- Air-L - lists.aoir.org

Re: [Air-l] Copyright Issues
by Zunt＠aol.com 23 May '01

23 May '01

Yes...this is the sort of reference that I think is appropriate...I'd also include the author's name, if one is included, for accuracy as well as courtesy. In a message dated 5/23/01 12:17:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, simonetta(a)artsci.com writes: > What I would recommend is to post a link to the article, the title and a > brief quote or two that gives the essence of the article being referenced. > > For example: > > Finding Free Internet Access for Those Without > > http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/23/technology/23EDUCATION.html > > "a group of nonprofit organizations are working to keep those students > connected during their summer vacations by building and distributing a > directory - in both English and Spanish - of more than 20,000 locations > nationwide that offer free Internet access." > > This allows you to convey the central points of the article without falling > afoul of copyright issues (I think). > > Of course, I am not a lawyer. > > -- > Leo G. Simonetta > Art & Science Group, LLC > simonetta(a)artsci.com > Bob Briggs Westport, MA

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Re: [Air-l] Copyright issues on material transmitted to AIR-L
by jeremy hunsinger 23 May '01

23 May '01

I tend to agree with Ed. This list constitutes more of a publication and distribution system than a research system. If it were a research system, and we distributed materials as we have done, then we would probably have to make the list password protected and moderated to some extent as lists for classes or lists for research groups usually are. >Ed: > >sorry...but I also disagree pretty strongly with this. This list isn't >doing research. It's chatting. It may be learning about research >issues...but list members are neither signed up for credit for a class, >nor are they engaged in active research as part and parcel to their >participation here. I don't buy it. > >Further, even if one of us is doing research, we aren't all on/in the same >project...so forwarding us copyright protected stuff goes outside the >intent (in my view). > >Of course....I'm no lawyer . . . and this is a brave new frontier. > > > > >_______________________________________________ >Air-l mailing list >Air-l(a)aoir.org >http://www.aoir.org/mailman/listinfo/air-l Jeremy Hunsinger http://www.cddc.vt.edu Instructor of Political Science Center for Digital Discourse and Culture Webmaster/Manager CDDC 526 Major Williams Hall 0130 http://www.cddc.vt.edu/jeremy --my homepage Virginia Tech (yes i partially updated it) Blacksburg, VA 24061 (540)-231-7614 icq 5535471

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Re: [Air-l] Copyright issues on material transmitted to AIR-L
by Zunt＠aol.com 23 May '01

23 May '01

In a message dated 5/23/01 9:17:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, jhuns(a)vt.edu writes: > However, one can distribute within fair > use guidelines, which is distributing the first paragraph a link to the rest. > Lord knows I've been guilty of this sort of thing and have see the issue raised elsewhere. On reflection I agree generally with Jeremy's view. However, the characterization of fair use is not accurate. Determination of fair use varies quite dramatically between contexts, and I've not seen any case law covering the topic vis-a-vis e-mail lists of any sort. (What if the article is just one paragraph?) As a practical matter on a list, I would prefer being informed *about* an article that someone thinks is important--as with other forms of lit reviews. And if a brief, relevant quote from the article helps to make the point, that's great. Cheers, Bob Briggs Westport, MA

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Copyright Issues
by Leo Simonetta 23 May '01

23 May '01

What I would recommend is to post a link to the article, the title and a brief quote or two that gives the essence of the article being referenced. For example: Finding Free Internet Access for Those Without http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/23/technology/23EDUCATION.html "a group of nonprofit organizations are working to keep those students connected during their summer vacations by building and distributing a directory - in both English and Spanish - of more than 20,000 locations nationwide that offer free Internet access." This allows you to convey the central points of the article without falling afoul of copyright issues (I think). Of course, I am not a lawyer. -- Leo G. Simonetta Art & Science Group, LLC simonetta(a)artsci.com

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Re: [Air-l] Copyright issues on material transmitted to AIR-L
by Zunt＠aol.com 23 May '01

23 May '01

Here 'tis: http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.html In a message dated 5/23/01 10:45:28 AM Eastern Daylight Time, ahynes1(a)yahoo.com writes: > My understanding of the disclaimer is > that such forwarding of copyrighted material would be > permissable. Not quite--it's not the one who copies who has the authority to make the decision. My desire to distribute someone's work without profiting from the action--to someone who wants it--does not make it ok because, for example, I might be depriving the author from his right to profit. (People who receive my free copies would have no need to purchase the original from the author's distributing agent.) It's not up to me to rationalize by saying, "this work will never turn a profit for the author in a million years, so my action cannot harm his/her interests." The proposed interpretation would make it ok to scan textbooks and distribute the scans freely. Cheers, Bob Briggs Westport, MA

