21/9/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and Zero Economics

This is the first post of WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics for this week. Enjoy and stay tuned for more.


Last week I wrote about the 'discovery' of the van Gogh painting (here). This week, it's another discovery, this time via MOMA archives - of Mies van der Rohe's designs: http://it.phaidon.com/agenda/architecture/articles/2013/september/19/mies-van-der-rohe-plans-found-in-moma-archive/
Amazing. Mies is an architect of depth framed by the simple, distilled geometry and contextualised by industrial simplicity of materials. Images in the article clearly prove his fascination with and mastery of perspective.

Example? http://www.miessociety.org/legacy/projects/friedrichstrasse-office-building/

Example built?
http://theartstack.com/gurdgiev/collections/architecture#/artist/mies-van-der-rohe/the-farnsworth-house

Example everyone should see at least once: http://www.miessociety.org/legacy/projects/neue-nationalgalerie/#1


On the topic of mastery of perspective - an uneven (in quality) series of aerial photographs via the Foreign Policy magazine: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/19/birds_eye_view_awesome_aerial_pictures_world
The opening shot is striking, as is number 7:
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/09/19/birds_eye_view_awesome_aerial_pictures_world#6
JEFF PACHOUD is a superb photojournalist, but the series of Mushers competition is something to behold as art. Here's another shot from the series:

And on a theme of uncovering the long lost…http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519391/internet-archaeologists-reconstruct-lost-web-pages/
Who knew there was such a field as 'Internet Archaeology'… Next, we might get a 'Applied Feminism' studies or 'Useful Economics' too?.. or am I being too optimistic?..


Via the same source, MIT Technology Review, comes another and even more fascinating piece of research:
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519306/most-influential-emotions-on-social-networks-revealed/
Apparently, the leading emotion of the social networks is anger. Not love (this still remains physical, one assumes, and personal) or empathy (which probably is not that 'powerful' in the number of its expressions in daily lives of human beings) but anger… Oh, well, don't tell Irish politicians about this research or they will renew their calls to 'regulate' and 'improve' 'the internet thingy' that 'those young people are using all of the time'…

In the above: (a) is the network structure, in which each node stands for a user and the
link between two users represents the interaction between them. In (b) each node is coloured by its emotion. Red stands for anger, green represents joy, blue stands for sadness and black represents disgust. The regions of same colour indicate that
closely connected nodes share the same sentiment.


On science (applied stuff) side, here's Google foray into something really pioneering and ambitious: pushing out death… http://www.businessinsider.com/google-is-launching-a-company-that-hopes-to-cure-death-2013-9
Someone in Google got the Elon Musk Syndrome and I like it! Next, Apple will need something breaking too, seriously breaking. But I am afraid that absent Steve Jobs, the company will continue stamping out marginalised improvements, undeterred by the fact that the fad has moved to the mass markets with lower leadership quotient (e.g. 'Big in Japan' moment is nearing for Apple). Just think: a decade ago, you'd expect a car company producing a Model 5S after a Model 5, while you would have expected Apple to think up a Hyperloop. Now, we have the inverse.


"Common sense is particularly well adapted to handling the complexity of everyday situations. We get intro trouble when we project our common sense to situations outside the realm of everyday life." Got you interested? Superb review of the "Everything is obvious once you know the answer" book by Duncan J. Watts:
http://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2011/07/is-everything-obvious-once-you-know-the-answer/
And once you've read the review, read this: http://www.fergco.co/2013/09/2092013-did-capitalism-fail-by-roman.html
Visualising common sense is a hard thing, but here's a good simple graph example:
http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2013/09/longer-sentences-and-prison-growth-part-1.html by an old colleague of mine from the UofC, Prof John Pfaff


When it comes to history, records are certainty… and here is a fascinating visualisation (interactive) of the 100 years worth of meteorites recorded in our archives: http://visualizing.org/full-screen/56202


Some interesting, compositionally and occasionally dynamically, infrared landscape photography by David Keochkerian:
http://emorfes.com/2013/07/22/surreal-infrared-landscape-photography-by-david-keochkerian/

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Liking Library Data

If you had told me ten years ago that teenagers would be spending free time "curating their social graphs", I would have looked at you kinda funny. Of course, ten years ago, they were learning about metadata from Pokemon cards, so maybe I should have seen it coming.

