On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Faustine wrote:
Harvard is supposed to have the best program, but here's a little something I found online from the University of British Columbia which explains what it's all about. This one seems a little business-heavy, but other analysis programs have a lot more room to focus on technology policy. At least this
Perhaps in evaluating potential programs, it would be helpful to list people in the policy + technology area who are worth looking into. Along perhaps with which institutions they studied at? I'll start. I regret that I'm not familiar with this area, and so I'm sure I'll overlook many interesting people. I'm also not sure what to do about people with some policy interests who are primarily cryptographers -- do we include Ron Rivest because of his work on electronic voting? -------------------------------------- L. Jean Camp (currently at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government) Was a student at CMU with Doug Tygar. Since then, Tygar has moved to UC-Berkeley; I don't know if Berkeley has any similar technology + policy program. She has done some work which would be of interest, including protocols for anonymous transactions, papers on how to handle law enforcement, and "Pricing Security."(Maybe relevant to the recent debate over insurance incentives for computer security; I haven't read it yet.) Home page: http://ksgnotes1.harvard.edu/degreeprog/courses.nsf/wzByDirectoryName/L.Jean... Publications: http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.jcamp.academic.ksg/cv.html ------------------------------ Lorrie F. Cranor (ATT Research) http://lorrie.cranor.org/ Works on Publius, P3P, online voting, other privacy-related issues. Attended Washington University in St. Louis for her PhD. Has links to pages on "Social Informantics" and "Value-Sensitive Design" which may be of interest. (Personally, I am intrigued, but I have a low tolerance for the way in which these are talked about; which is part of why I was not a History of Science major.) ------------------------------- Susan Landau (Sun Microsystems) http://www.sun.com/research/people/slandau/ Went to MIT. Wrote _Privacy on the Line: The Politics of Wiretapping and Encryption_ with Whitfield Diffie. -------------------------------- Michael Froomkin (U Miami law school) http://www.law.tm/ Wrote "Flood Control on the Information Ocean." Among other things. Used to show up on cypherpunks once upon a time. I don't see where he went, so perhaps it doesn't matter. ---------------------------------------- By the way, what exactly do you *do* after you graduate from a technology and policy program? Every now and then I wonder if I will eventually end up in law school or a policy + technology program. The thought is alternately exciting and saddening. Then again, so is the prospect of being a "pure" researcher. -David Molnar
On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 04:30 PM, dmolnar wrote:
Perhaps in evaluating potential programs, it would be helpful to list people in the policy + technology area who are worth looking into. Along perhaps with which institutions they studied at? I'll start. I regret that I'm not familiar with this area, and so I'm sure I'll overlook many interesting people. I'm also not sure what to do about people with some policy interests who are primarily cryptographers -- do we include Ron Rivest because of his work on electronic voting?
Ron Rivest is a good example to make some points about. Suppose Ron were to have some kind of connection to a "policy" or "law" program (presumably at MIT). Would he be a good guy to study under? I'll answer. "Only if you favor his politics." Not that he demands loyalty, so far as I know, but that he is not particularly Cypherpunkish or libertarian. There is no particular reason why a Shamir or an Adleman or a Rivest should be useful. Probably studying under Varian at Berkeley, or Lessig at Stanford, would be better. (Though I don't think people study "under" law professors, do they? From my contacts at Stanford Law, via some talks I gave to Prof. Rader's classes, my impression is that the kids are racing through Stanford Law as fast as Daddy's money will take them, the better to get the big bucks at the prestigious law firms.)
L. Jean Camp (currently at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government)
Was a student at CMU with Doug Tygar. Since then, Tygar has moved to UC-Berkeley; I don't know if Berkeley has any similar technology + policy program. She has done some work which would be of interest, including protocols for anonymous transactions, papers on how to handle law enforcement, and "Pricing Security."(Maybe relevant to the recent debate over insurance incentives for computer security; I haven't read it yet.)
Hal Varian has done much basic work in things like congestion pricing for the Internet. A friend of mine, Robin Hanson, was connected with his group for a while. (I think Robin is now at George Mason U. in Northern Virginia...another place to look at.) Robin is an interesting example of this thread in action. After years of work as a programmer, and after developing the concept of "futures markets" ("I bid $160 that such and such will happen by 2003"), Robin decided to try to put his ideas to better use by going back to school. He didn't take a night school law school degree, thus allowing him to process wills and divorce papers in Outer Nowhere. No, he moved his family to Pasadena and spent several years at Caltech getting his Ph.D. in something related to game theory, economics, and policy. (Some of the people in his group were those who solved the general N-person fair slice of a pie problem. Long known to be solved perfectly for one slice, via "Alice cuts, Bob chooses," it wasn't obvious how to extend this to N slices.) Robin made some substantial economic sacrifices in giving up several years of Silicon Valley income for a load of debt.
Michael Froomkin (U Miami law school) http://www.law.tm/
Wrote "Flood Control on the Information Ocean." Among other things. Used to show up on cypherpunks once upon a time. I don't see where he went, so perhaps it doesn't matter.
