[B]oredom is more than a mere flagging of interest or a precursor to mischief.   Some experts say that people tune things out for good reasons, and that over time boredom becomes a tool for sorting information — an increasingly sensitive spam filter.  In various fields including neuroscience and education, research suggests that falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative at least as often as they are disruptive.

Fascinating.  I’ve often felt that my mind processes information the best when I give it a chance to idle.  For instance, I’ll read complicated materials before bed and let my brain process things while I sleep.  When I awake, things often seem to have gelled.  Although the mental processes associated with sleep are likely quite different from those associated with boredom, it would seem that in both instances, the brain sometimes needs to detach in order to wade through information overload.

An updated and expanded study of information growth, conducted by a multi-disciplinary, multi-university team supported by corporate and foundation sponsorship, will complete an update of the 2003 Berkeley report by the end of the year.  The 2008 report will be the first in a three-year research program, sponsored by seven companies, AT&T, Cisco, IBM, LSI, Oracle, Seagate and the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and spanning three research universities, UC San Diego, MIT and UC Berkeley.

Hat tip to Lockergnome’s Tech News Watch.

Morse code has now been in use for more than 160 years. It still has practical applications in the modern world because almost anything can be used, from telegraph key to flashlight to pencil to fingertip, to tap out or flash a message. Severely disabled people even use Morse to communicate, sending out the code by eye movement or puffing and blowing.

For an excellent read on the history of the telegraph and its parallels to the internet, see The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage.

Here’s Morse’s patent, issued 168 years ago today:

More serious may be the loss of the circulating 35-millimeter theatrical prints.  While not original masters, these are the copies made for screenings at repertory theaters, art museum retrospectives and in college classes. . . .

. . . .

This latest fire, I hope, will prompt Universal and its fellow majors to better preserve not just key titles like “Duck Soup,” “Dracula” or “Vertigo” — which will surely be reprinted and return to circulation — but also the other 90 percent of their inventories, the less famous and therefore more vulnerable titles that the studio may not feel justify spending thousands to save. These are exquisite samples of 20th-century American culture and deserve to always be seen in their extravagant, sensual, big-screen glory.

It sounds like after the fire, some of Universals’ assets no longer exist beyond a single remaining master copy.  That’s troubling for several reasons.  First, should the masters be destroyed, the best (and in some cases, only) copies will be lost.  Second, for cultural use to be made of the materials, new copies must be made.

What does this have to do with law students?  The same thing: the importance of archiving and the dangers of failing to do so.  Every term, students suffer data catastrophes — hard drive crashes, stolen laptops, etc. — leading to lost class notes, outlines, paper drafts, etc.  Law school is stressful enough without the added strain of losing a 100-page outline two days before the final exam. But sadly, it seems to happen every term.

Back up your essential files, do so regularly, and keep them in secure and geographically distinct places, such as multiple computers, external hard drives kept elsewhere, network storage, and/or online storage.  Or do simple and quick backups: periodically email your essential files to yourself.

Advice part I (life and stress) here.
Advice part II (studying and attitudes) here.
Advice part III (back up your data) here.
Advice part IV (essay exams) here.
Advice part V (conclusory argumentation) here.
Advice part VI (incomplete argumentation) here.

According to the article, researchers have developed an effective technique to erase hard drives in minutes rather than hours:

The researchers concluded that permanent magnets are the best solution. Other methods, including burning disks with heat-generating thermite, crushing drives in presses, chemically destroying the media or frying them with microwaves all proved susceptible to sensitive, patient, recovery efforts.

The military need for such technology is obvious and is a simple no-brainer. But additionally interesting are the potential commercial and consumer applications of such technology. According to the article, the researchers claimed the magnetic eraser could be used to quickly erase VHS tapes, floppy drives, data cassettes and hard drives. Maybe someday soon, it will be unacceptable and even illegal for corporations and government agencies to keep sensitive information — like your social security number — on easily stolen laptops, unless those machines are equipped an effective auto-erasure mechanism.

Sunday’s New York Times includes a really interesting article by Alan Finder on how some companies now investigate job applicants on social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Xanga, and Friendster. See “For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé.”

The article underscores a simple but important fact: users of social network sites shouldn’t assume that their postings are private. Although names like “MySpace” paint an image of personal spaces, personal doesn’t mean private. It’s not difficult to get into these sites – as the article notes, for some sites such as MySpace, you generally only need to register. For Facebook, to view entries for a particular college, you only need an e-mail address from that college.

That means an awful lot of people can view Facebook entries: alumni with email addresses (which could include potential employers), professors, even campus police. Despite this, at an emotional level, many people assume that their personal websites, blogs, and social network postings are relatively personal spaces that won’t be noticed or invaded by others. These assumptions are wrong in at least two ways.