Social networking websites have made us all aware of the value of modeling aspects of our daily lives in graph databases, even if we don't realize that's what we're doing. Since the "semantic web" is predicated on the idea that ALL knowledge can be usefully represented as a giant, global graph, it's perhaps not so surprising that the most familiar, and most widely implemented application of semantic web technologies has been Facebook's "Like" button.

When you click a Like button, an arc is added to Facebook's representation of your social graph. The arc links a node that represents you and another node that represents the thing you liked. As you interact with your social graph via Facebook, the added Like arc may introduce new interactions.

Google must think this is really important. They want you to start clicking "+1" buttons, which presumably will help them deliver better search. (You can try following me+, but I'm not sure what I'll do with it.)

The technology that Facebook has favored for building new objects to but in the social graph is derived from RDFa, which adds structured data into ordinary web pages. It's quite similar to "microdata", a competing technology that was recently endorsed by Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. Facebook's vocabulary for the things it's interested in is called Open Graph Protocol (OGP), which could be considered a competitor for Schema.org.

My previous post described how a library might use microdata to help users of search engines find things in the library. While I think that eventually this will be an necessity for every library offering digital services, the are a bunch of caveats that limit the short-term utility of doing so. Some of these were neatly described in a post by Ed Chamberlain:

• the library website needs to implement a site-map that search engine's crawlers can use to find all the items in the Library's catalog
• the library's catalog needs to be efficient enough to not be burdened by the crawlers. Many library catalog systems are disgracefully inefficient.
• the library's catalog needs to support persistent URLs. (Most systems do this, but it was only ten years ago that I caused Harvard's catalog to crash by trying to get it to persist links. Sorry.)

But the clincher is that web search engines are still suspicious of metadata. Spammers are constantly trying to deceive search engines. So search engines have white-lists, and unless your website is on the white-list, the search engines won't trust your structured metadata. The data might be of great use to a specialized crawler designed to aggregate metadata from libraries, but there's a chicken and egg problem: these crawlers won't be built before libraries start publishing their data.

Facebook's OGP may have more immediate benefits. Libraries are inextricably linked to their communities; what is a community if not a web of relationships? Libraries are uniquely positioned to insert books into real world social networks. A phrase I heard at ALA was "Libraries are about connections, not collections".

Libraries don't need to implement OGP to put a like button on a web page, but without OGP Facebook would understand the "Like" to be about the web page, rather than about the book or other library item.

To show what OGP might look like on a library catalog page, using the same example I used in my post on "spoonfeeding library data to search engines":

<html> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

Open Graph Protocol wants the web page to be the digital surrogate for the thing to be inserted into the social graph, and so it wants to see metadata about the thing in the web page's meta tags. Most library catalog systems already put metadata in metatags, so this part shouldn't be horribly impossible.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
<meta property="og:title" content="Avatar - Mysteries of Septagram #2"/>
<meta property="og:type" content="book"/>
<meta property="og:isbn" content="9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:url"   
      content="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:image" 
      content="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Example Library"/>
<meta property="fb:admins" content="USER_ID"/>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span>Author: Paul Bryers (born 1945)</span> 
 <span>Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The first thing that OGP does is to call out xml namespaces- one for xhtml, a second for Open Graph Protocol, and a third for some specific-to-Facebook properties. A brief look at OGP reveals that it's even more bare bones than schema.org; you can't even express the fact that "Paul Bryers" is the author of "Avatar".

This is less of an issue than you might imagine, because OGP uses a syntax that's a subset of RDFa, so you can add namespaces and structured data to your heart's desire, though Facebook will probably ignore it.