Froomkin was fairly active on the list in 1993-96. I visited him when I was in the Miami area. We were on some panels together at some CFP conferences. He's been doing a lot of work on ICANN things now. This is a good example of a point I made in my earlier post: academic interests shift, following trends (translation: worth of granting tenure for). Clipper and key escrow were very hot topics around 1993-95. Today, it's stuff like ICANN and Napster (with Napster fading...). In a few years, these law professors may be concentrating on international whaling laws. (Lessig, in "Code," notes that he was almost exclusively focussed on Eastern European constitutional law issues following the collapse of the Iron Curtain, as this was where some hot issues were. The point being that a person going into "law" (or "policy") should only do so because they love the field of law (or policy) itself, not because they have some ideological axe to grind on crypto policy. "Do what you love, the money may follow." --Tim May
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
This is a good example of a point I made in my earlier post: academic interests shift, following trends (translation: worth of granting tenure for). Clipper and key escrow were very hot topics around 1993-95. Today, it's stuff like ICANN and Napster (with Napster fading...).
Tim makes a valid point here, but omits a companion point of perhaps greater importance, in context. Faddish as it sometimes-- well, hell, often--is, the academic side of the law is the *only* side of the law that even begins to reward originality. Those of us who actually represent people find that original thinking is the bane of most judges, unless you can make them believe the idea started with them. Any parallels in software, both as to faddishness among the "original" thinkers and leader-following otherwise? MacN
On Tuesday, August 21, 2001, at 08:25 PM, Mac Norton wrote:
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:
This is a good example of a point I made in my earlier post: academic interests shift, following trends (translation: worth of granting tenure for). Clipper and key escrow were very hot topics around 1993-95. Today, it's stuff like ICANN and Napster (with Napster fading...).
Tim makes a valid point here, but omits a companion point of perhaps greater importance, in context. Faddish as it sometimes-- well, hell, often--is, the academic side of the law is the *only* side of the law that even begins to reward originality. Those of us who actually represent people find that original thinking is the bane of most judges, unless you can make them believe the idea started with them.
I fully agree with this point...I thought I indicated this by frequently referring to professors, academic programs, etc. The only "lawyers" who get to do any substantive research are those working for or with prestigious law professors, or for a few dozen justices. Everyone else is processing writs and regurgitating old boilerplate. Or maybe teaching young larvae who think they're about to change the world.
Any parallels in software, both as to faddishness among the "original" thinkers and leader-following otherwise?
Many parallels. Nearly all programmers and engineers are doing what they are told to do. Only a small fraction are able to strike out in new directions. While we celebrate programmers like Linus Torvalds, most programmers are doing the programming equivalent of processing wills and divorces. Drones rule, especially in a drone-dominated field like "the law." Only study law if this is the kind of dronedom you prefer. --Tim May
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Mac Norton wrote:
perhaps greater importance, in context. Faddish as it sometimes-- well, hell, often--is, the academic side of the law is the *only* side of the law that even begins to reward originality. Those of us who actually represent people find that original thinking is the bane of most judges, unless you can make them believe the idea started with them.
Any parallels in software, both as to faddishness among the "original" thinkers and leader-following otherwise?
At the first job I had out of college, we spent almost six months busily "updating the look" of an application that worked perfectly well, so that the sales guys could impress people not only with how well it worked, but also with how "slick" it was. So we did color fades on title bars, and added gray to our white scroll bars, and rearranged dialog boxes, and exchanged our athena widgets for motif widgets that worked exactly the same, and moved stuff from the regular menus to the right-mouse menu, and made our "drawn oval" buttons into rectangular buttons that were lighter on the upper and left edges and darker on the lower and right edges (which, laughably, was called "making them 3-d"), and converted the internal documentation from troff and TeX to HTML, and did about a jillion other tiny things that added nearly zero functionality but brought the old application up to the current idea of "style". A year after I left, I heard from someone who had stayed that they were reimplementing the interface as a "thin client" application, because thin clients had come into style. Note -- it had an XWINDOWS INTERFACE to start with!!! your "thin client" on an Xwindows interface is neither more nor less than a standard X server running on the machine where you want the interface to appear! At another company, a few months ago, a lead developer came to me announcing that they were developing a parser to convert an application langauge into an XML schema using a whizbang database that had somehow sprouted an XML interface, and they were having trouble with recursive structures in the formal schema description the database wanted. I said, "is there a reason we're not using lex? lex handles recursive structure just fine." The response, of course, is that nobody wants to tell customers we're using lex to generate our XML, because lex isn't in style.... but this whizbang database (and why does a *database* have XML-conversion functions??) is. I see a lot of engineering effort wasted on silly fads. Good people spending days and sometimes weeks reinventing wheels that represent problems that were solved decades ago, just because the solutions developed then, despite being proven and correct, are presently out of style. It's a waste of resources and it pisses me off. Bear
At 02:54 PM 08/22/2001 -0700, Ray Dillinger wrote:
(and why does a *database* have XML-conversion functions??)
XML's a decent match with tuples, and providing an easily standardized and malleable data interchange format is not only an easy thing to bolt on but a potentially big win for usability, as well as providing the lastest buzzword compliance. Of course, just because you *can* use it to make things cleaner instead of uglier and more complex doesn't mean you have to.
I see a lot of engineering effort wasted on silly fads. Good people spending days and sometimes weeks reinventing wheels that represent problems that were solved decades ago, just because the solutions developed then, despite being proven and correct, are presently out of style. It's a waste of resources and it pisses me off.
Lots of the recent user interface trends are a waste of, umm, skins. A certain 3.5-letter-acronym company or its suppliers recently put lots of effort into enhancing its secure VPN dialer product, and I *wish* they'd focused on testing the Mac product instead of doing customizable look&feel for the Windoze versions...
participants (5)
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Bill Stewart -
dmolnar -
Mac Norton -
Ray Dillinger -
Tim May