I hadn’t checked my rss-feed reader since the winter break.\u00a0 After the (deserved) attention of the life and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, I was interested in hearing the thoughts of my fellow computer scientists and so delved into the hundreds of unread articles in my rss-feed reader.\u00a0 I was saddened to see that of the 19 personal blogs of computer scientists that I follow, there was only one mention of Aaron Swartz.<\/p>\n
Also in the news: driverless cars.\u00a0 Commentators inevitably rave at being able to read a book or watch a movie on the way to work or avoiding those DUII charges.\u00a0 You know what has those features today?\u00a0 Public transit.\u00a0 And you know what doesn’t help to counter the real problem we are increasingly facing, that of overuse of limited resources?\u00a0 Private, individual transportation.<\/p>\n
More news: Facebook’s new searching feature, allowing Facebook users to access information that other Facebook users have donated to Facebook in exchange for having up to date information about their friends’ pets and drinking Odysseys.\u00a0 There is a reason why Facebook needed to do this.\u00a0 Facebook has carved out a segment of the web that is proprietary, that only they allow or disallow access to, based necessarily on their profit margin.<\/p>\n
As computer science academics we are in a very powerful position.\u00a0 We are trusted with shaping the next generation that will make very important decisions that will have far-reaching social implications.\u00a0 Decisions like those over Facebook’s privacy defaults, motivating technology that enables autonomous private vehicles at the expense of the public interest, defining ownership of electronic media.\u00a0 We make those decisions ourselves in our research; what we research, how we allow our research to be used.<\/p>\n
Aaron Swartz cared about this and I think the world would be a better place if we all took action to advance his ideals.\u00a0 We can do so by thinking about our actions.\u00a0 How are you going to get to work today?\u00a0 What are you going to do when you get there?\u00a0 How are you going to choose which problems to focus on?\u00a0 What will you allow your university tech transfer office to do with your IP?\u00a0 What are you going to teach your students, implicitly and explicitly?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I hadn’t checked my rss-feed reader since the winter break.\u00a0 After the (deserved) attention of the life and untimely death of Aaron Swartz, I was interested in hearing the thoughts of my fellow computer scientists and so delved into the hundreds of unread articles in my rss-feed reader.\u00a0 I was saddened to see that of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3747,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[120191,106190],"class_list":["post-1001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-social-responsibility","tag-tcs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3747"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1003,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions\/1003"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/glencora\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}