First, people might assume – incorrectly – that they’re not going to be noticed. True, most postings to personal websites, blogs, and social networking sites are probably viewed by hardly anyone, and at best by only a few of the poster’s friends. Because of this, people get a sense of false security that they’re broadcasting only to their personal crowd. That’s probably true for the most part, unless somebody’s looking you up. As said by Susan Crawford in an excellent posting on social networking, “Oddly, people using these spaces may feel that they’re just having a conversation with their friends, not thinking about large-scale, perhaps automated searches/hunts about them carried out. This is like being on a live TV interview, and seeing only the guy across from you, and not realizing that anyone can see you in the world.”

Susan’s right. Many posters assume that internet infoglut makes them invisible; after all, how will they stand out from the millions of other postings? But infoglut doesn’t create invisibility. At best, posters are relatively invisible. But when you combine social networking sites with indexing and searching capacities, relative invisibility can be fleeting.

Second, posters seem to expect – dangerously – that outsiders shouldn’t and therefore won’t intrude into their spaces. In the blogging context, Mike Madison recounts an instance where he forwarded to a Pitt Law colleague a link to a blog posting about that prof and another faculty member. One of them then casually mentioned to the student blogger that he or she had read the post. As Mike says, “The student was a bit surprised, I think; students generally expect that their blogging is their ‘space,’ and faculty (and others) shouldn’t intrude.”

But outsiders do intrude, and they might include law enforcement authorities. Ed Felten has described the use of social network sites by Princeton’s Public Safety officers (i.e., the Princeton campus police) in investigations into alcohol use and campus building-climbing. Particularly interesting is the controversy that ensued after it was revealed that Facebook was used in the investigations. In the end, Ed reports that “Public Safety stated that it would not hunt around randomly on Facebook, but it would continue to use Facebook as a tool in specific investigations. Many people consider this a reasonable compromise.” Ed further noted, “It feels right to me, though I can’t quite articulate why.”

Mike’s and Ed’s postings both touch upon a sense of some and perhaps many students that outsiders – professors, campus authorities, etc. – are not particularly welcome at student sites. That’s somewhat understandable: think of the family reunion where an older, uncool uncle hangs around a bit too long with the younger folks. I’d call this the creepiness factor. The creepiness factor is amplified when it’s law enforcement authorities who come visiting. But expectations that outsiders will stay away are dangerous. Considering the relative anonymity of web surfing, it’s doubtful that social norms will emerge to deter others from browsing student sites. If anything, the tremendous attention being given to social networking guarantees that more people will check these sites out.

Nonetheless, Ed’s posting suggests at least one way in which institutions might be pressured into adopting norms that limit their review of social networking sites. As Ed notes, after student outrage, the Princeton Public Safety director promised to use Facebook only in specific investigations. The Daily Princetonian reports that under new guidelines, “Officers can continue to use Facebook as a supplementary source for investigations, but cannot scour the site for parties or other activities. In addition, officers are prohibited from identifying themselves as students in their Facebook accounts.” In discussing the compromise, Ed notes the difficulty in trying to articulate why it’s reasonable for campus police to use Facebook as part of a specific investigation but not as a tool for random hunting.

Ed’s right that it’s difficult to articulate what’s reasonable and what isn’t. Maybe the distinction goes back, at least in part, to the creepiness factor noted above. Even if social network sites are public or semi-public, it’s creepy to think that law-enforcement authorities are trolling student sites on a general fishing expedition for inappropriate behavior. (And the creepiness is magnified a thousandfold-plus when the materials being perused are private. NSA, anyone?)

But it’s hard to conclude that it’s equally creepy for authorities to look up public materials as part of a specific investigation. (Which begs uncertainty, however, over just what is meant by a “specific” investigation…) And the same can probably be said, I think, about employment recruiters who use social networking sites to research specific applicants.

Thanks very much to Robhyndman.com, where I discovered the link to the Times article.

What happens to . . . web logs if a person dies and their executor notifies [the weblog's host] of their demise. Can one leave their account, username, password and API key number to another person in their will?

What a great question! It reminds me of the case last year of Lance Corporal Justin Ellsworth, who died in Iraq. After his death, his family asked Yahoo for access to his emails. Yahoo refused. After a court ordered Yahoo to hand over the contents of the account, Yahoo complied. But the parallel to Ellsworth has its limits. With emails, there are significant concerns over privacy: it just cannot be assumed that every deceased person wants his or her executors and heirs poring through their private and potentially embarrassing emails.

