, or truncating sections. The analogy to mutational events is computationally very useful.  Every kind of genomic mutation that you can imagine.

Showed 20,000 nodes of the Iraq chain letter -- looks like hair.  More linear propagation than lateral propagation. Really few branches. (Jon has clarified that we're reconstructing the chain based on what we find... we don't have the whole tree.)  Trees for other chain letters have similar structure.

Timing gets you closer to the answer. Viral spreading is implicitly synchronous -- that each branch propagates at basically the same rate.  Biological viral infections impose internal schedules, but people don't forward information at the same rate, so different branches will progress at different rates.  Notes that there's been productive recent research in the time people take to respond to emails.

Because people within social networks will likely get multiple copies of a chain letter, the relative dates at which people woke up and found multiple copies of the chain letter in their in box means that the chain latter followed a depth chain -- only one copy was produced from each related group of friends who received it at the same time and got a copy from someone else before they acted on it. LiveJournal friendship networks produce a similar tree shape.

Spatial clusters... even in online social networks, there's a large amount of homophilia (you are friends with people who are similar to you).

Opposing influence -- sometimes people act only when they have multiple stimuli (multiple requests to send on the chain letter).

Altough you may hear about the chain letter from a remote link, you are not likely to participate until you've heard about it from enough of your closer relationships... so the chain letter only spreads locally, it doesn't jump a great distance to bridge the gap between you and a distant connection who shares few of your friends.

Can we use this information to predict which viral events will lead to cascades? Columbia University "Music Lab" has a leader board. They ran eight parallel versions of the site, letting the universes evolve independently. The leader board feedback leads to inequality. Random symmetry breaking in the beginning gets amplified. Genuinely bad songs didn't get propagated, and good songs weren't totally published; nevertheless there may be an element of inherent unpredictability in the efforts to predict viral success.

Protection of anonymity. Handing data over to researchers with anonymization is "weak to the point of being dangerous."  When we have detailed data about people, anonymization runs into trouble.  Someone who posts under multiple identities can readily be identified as the same person.  [I love the word -- "de-anonymize."]

The implications -- we may not object to our use trails being published without names attached, but as Jon notes it's possible to correlate the anonymized private data (such as Netfilx rentals) with public data (such as IMDB ratings).

The attacker of an anonymous network can have more power if they are part of the system. It's not hard to plant yourself in a large network, and leave some kind of privacy-breeching Trojan horse. If you knew the information would be released, it's surprisingly easy to compromise privacy by exploiting the pattern of links. The pattern will be so rich that anything  you create will be highly distinguishing and highly findable.

A network of 12 nodes is sufficient to identify within a dataset of 100M nodes. Would it be computationally hard to locate a particular node of 12?

In LiveJournal, you and 6 friends chosen at random can carry out an attack compromising (within the domain of an anonymized data set) 10 users. This can happen even unintentionally -- you and a group of friends likely already have a unique linking structure that compromise a set of people you've already linked to.

 A clique is a set of nodes that are all interconnected; an independent set has no links.  In a large set, you've got to have either a large clique or a large independent set.

Takeaway -- one way to prove that something exists is to show that there's a high probability that it will occur in a random structure.

The IM graph is not random, but we're randomizing the subgraph we're targeting. It's very unlikely that your subgraph is in the set of data released. We don't need to randomize to get that signature -- friendship structures already lay the groundwork for this kind of attack.

Reflections on privacy -- social networks are skeletal structures, but they are something that needs to be treated with care. Anonymization of data doesn't really protect users -- only our contractual agreement with the service provider is protecting our information.

 t ^ -1.5 describes the likelihood that you will answer a given e-mail in t days.  (Barabasi 2005)

Toronto Globe and Mail -- MySpace "doesn't just create social network, it anatomizes them. It spreads them out like a digestive tract on the autopsy table."  Do we want to know all that we can learn when the guts of our social networks spill out?  These relationships have been implicit, but social networking makes those relationships explicit.

GamePlasma.com broke a story about a new adventure game, Limbo of the Lost, which uses digital assets from the RPG Oblivion. (There are plenty of screenshots in the article.)

Eric was recently assigned a game developed by Majestic Studios titled "Limbo of the Lost." At first glance, this game appears to be your typical point and click adventure again. This time, however, something seemed oddly familiar to him. Eric, being the avid PC gamer that he is, noticed that there were some similiarties between Limbo of the Lost and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

The first example of this can be seen in the screenshots from Oblivion and Limbo of the Lost below. Notice how everything is placed in exactly the same place and almost all of the textures are identical. In fact, the only real difference is the quality of the texture and overall graphical look. Even the portrait that can be seen under the stairs is exactly the same as the one that can be found in Oblivion. Also, take note of the placement of the rug in the middle of the floor and the placement of the stairways. These similarities lead to many questions. How rampant are situations like this in games that fall under the radar of the typical gaming crowd?

Now, it's possible that Limbo of the Lost purchased the rights to re-use the art and 3D models, but Oblivion isn't the only game the creators of Limbo of the Lost have borrowed from.