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Copyright issues on material transmitted to AIR-L
by Ken Friedman 23 May '01

23 May '01

Dear Colleagues, I have posted stories to the list from various publications. When I do, I am careful to include full publishing data, URL, and copyright notice. These stories are made available to the public by the publishers, often through emailer programs. Occasionally, I take them from a university-based email newsletter that carries stories from publishers. The time required to write for permission on stories of possible interest here would make it difficult to pass good material on. I don't bother with URL clips and first-paragraph only broadcasts. I find them annoying to read, and I don't want to plague other with material I don't like myself. I'd welcome the view of other subscribers on this issue. If it seems inappropriate to transmit material with full identification and copyright notice, I'll be happy to stop. Best regards, Ken Friedman -- ******************************************** Ken Friedman, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design Department of Knowledge Management Norwegian School of Management Visiting Professor Advanced Research Institute School of Art and Design Staffordshire University Norway +47 22.98.50.00 Telephone +47 22.98.51.11 Telefax Home office Byvaegen 13 S-24012 Torna Haellestad Sweden +46 (46) 53.245 Telephone +46 (46) 53.345 Telefax email: ken.friedman(a)bi.no ********************************************

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The Guardian: Online: Second Sight -- Melissa is a marketing tool
by Ken Friedman 21 May '01

21 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guardian Unlimited (C) Guardian Newspapers Limited 1999 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3850829,00.html Thursday April 8, 1999 Online: Second Sight Melissa is a marketing tool By Esther Dyson Guardian Unlimited Most right-thinking people hear about Melissa the virus and shudder. But a few politically incorrect marketers are marvelling at her ability to reach the masses overnight. Imagine attaching your marketing message to such a virus. In fact, that's what marketers are already trying to do. When this works so well that it clogs e-mail systems, it's called a virus, but when it happens with the active involvement of the human carriers, it's called viral marketing. The best viral marketing is not just word-of-mouth, as some people carelessly assume. Nor is it multi-level marketing, where Juan sells to Alice and then gets a cut of whatever Alice sells to Fred. It is when users actively recruit other users, not for pay, but because they benefit from a larger user pool, just as virus DNA benefits from the spread of a virus. As with any new concept, anyone can define the term. Steve Jurvetson and Tim Draper of Silicon Valley venture capitalists Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson, are the foremost proponents of the technique. They have even posted an essay about it on their website, mostly describing their success with Hotmail, one of their best investments, sold to Microsoft last year for upwards of $300 million. Each Hotmail user, who signs up for free, markets the service to others because of the sig file attached to each Hotmail message: "Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com." Each time the user uses the product/service, he's promoting it to others. You could almost say that any campaign that gets the customers to flaunt a brand name is viral marketing. But getting people to wear your T-shirt is not viral marketing. Viral marketing, as I define it, is where the original user gets a benefit from the spread of whatever is being marketed. That is, it concerns products or services that benefit from so-called "network effects" - those same disproportional returns to early entrants that are the subject of so much discussion concerning Microsoft. That is why Hotmail can be viral in some cases, but not in others. In the wired world, where everyone has e-mail, Hotmail user Alice doesn't particularly benefit from Juan's using Hotmail, because she can reach him as easily at Demon or on AOL. In the less wired world, where most people don't have e-mail accounts of any kind, Hotmail can spread, well, like a virus. As Jurvetson and Draper say: "The Hotmail adoption pattern is that of a virus - with spatial and network locality. People typically send e-mails to their associates and friends; many of them are geographically close, and others are scattered around with clusters in areas of high Internet connectivity. We would notice the first user from a university town or from India, and then the number of subscribers from that region would rapidly proliferate. The beauty of it is that none of this required any marketing dollars. Customers do the selling." There's a delicate balance between ownership and reach: the ideal viral marketing product is semi-proprietary. That is, it needs to be generic enough for its use to spread quickly, but people shouldn't be able to interact with imitations. At first, Internet telephony didn't spread, because the proprietary systems meant you could talk only with a small group of people using the same provider. When Internet telephony meant you could talk with anyone who had a phone, it became much more useful, but the few who had it had less incentive to push a particular brand onto others. The current rage in viral marketing is relationship or networking tools - Six Degrees or PeopleLink. A couple of times a week I get e-mails from someone wanting me to join one so that I can make new friends. Do I need new friends and contacts? Maybe, maybe not, but enough people do that these services are spreading rapidly. The business model here is advertising. Of course, sometimes the marketer forgets about the business model: the goal is simply to sign up users, and then let someone else figure out what to do with them. That's what Mirabilis did with its ICQ instant messaging service. It acquired 12 million users before it sold out to AOL for $300 million. The best current example of viral marketing is the new range of Gizmoz from Zapa Digital Arts. Gizmoz enable you to build your own identity and then have other people link to it. Instead of static business cards such as Versit's (which simply sit in someone's "card" file and are sent to other people), Gizmoz work as live links. You send someone a link to your Gizmo; then, each time they look at it, they link back to the original (either at your site or at Zapa's) and get the current version. What's the benefit to Zapa? Well, in order to update your Gizmo - which could be kinds of biscuits you're offering for sale or of your need for a lift from Cambridge to London next Friday - you will want to go back to Zapa for new and improved graphics. This isn't viral marketing just for Zapa: it's viral marketing for Zapa's users, because it lets them spread their messages to others. In principle, you can "own" your own gizmo, but you can also share it. That keeps you and other users coming back to each other - and to Zapa for new shareable Gizmo components. So what's to keep everyone from using viral marketing? The backlash is already in sight as some vendors start moving towards multi-level marketing for products where there's no benefit to the redistributor other than a commission. But just as the difference between e-mail and spam is a delicate social matter, so is the difference between gifts that delight both giver and receiver, and using friends in a marketing scheme. So what is the value that Zapa is giving to its customers? In exchange for their attention, it is selling them the ability to get attention from other people. Marketers want attention so they can sell ads to people who sell products. People want attention because, well, they're human. They don't want marketers' attention, which they know is conditioned upon their eventually purchasing something. They want the attention of other human beings. Good on them! But I have to add: in the past, getting attention required nice clothes. Now, it requires nice Gizmos. Is that progress? Or is it just human nature, reinvented? Or am I just too cynical, and are Gizmos actually a tool for creative users to express themselves with? http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,3850829,00.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Guardian Unlimited (C) Guardian Newspapers Limited 1999 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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flocking to the Web (Washington Post article)
by J. Sternberg 21 May '01