In contrast, blogs are intended for some level of public consumption and the privacy issues generally don’t run as high. (Though even with blogs, privacy concerns can exist, such as with David Lat, the formerly anonymous “Article III Groupie” who writes Underneath Their Robes.) Indeed, although many blogs are quickly abandoned, others are intended to serve as lasting statements of authorship, whether professional or personal (or both). As timethief noted in a later post, “Blogging is now and will remain part of what defined me as a unique individual.” But blogs aren’t books or magazines. After we’re gone, existing copies of books we wrote can continue to exist without additional effort on the part of our estates or heirs. And our estates and heirs can’t force consumers to return legally acquired copies of books.

But the book analogy is hard to apply to blogs. Blogs aren’t material objects and they’ll disappear without maintenance or preservation. But long-term maintenance isn’t really practical, at least yet, for blogs whose owners have passed away. If hosting accounts aren’t kept active, or applicable payments stop, or hosting providers go out of business, or computers fail, or blogging code & databases become incompatible with future technologies, our blogs — like other web-only publications — may disappear or break. Plus, a blog might be shut down by an author’s estate or heirs, unless perhaps some sort of enforceable provisions can be made by the author that the blog be maintained posthumously.

Communal blogs like The Volokh Conspiracy stand a better chance of lengthy lives, since maintenance tasks can be undertaken as new members arrive. But most other sites, even highly successful ones like Howard Bashman’s How Appealing, are run by only one person. For an estate or heir, long-term maintenance after an author’s demise is not necessarily simple or — excuse the pun — appealing. In a rare case, successful blogs like Bashman’s could be valuable estate assets that would encourage continued maintenance and even eventual profitable transfer, but most blogs will utterly lack any such kind of maintenance incentive. (Of course, this is all illustrative, and Eugene and Howard should be blogging for many decades to come!)

This raises the question of digital preservation. Because long-term maintenance may not always be feasible, digital preservation of old sites becomes really important, and the utility of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can’t be overstated. But I think that Wayback Machine is just the beginning of a dialogue over how — and when — to preserve web-only materials. Putting copyright issues to the side for the moment, the Internet Archive doesn’t archive all sites, and when it does, it archives some sites more often than others. Plus, it’s not entirely clear whether the Wayback Machine is currently capable of properly archiving all types of blogs: the Internet Archive states that sites that are database-driven or that generate dynamic web pages can’t be archived. I’d think this limitation could apply to at least some blogs (such as this WordPress blog, which is driven by a PHP & MySQL database).

But a quick review of the Wayback Machine suggests that, despite the disclaimer, the Internet Archive may be improving its ability to archive blogs — here’s links to a WordPress-run site that was archived incorrectly in March 2004, but appears to be much better represented in an archive from November 2004. Hopefully, the Internet Archive is continuing to improve its capability to archive different kinds of webpages. Needless to say, as web publishing technologies evolve, it will remain a struggle to find ways to accurately and authoritatively preserve such materials. My quick review of a number of blawgs suggests that some appear to have been pretty nicely archived, whereas others have not. I’ll address this more in a future post.

Thus, I think that timethief’s question — a really good one — leads to additional questions about whether web-only materials should be kept online, and if so, to even more questions about how, where, and by whom they should be maintained or preserved. I don’t think the answers to these questions are easy or obvious.

Searching the web, I found this flickr photo by “Ksaad,” who calls it “Digital Garbage.” Ksaad’s photo (which I’ve cropped slightly) nicely captures several parts of the [tag]digital preservation[/tag] dilemma — how many of these programs won’t work on a standard PC configuration of 2006? 2016? 2106? Even if a platform might somehow run these programs in 100 years, the media might degrade beyond recovery anyway.

Paper seems immortal in comparison.

Ksaad licensed this work under a Creative Commons License.

Quick answer #1: Because he wrote so much more beautifully than I ever will.

Quick answer #2: Because I wanted a placeholder.

Not-so-quick answer #3: When working on the blog’s design, I wanted something — anything — to serve as a placeholder. Shakespeare seemed like a good idea: because I’m interested in the technical, policy, and legal problems of preserving information, Shakespeare’s works seemed a textbook example of what should be preserved.

So I found a Shakespeare website and gleefully exercised my right to copy, clip, and paste from the public domain. Sidebar: it would have been even more interesting if I had clipped from a DRM’d CD-ROM of Shakespeare’s works, but that’s another post and another day . . . .

And an admission: Although I was an english & philosophy major in my undergraduate days, it’s been a very, very long time since I thought about Shakespeare. (Notwithstanding Shakespeare in Love, which was great). Having absolutely no idea what might be relevant or useful, I simply looked at the the first thing I found, Shakespeare’s first sonnet.

But serendipity is a funny thing. Considering that I’m currently writing about digital preservation, and further considering that so much of what we electronically preserve is forgettable noise and infoglut — or digital garbage! – I thought Shakespeare’s language was a keeper. Which, of course, it is.