Inside Higher Ed raises an interesting question. If a student paper learns that sensitive information in an unprotected computer file, and then writes a story about it, how should the administration react after learning the paper still has a copy of that protected information? Here's what happened at Western Oregon University:

In a letter sent to university officials late last week, the College Media Advisers Board of Directors condemned the university's response to a student newspaper article published in September. The story revealed that sensitive information about student applicants, including their Social Security numbers and grade point averages, had been left unprotected from public view.

In response to the article, university officials rifled through the newsroom in search of a copy of the computer file containing the sensitive student information. The paper's adviser also lost her job amid the furor, and a student was disciplined for copying the file and violating university policies designed to protect private information.

The board, which represents student newspaper advisers, denounced the university's "lack of understanding of basic journalism principles and ethics." But in detailing its dissatisfaction with the university's actions, the board also offered help.

The university punished the student reporter for making a copy of the file that the university was responsible for protecting, which sounds like shooting the messenger. Was it necessary to copy the entire file in order to write the story?  Hm... I might have taken a few screenshots -- just enough to back up the story. The interim adviser blames the fired adviser:

"Her firing was entirely justified," said Yehnert, an English professor. "She was a terrible media adviser all the way around."

Want to quote 5-25 words from an AP story? That'll be $12.50.  ($7.50 for non-profit or educational use.)  The AP has published a form that details the cost of an "Excerpt for Web Use" license.

The AP has a right to discourage people from posting the full content of articles online, just as you or I retain the copyright to our own writing (unless we explicitly give those rights away).  But to charge money even for brief quotations is to reject the Section 107 of the Copyright Act -- known as the "Fair Use Exception." 

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include--

(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Note that copying an entire book (or song, or movie) in order to avoid purchasing it is not "fair use."  Showing a clip from a movie in class, or posting quotations from a novel to back up a review or literary research paper, are all covered by "fair use."

Access to the words of public officials, as reported from various news sources, is an important part of the democratic process.  A candidate being interviewed on ABC should be able to quote from what an opponent said on NBC, and someone who calls in on a CBS show should be able to quote from what a guest said on CNN. The Fair Use Exception recognizes that anyone engaging in "criticism" or "comment" should have the same the ability to quote brief passages from published materials.

The line between blogging and journalism is fuzzy, and bloggers have been sued for making statements that a trained journalist would know not to make. The Society of Professional Journalists offers training sessions for bloggers who want to know what journalists know.

People are practicing journalism through blogs, Web site production and interaction with sites maintained by mainstream news organizations. They are contributing to the world's 24/7 news cycle, making it easy and accessible for more of us to be in the know.

The Society of Professional Journalists believes the world benefits from more news coverage, not less. Through its Citizen Journalism Academy, SPJ seeks to help everyone wanting to practice journalism to do so accurately, ethically and fairly. The Society aims to help participants understand how responsible practices could increase their reach and help them have strong journalistic reputations within their communities and around the world.

Chronicle

Kristin Roovers, a postdoctoral fellow at the Ottawa Health Research Institute who was found by U.S. investigators last year to have wrongfully doctored images published with her scientific research while at the University of Pennsylvania, was suspended last week pending an investigation into her work at the Canadian institution.

An excerpt from the book Grand Theft Childhood, which is being marketed as a message to parents that video games aren't the problem. As one of several supporting points, the artists argue in the following passage that it's not videogames that teach teenagers to think of the world as a place where violence and fear are normal:

Parents don't generally think about news as harmful to children, or that children even watch news programs. But surveys show that children and teens watch TV news regularly; sometimes, they just happen to be in the room when an adult turns the news on.  A child who sees a lot of violence on television, whether it's Law & Order reruns or news programs, is more likely to see the world as a scary place with lurking dangers far out of proportion to reality. But realistic depictions of violence, such as those on the news, are thought to be more likely to scare or desensitize children. As one child told us, "In video games, you know it's fake."

Given that older children and teens believe that news represents reality, and that TV news programs increasingly show graphic or sensationalized violence, there is a real risk of harm. Parents can help by keeping track of their kids' exposure to TV news, and helping them put it into context--for example, that stories get on the news because they are rare, and that events on the news--whether it's losing your house to a tornado or winning the lottery--are not likely to happen to them.

Research on television coverage of war shows that children of different ages are upset by different aspects, with younger ones more bothered by the visual images and teens by the complex issues, such as morality and justice, that are raised by news events.

In the business of journalism, there's a saying -- "If it bleeds, it leads."  That's a somewhat cynical recognition of the attention that people play to unusual things -- car crashes, school shootings, and plane wrecks. And visuals -- such as security camera footage, a chase seen through a police officer's dashboard camera, a journalist clinging to a telephone pole as a hurricane blows in from the ocean -- make good TV, because the images speak to our emotions.

TV is all about making an emotional connection with the viewer, but it's so one-sided.