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
      xmlns:og="http://ogp.me/ns#"
      xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml"
      xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
      xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/"> 
<head> 
<title>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</title>
<meta property="og:title" 
      content="Avatar - Mysteries of Septagram #2"/>
<meta property="og:type" 
      content="book"/>
<meta property="og:isbn" 
      content="9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:url"   
      content="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762"/>
<meta property="og:image" 
      content="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg"/>
<meta property="og:site_name" 
      content="Example Library"/>
<meta property="fb:app_id" 
      content="183518461711560"/>
</head> 
<body> 
<h1>Avatar (Mysteries of Septagram, #2)</h1>
 <span rel="dc:creator">Author: 
    <span typeof="foaf:Person" 
        property="foaf:name">Paul Bryers
    </span> (born 1945)
 </span>
 <span rel="dc:subject">Science fiction</span>
 <img src="http://coverart.oclc.org/ImageWebSvc/oclc/+-+703315758_140.jpg">
</div>

The next step is to add the actual like button by embedding a javascript from Facebook:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script   src="http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js#appId=183518461711560&xfbml=1"></script>
<fb:like href="http://library.example.edu/isbn/9780340930762/" 
       send="false" width="450" show_faces="false" font=""></fb:like>

The "og:url" property tells facebook the "canonical" url for this page- the url that Facebook should scrape the metadata from.

Now here's a big problem. Once you put the like button javascript on a web page, Facebook can track all the users that visit that page. This goes against the traditional privacy expectations that users have of libraries. In some jurisdictions, it may even be against the law for a public library to allow a third party to track users in this way. I expect it shouldn't be hard to modify the implementation so that the script is executed only if the user clicks the "Like" button, but I've not been able to find a case anyone has done this.

It seems to me that injecting library resources into social networks is important. The libraries and the social networks that figure out how to do that will enrich our communities and the great global graph that is humanity.

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Libraries Creating Connections

"Libraries should stop focusing on their collections and start focusing on their communities" is something I've said before. Today, I learned that I may need to revise that. Two presentations today at Code4Lib 2011 showed how a library might do both at the same time.

Nell Taylor and Margaret Heller talked about the Chicago Underground Library, a grass-roots special collection that focuses on a specific place, Chicago.

The Chicago Underground Library is an all-inclusive collection of Chicago-specific media, produced by and for the community. Through our unique indexing of contributors and our open venue, we provide a space for individuals, organizations and ideas to come together, and creative connections to emerge.

They'll take anything into their collection, even a book of poems bought for a dollar made by a local guy Taylor met on a bus. Their goal is to use the collection and "obsessive cataloging" to create connections between people and places.

I'm guessing that a hot topic at Code4Lib 2012 will be Search Engine Optimization (SEO), but Taylor and Heller were the first and only to mention it this year. They make the metadata on their item pages easy for search engines to consume, and that's what drives the connections to people. People google themselves and their places, and lots of things happen and have happened that never enter the pages of The Chicago Tribune.

The Underground Library has a lot in common with the Chinatown Storefront Library project that I wrote about last year. They're running on a shoestring, living in borrowed space, and relying on volunteer labor. With some luck, they'll get some funding and some space of their own, but they have no shortage of courage and audacity.

The most surprising talk today came in the "lightning session". Haruki Ono, a student at University of Tsukuba in Japan, told us about project Shizuku. Shizuku is named after the heroine of Hayao Miyazaki's movie Whisper of the Heart. Shizuku loves reading books, and goes to the library every day. She notices that one other user has signed the checkout slip for many of the books she loves. To make a long story short enough for this blog post, they end up getting married.

Code4Lib 2011 Conference Lightning Talks - Haruki Ono

View more presentations from milkyalab.

Project Shizuku aims to use library circulation data to connect users, not to other books they would like to read, but to other users. When I wrote about "Biblio-Social Objects" in December, somehow it didn't occur to me how much local libraries could leverage their non-virtuality to create relationships and build community.

You learn something new and meet someone new every day, especially at Code4Lib.

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Google's Wave is a Tsunami of Conversation

Human communication is a magical thing, and over the last decade, we've acquired some super-powers. We've had the telephone for a hundred and thirty three years and it is still developing. Nowadays you can hardly set your twelve-year-old loose in the mall without packing a cell phone, and people are dying because they just have to send texts while driving. Just think about all the "conversation" tools we've added since the birth of the internet: e-mail, instant messaging, chat rooms, mailing lists, bulletin boards, blogs, various and sundry social networks, Facebook, Skype, Twitter. Our use of these tools will continue to evolve, but at some point there's going to be a consolidation. Do we really need both Twitter and Facebook?