21 May '01

http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A1132-2001May8.html Flocking Together Through the Web By Joel Garreau Suppose the Earth is all one big single living organism, with all the elements of it -- from the people to the birds -- connected like cells in a body. Suppose the goal of evolution is to link up individual human minds, bringing an explosion of intelligence and even global consciousness to this mammoth being. For half a century, this idea has been batted around, much spurred by the writings of the late French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. But the attention the notion received, especially in the '60s, was of an airy, hand-waving, late-night-dorm-session sort. It was hard for serious people to imagine how such a global consciousness would ever be wired up in any practical way, and even harder to observe any concrete evidence of its existence. Until now. It seems that the fastest-growing outdoor activity in North America by far is bird watching, according to the National Survey on Recreation and the Environment. More than 71 million Americans -- one in four ! -- watch birds, according to the NSRE. For 101 years, the most devoted of these citizen scientists have been conducting annual bird censuses at Christmas. But the friction in the system, even for the most dedicated birders, was enormous. They had to count their sparrows, fill out a form, put it in an envelope, mail it to a compiler and wait a full year for publication in an obscure journal. Four years ago the National Audubon Society and the nation's foremost ornithology lab at Cornell University started moving this process to the Web. You can now count birds without leaving your back yard and drop the numbers into sites such as Bird Source or Journey North. In short order you will see updated maps and numbers that show you how bird populations are rising, falling and changing all over North America, right now. The projects are still embryonic -- perhaps 70,000 people contributed this year. But those numbers are vastly greater than in the days of paper and pen and have been doubling every year. The resulting picture of the natural world is consequently becoming richer and more complex. That's not the earth-moving part, however. The earth-moving part -- literally -- is that, as a result, a movement is spontaneously emerging that alters the physical nature of the planet so as to make it more amenable to the birds that are indicator species of global environmental health. Some of this is as simple as town-house owners deciding to plant lobelia in their back yards because these flowers please hummingbirds. But others are more ambitious. One Fairfax County youth had his back yard certified as a wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation, one of 600 such designated refuges in Fairfax County alone. Activists in Columbia, meanwhile, are spending this spring uprooting some of the Rouse Corp.'s well-meant ornamental plantings to replace them with habitat that woodcocks view as more homelike. A 5,600-acre farm in Chestertown is replanting grassland to nurture the dickcissel so that the bird, which had been nonexistent on the Eastern Shore for decades, suddenly has eight breeding pairs there. International Paper Co. -- the largest private landowner in the United States -- has revamped forestry practices in South Carolina to create a population explosion of the rare Swainson's warbler. The Department of Defense, with its 25 million acres, has launched initiatives that range from burning grasslands in Fort Riley, Kan., so as to encourage native prairie and the Henslow's sparrow, to having Seabees construct wetlands in Hawaii for the Hawaiian stilt, Hawaiian coot and the Hawaiian moorhen. All of these actions have roots in the new ease with which ordinary individuals now find it natural to come together swiftly, unceremoniously and improvisationally on the Net to create measurable change. These changes, in turn, have encouraged a "virtuous circle" in which people are having their appetites whetted for more data about birds. Pioneering volunteers are putting on their roofs microphones that are attached to their home computers that are attached to Cornell. These microphones pick up "chip calls," which are the beeps many birds make when they migrate in order to keep in touch with the flock. The big computers in Ithaca, N.Y., can take these remote recordings and figure out how many white-throated sparrows flew over which house. At night. Meanwhile, the Doppler radar so ubiquitous on TV weather picks up signals that have long been misidentified as scattered showers in a clear sky. No -- it's birds. Researchers at Clemson University can now take the Doppler signals from some 150 installations continent-wide and