Is too much weather bad for our children?  Coming up, we'll have a LIVE report from our own Slick Goodhair, who is outside, facing the weather, so that you can stay safe in your homes. He'll tell you the three simple ways you can save your family from the effects of too much weather. We'll also have a preview of a made-for-TV movie about a family that didn't trust their local TV journalists enough, went out into the weather completely unprepared, AND DIED! But first, these messages from our sponsors, who also don't want you to die. Have we mentioned lately that the internet is scary, that TV and movie stars are your only true friends, and that because we love you so much, and you've been so obedient good to us, we'll show you footage of adorable puppies!  Tonight! Live footage of yellow police tape at a completely deserted site where some event ended 12 hours ago!  Anchors infusing even the most routine story with tension and drama! Verbs disappearing from TV newscasts!  Present participles taking their place! Grammarians continuing to investigate!

Okay, I'm exaggerating. Television projects a distorted image of the world, in which the only thing that matters is being on TV... but there's a significant sliver of good, in that today's young people who watch The Daily Show or the Colbert Report, are at least familiar with comic riffs on the news.  And they can post their own opinions on blogs or on YouTube.

Now, much of this self-published material is dreck, but I'd rather my students create drek -- and learn from the process -- than passively absorb only what the media elite decide is worthy of attention.

I watch less and less TV these days, and more and more YouTube.  Of course, much of the content of YouTube is excerpts of footage from TV shows, or DVDs... when I heard the news that Harvey Korman had died, it was great to view some of my favorite clips of his performances on the Carol Burnett show and Blazing Saddles. The availability of archival material on YouTube let me put together my own retrospective clips show, drawing from material that fans of Harvey Korman had already decided to post online.  Composing my own personal playlist is an exercise in interpreting, evaluating, and re-contextualizing material that was created for a business model that favors linear distribution and passive consumption.

George Lucas, who recognized how much Star Wars fans wanted to participate in the universe he created, organized a short film contest.  Joe Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, posted on the internet every step of his creative journey towards building a science fiction series that played a huge part in revolutionizing the way science fiction stories are told. Now, practically every SF series works each individual episodes into a season-long arc, giving hints and planting clues that online fan clubs dissect and argue about. Of course, the soap operas have been doing this for decades. And even Paramount Pictures, which has a reputation for not being nearly as welcoming of fan interest in Star Trek, has in recent years given the OK for fan-produced amateur shows (some of them even involving the orignial actors).  I'm far more interested in what online communities do with TV than in the TV itself. 

Gonzalo Frasca touched on a crucial difference between video games and linear drama when he pointed out "Hamlet's dilemma would be irrelevant in a videogame, simply because he would be able 'to be' and 'not to be'" ("Ephemeral Games")  The creators of Peacemaker took useful advantage of this feature of the medium, encouraging players to role-play the leadership decision of both Israel and Palestine, in order to explore the depths of a complex and multifaceted environment. 

In games in general, I really appreciate that illusion of player agency -- when I know the PC so well that I willingly choose options that I might not necessarily choose myself, but which I know are likely to advance the story in a direction that supports the goals of my PC.

But I'm really blogging all this in order to point out how important it is to cast your net widely when you do research.

The prevalence of TV, and the prominence of TV journalism in the construction of a network's public identity has also burned into my memory some events that would have had little impact on my life if I hadn't happened to be watching them on TV, such as the US Federal assault on the Branch Davidian compound, the OJ Simpson verdict. And whenever I'm back in the Washington D.C. area and catch some of the local news, I'm reminded of how easy it is to tire of hearing about yet another drug-related shooting, yet another protest on the Mall, and yet another example of incompetence or scandal in the D.C. local government.

But my criticism of shallow local TV news shouldn't be extended to the international gravitas associated with the power of TV to provide an emotional message that unites.  I'm thinking of the American coverage of the JFK assassination and funeral, the Apollo 11 moon landing (my mother took a photo of the TV set, and I grew up looking at it in my photo album) and my own memory of watching the launch of the first space shuttle, scuds being fired in the first Gulf War, and footage of the World Trade Center's demise.  Someone has to be out there covering routine events, filling the airwaves with something or other in between the momentous occasions that make TV journalism really shine, and the reporters who can manage to tell a good story while also maintaining their credibility as journalists have my respect and admiration.

I haven't read Grand Theft Childhood yet, and I'm not confident that a few isolated quotes are sufficient to counter the findings of researchers who identified correlations between playing violent games and increased displays of aggression. I welcome the introduction into the memestream a popular discussion of videogames that challenges assumptions that I often see perpetuated in TV journalism.  Yet I note with some distress that the book is so usefully organized to supply "So there!" soundbites to defenders of videogames.

The article made sure not to phrase the poetry lessons as punishment -- the one who actually bought the beer served a few days in jail. This sounds like a creative and proportional way to respond to the problem. USA Today (Thanks for the tip, Rosemary.)

More than two dozen young people who broke into Robert Frost's former home for a beer party and trashed the place are being required to take classes in his poetry as part of their punishment.