Yesterday, I was lucky enough to get an invitation to the Google Wave Preview. I have no idea whether Wave will be the next big thing, but I can tell you it won't fail for lack of ambition. Unlike Twitter, which started with a concept so simple that it sounded really stupid, Wave starts by imagining what email would look like if its designers were to start from scratch, knowing what we know today. The result is a daunting attempt to roll all of our communication superpowers into a single user interface. At first, I couldn't really figure out how to get Wave to do what I wanted it to do. Part of the problem was that some of the features mentioned in the help videos had not been activated in the Preview version, though they are still working in the "Sandbox" version which has been available to developers for a few months now. Other things just don't work yet- the contacts module seems very buggy, which is a big problem because you need that to connect with other "Wavers". Luckily, my multitool communications mischmash is still working, and I was able to find some friends (via Twitter and Facebook) who were in the same situation as myself, still stumbling around a dark room of functionality, looking for someone to connect with.

With some help here and there, I gradually figured things out. Wave introduces several new (to me) user-interface widgets; it struck me that web applications rarely introduce new interface widgets, unlike applications like Excel or Photoshop that put powerful capabilities in inteface objects. I still haven't figured out the sliders. The threaded discussions have little colored boxes that indicate who is typing something. The overall effect is that gMail has been tricked out and turbocharged. After a day of playing with it, I'm not sure I like the user interface, but I can't really think af any way to make it better given the scope of what Wave is trying to do.

The focus of Wave is editable, threaded conversations, i.e. waves. (There's already a convention to use lower case w for the conversations and upper case W for the platform as a whole.) These are quite well done. They support hierarchical threading, styled text, auto-linking, distributed editing, history, history playback, insertion of images, videos, and software objects known as extensions (there is a poll widget pre-installed). The one thing that's missing is undo. I can think of all sorts of uses for these capabilities; I intend to try a few over the next week or so.

The intro videos plug a tool called Bloggy that allows you to publish a wave to your blog. Bloggy is a robot that you add as a participant in your conversation. I spent about an hour trying to figure out how to get Bloggy to work, until I discovered (via Twitter) that Bloggy had not been activated on the Preview version yet.

Having failed with Bloggy, I started thinking "Is that all there is?" and envying Google's white-hot overhype machine. But then @jillmwo pointed me to the way to search on public waves (put "with:public" before a search). Immediately the little ripply waves I was seeing turned into a tsunami, and I began to see the enormous possibilities of Wave. To make a wave public, you add a participant called "Public" (public@a.gwave.com) to the wave; "Bloggy" does the same thing.

The ability to search public waves (and to make your own public wave) is a feature qualitatively different from anything I've seen before. A public wave is sort of the bastard offspring of a Twitter hashtag mated with a Wikipedia topic page. When it matures, this creature will surely be a monstrous beast; what no one can tell yet is whether the beast will be a tame workhorse or whether it will be a velociraptor requiring a good strong cage. New technology is always easy to create and control compared to new social practice.

If it was me trying to invent email from scratch, I would spend 80% of my effort on spam prevention. It looks to me as though many of Wave's feaures have been hidden in the Preview because the functions needed for spam prevention are not ready yet. This is not to say that the Wave team is not spending 80% of its effort on spam prevention- these are incredibly hard things to get right. As an example, it's currently not possible to remove a participant from a wave, and any public wave participant can see the addresses of all the other participants. The problems with the contacts module are also probably related- waves from people you might not know just appear in your inbox, even though it looks like the intent is for them to first appear in the "Requests" folder in the "Navigation" module. Groups are also not yet implemented. It's difficult to know how this will play out until we see everything working.

Since the Preview roll-out, there have been quite a number of negative reviews by people pointing to all the problems in Google Wave. I think these are missing the point to some extent. Sure, Wave could end up being a complete failure, but even if that happens, Wave is giving us today a glimpse of what the future could look like. If not Wave, then surely there will be a SuperTwitter or a SpaceBook or maybe even a MagicForce that will contend for the consolidation of our one hundred flowers of conversation.

Note: this post will also be published as a public wave.

Related articles

• Google Wave could threaten Facebook, Twitter (computerworld.com)
• What's Next for Google Wave (blogs.wsj.com)
• Google Wave: Early Protope Not So Useful (casesblog.blogspot.com)

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Why did you ReTweet that Tweet?

Dan Zarella has been using Twitter as a Petri dish for human behavior. I recently discovered his blog while searching for information on the propagation of vocabulary on social networks. He bills himself as a "social media and viral marketing scientist". One thing he's looked at is how retweets spread, which is worth a look.

I was interested in why people retweet. Since it's Friday, I thought it might be fun to try a poll on the subject. If you use Twitter, please give it a try, and retweet the link!

Directions: Look at your Twitter update history. Find the last thing you retweeted (not this!). For that retweet, pick the one answer which best expresses the most important reason for you to retweet that tweet. If there's another reason I haven't thought of, leave a comment!

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Dung Beetle Armament and the Real Threats to Scientific Publishing

To illustrate an article on dung beetle armament, the New York Times Science section published a graphic with a spectacular montage of 35 animals with grotesque armaments, ranging from the Narwhal to the Giraffe Weevil. 13 of them are extinct. The reason that many dung beetles have evolved such elaborate armaments is not so much that they are effective in combat with other dung beetles, but rather that female dung beetles select mates based upon the outward display of combat fitness.

In my last post, I argued that scholarly publishers were not being threatened by imminent disruption by the same factors that have the newspaper publishing industry on the brink. I suggested that a potential vulnerability of the scholarly publishing industry would be the disintegration of the linkage between the industry's activity, publishing scholarly articles, and the industry's main revenue source- library subscriptions. I see two possible ways that this could occur. It could occur through a collapse of library funding; I hope to discuss that in a future post. This post discusses another way this could occur: I think there is a possibility that the adoption of social networking technologies will lead to a collapse of scholarly publishing as it exists today.

If this sounds a bit far-fetched, consider the parallels between scholarly publishing and dung beetle armament. The development of scholarly publishing today is driven by the selections made by authors about where and how to publish articles. The authors ultimate goal is to propagate their work and thus gain tenure, status and funding, just as "the ultimate goal" of the female dung beetle is to gain a safe tunnel to enjoy dung and raise baby dung beetles. The authors do not really know which journals do the best job of propagating their work, but they recognize prestige and the badges of prestige, and they know what sorts of publications will look best to their tenure committees. Authors do not consider the cost of journals any more than female dung beetles consider the energy cost of male armature. The size and form of today's scholarly publishing ecosystem is thus driven to a significant extent by the superficial judgments of tenure committees.

Anything that might change the way tenure committees, and thus authors, perceive journal publication has the potential to reverse the fortunes of journal publishers. To my mind, social networking technologies have that potential as do few other other things on the horizon. The reason is that tenure decisions have used journal publication records as objective measures of a candidate's social status within the scientific community. Publication in a prestigious journal has been an important way for scholars to become known, to gain speaking invitations, and to advance ideas. But publications are only part of this process. Knowing the right people, studying with the right professors, schmoozing at conferences, all of these are probably more important to the advancement of new ideas, but they have been very hard to measure in any objective way.

Social network technologies open new possibilities for the propagation of new ideas and for the assessment the impact of those ideas. Already, we see people using the number of followers they have on Twitter or the number of recommendations they have on LinkedIn as measures of social status, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that similar measures could be used to evaluate young academics or to award grants. It's beyond dispute that Twitter is already being widely used to propagate links to interesting technical papers and posts on scientific subjects. If targeted development of social network-based evaluation methodologies were pursued by groups such as the library community who wish to re-inject usage and low-cost access into the tenure equation, the competitive environment for scholarly and scientific publishers could change radically.

Every threat is an opportunity, of course, and it's equally possible that social networking technologies could reinforce the scholarly publishing industry- after all, dung beetle armaments evolve to adapt to changing fashion choices among female dung beetles. A potential weakness- for example, the unwillingness of people to post or retweet links to subscriber-only content, could turn into strengths if publishers develop access models that grant special access for re-tweeted links or an author's Facebook friends. Publishers could also try to ward off challengers in the scholar evaluation game by developing improved and more ostentatious badges of honor- best paper prizes, awards for the most forwarded paper, etc.

In fact, I've come up with a mathematical model for how all this will evolve. First, assume a spherical dung beetle...
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Death, another unsolved problem. Wait... Facebook says it's a "Known Problem"

Last September, the library world lost one of its really nice people and great resources. Johan van Halm was one of those people I would see at practically every conference I went to. I remember meeting him a bit more than 10 years ago when I had just started in the library and information business. He went out of his way to introduce me to many of his friends, and I soon realized that he knew just about everyone in the library automation world. We would make it a point to get together for a drink at least once every ALA. I really miss him.

But I'm not writing about Johan today- but I had to get that out of the way. I wanted to write about LinkedIn. You see, Johan is a "connection" of mine on LinkedIn. Every time I look at the list of my connections on LinkedIn, there I see Johan, living on forever in social network space. I could remove him as a connection, of course, but somehow that just doesn't seem right. Also, LinkedIn encourages you to treat your connections and the network they expoe to you as valuable assets and protects them accordingly. In contrast, your Facebook and Twitter "friends" are by default exposed to just about everyone. So on LinkedIn, it would not be to one's advantage to unconnect with someone just because they've left the corporeal parts of this life.

I hope you're sitting down, dear reader, because I have some serious things to discuss with you. Neither you nor I are going to be forever avoid "becoming deceased". However, to make this bleak situation a bit easier to swallow, let's assume, just for fun, that both you and are are going to live forever. In that case, I can pretty much guarantee you that everyone who is following you now on Twitter, all your Facebook Friends, all your LinkedIn Connections, all the friends of your friends, and even all the email accounts that you send jokes to, they will all either pass away into inactivity or become zombies controlled by someone else who is probably not your friend or connection.

Now it might just be that all the social networks we have become so enthralled with have just assumed that they themeselves will have gone belly-up or will have gone through their liquidity event before the death problem becomes severe. Or more likely, its just that they experence such a large volume of accounts fading away into inactivity that having users die is only a small perturbation on their services. But it is certainly the case that as these services become more important to our lives, the fact that we are not immortal increasingly must be addressed.

LinkedIn has done it this way:

What if I see a Profile of someone who is deceased?

Unfortunately, there may be a time when you come across a Profile of a deceased colleague, classmate or connection. If this occurs you are welcome to notify Customer Service that the Profile still exists and may need to be removed. We ask that you provide any important information about the deceased member that may aid our Privacy Department in their investigations and act on the account accordingly. Items to provide in your email would be one or two of the following:

1. An Obituary Link.
2. A Death Notice.
3. Consular Report of Death.
4. Death Certificate.

The profile "may need to be removed"?????

Facebook is also ready with a policy:

Profile: Bugs and Known Problems

I’d like to report a deceased user or an account that needs to be memorialized.

Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honor requests from close family members to close the account completely.

"Bugs and Known Problems"???? There are some other odd results when you search Facebook help for "death", and following one of these results, you get: a link to Facebook's "Deceased" page.

GMail has an elaborate paper based procedure to access a deceased person's mail:

Accessing a deceased person's mail

If an individual has passed away and you need access to the content of his or her mail, please fax or mail us the following information:

1. Your full name and contact information, including a verifiable email address.
   
2. The Gmail address of the individual who passed away.
   
3. a.The full header from an email message that you have received at your verifiable email address, from the Gmail address in question. (To obtain the header from a message in Gmail, open the message, click 'More options,' then click 'Show original.' Copy everything from 'Delivered-To:' through the 'References:' line. To obtain headers from other webmail or email providers, please refer to http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22454#) b.The entire contents of the message.
4. Proof of death.
   
5. One of the following: a) if the decedent was 18 or older, please provide a proof of authority under local law that you are the lawful representative of the deceased or his or her estate or b) if the decedent was under the age of 18 and you are the parent of the individual, please provide a copy of the decedent’s birth certificate.
   

Postal Mail:

Google Inc.
Attention: Gmail User Support
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043
Fax: 650-644-0358 After we've received the above information, we'll need 30 days to process and validate the documents that you've provided. If you need access to the address sooner, in accordance with state and federal law, it is Google's policy to only provide information pursuant to a valid third party court order or other appropriate legal process. Please note that our ability to ability to comply with these requests varies according to applicable law.

I'll bet that even if you have made a last will and testament, you've not included any instructions there about what your executor is to do with your email accounts, your blog passwords, your websites, your social networks. Probably your family might want access to your flickr and youtube account. Also, if you think about it, you don't really want your executor poking around in your e-mails, especially that address you use only for illicit activity.

Part of my interest in the death problem stems from my interest in the Google Book Search settlement. You see, book authors and publishers have been ignoring the death problem for much longer than the Facebooks and Gmails of the world have been. The result is that many works are "orphaned", which means that the rights holders cannot be found or died without leaving instructions or documention about what to do with their intellectual property. It's worse outside the US, because the duration of copyright protection frequently depends on the death date of the author, which can be rather difficult to ascertain. Now that we have the technology to make out-of-print books in libraries generally available through the internet, the corpus of orphan works is once again important, but copyright law presents barriers to many uses, particularly those with economic value less that the cost of finding rights holders and obtaining permissions.

Do you think that perhaps Google is saving its deceased-person access requests for the day 50 years from now when they will become relevant to copyright status? I'll bet the answer is NO.
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Smart Social Networks (consult a health professional before reading)

Different social networks have different properties with respect to transmission of information. Physicists have studied these sorts of networks in a variety of contexts- the problems of electronic conduction in random media and oil propagation in porous rock are deeply connected to the problems of virus transmission between people or between computers, for that matter.

A phenomenon that occurs in many of these networks is that propagation through the network can depend exponentially on parameters such as connection strength, connectedness of nodes, dimensionality of the network, etc. To use twitter as an example, a link might propagate to ten times as many people if the retweet rate changes by 10% (numbers completely fabricated). Or it might be that Macs are a million times less likely to be infected by a virus even because they are only 10 times less likely to retransmit a virus. (the product of a factor of 5 lower density and a factor of 2 intrinsic security (numbers that might not be true, but should be)).

I've been thinking a lot recently about propagation on networks this past week because of the news on influenza A (H1N1) AKA swine flu. You see, I got back from a week's vacation in Mexico a week ago, and I was just amazed at the break-out of flu hysteria. The amount of sheer stupidity out there is just appalling. I am reminded of Ionesco's Rhinocéros when I hear how common sense has also taken a vacation and gotten the flu. It's particularly striking when raw prejudice is accepted by otherwise rational people as prudence. One of many amazing bits of non-thought that I've heard or seen this past week: Perfectly healthy Students at Slippery Rock State University who went to Mexico are being prevented from attending graduation.

Lost in this are many shreds of rationality: Let's suppose a pandemic is really going to happen. That means that all of us will get exposed sooner or later. From the public health point of view, the spread needs to be slowed sufficiently that public health resources can be marshalled in plenty of time. But from the individual point of view, however, the worst thing for you is to contract the disease at the peak of the pandemic, when society's resources are most strained. There are two ways to avoid this- one is to become a hermit and hope you are not exposed until after the peak. The other is to contract the disease early, before the public health system comes under strain (making sure not to give it to anyone else). It's just the flu!

Maybe part of the reason for hysteria is that people don't understand the exponentials I mentioned above. When confronted with a potentially deadly pandemic, it's hard to imagine that something as simple as washing your hands could stop the scary monster in its tracks. You know intuitively that washing your hands will only protect you a little bit, so how can that be the answer?

For the purposes of this blog, the swine flu is just a chunk of information that has the ability to be transferred from one node of a social network to another. It's a reminder that social transmission of information can have bad consequences as well as good ones, and that the ultimate health of the social network is determined by how well it can discriminate between the two. Twitter seems to be a very useful medium for transmission of memes. The network of twitters seems to act as an intelligent filter which exponentially removes things I'm not interested in while delivering to me stuff that I am interested in. Facebook has recently seemed very effective at transmitting "quizzes" to me, which I'm not thrilled with, but seems to be evolving in a more self-aware way.

And in case you wondered, there is

1. no chance you'll get swine flu just by reading this
   
2. ...because I am perfectly healthy and showing no symptoms
   
3. ...but you may want to contact your local health authorities just to be sure
   
4. ...and since you've read it anyway, go wash your hands.
   

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