focus on the bird signals. With this vast array they can, for example, track birds migrating up from South America across the Gulf of Mexico. On a single autumn night several years ago, radar on Cape Cod revealed 12 million songbirds passing overhead. In Florida, a company called Geo-Marine Inc. is developing the technology to provide daily bird forecasts and hourly updates for the U.S. Air Force, a client that values both flying close to the ground and not sucking 12-pound geese into expensive jet engines. Other enthusiasts are wiring birds with devices the weight of a nickel that connect directly to orbiting satellites. These record the birds moving from, say, Canada to New Jersey. Such migrations are displayed on the Web for everyone to watch. The devices are getting so small and cheap that scientists hope eventually to wire entire flocks of Neotropical songbirds -- those that summer in the States but winter in the tropics -- to the satellites. Because bird watchers are such an enormous portion of the population in rich and powerful nations -- such as those of North America and Europe -- this is leading to modification of the terrain itself by an unprecedented number of individuals, corporations and governments with global reach. No one knows if poorer nations will follow their lead, or when. But emerging countries are where the Web is growing fastest, and environmentalists know that increased prosperity, as a rule, brings with it environmental improvements like cleaner air and water. In his 1940 magnum opus, "The Phenomenon of Man," Teilhard said that someday our technology would allow us to create a web of thought and action that would make the world more complex, diverse and alive, moving mankind toward ultimate evolution. In the mid-'90s, with the arrival of the World Wide Web, technos started pointing to his ideas again, with computer designer Danny Hillis saying in Wired magazine, "Now evolution takes place in microseconds. . . . We're taking off. We're at that point analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multicelled organisms. . . . We are not evolution's ultimate product. There's something coming after us, and I imagine it is something wonderful." In the past decade, of course, such predictions seemed hypothetical or even delusional. What's new is that some scientists think they are looking now at first evidence that maybe Teilhard was right. Count, Care and Act Humans have been changing the environment at least since man learned to eat other animals faster than they could eat him. For the other species -- including those that early humans drove to their slaughter by deliberately setting forest fires -- this has not always been a picnic. "We typically think of humans as hellbent on ecosystem destruction," notes John W. Fitzpatrick, director of the Laboratory of Ornithology at Cornell. Evidence, of course, abounds -- from clear-cutting of the Amazon rain forest to the advance of global warming. What's new is the rise of humans connected by the Internet, acting like a flock without leaders, changing the physical planet a fraction of an acre at a time, for the<em> benefit</em> of the other species and thus the entire world. "I think we're seeing history in the making," says Fitzpatrick. "People are now noticing change, searching for bio-indicators and then fixing the problem. What we're just beginning to realize is that humans represent the internal control mechanism the Earth has long sought. They're bringing feedback into the system, changing the management of the system." "You're gardening the planet for birds," says Frank Gill, senior vice president for science of the National Audubon Society and author of "Ornithology," the most widely used text in the field. "If you count things, you care for them. If you care for them, you act. It's a counting, caring and acting system. You make fields, manage forests in certain ways. Even industrial forests are just gardens with woody sticks coming out of them. You fix things up in the back yard. The whole landscape becomes human-dominated and managed. That's just gardening on a planetary scale. The whole restoration-ecology world is now moving toward some ability to do that." "Our long-term hope is that instead of the Weather Channel, you could turn to the Bird Channel," says Fitzpatrick. "We'll be able to count them, monitor them, observe their population crashes, on a continental scale. We're preparing the world for times after I'm gone. If this had been available in the 1800s, we'd still have passenger pigeons flying over us by the billions. "Global consciousness?" continues Fitzpatrick. "It's true. It is exactly what we have been after. Our thesis is that the Internet is the first point in human history in the creation of consciousness at a massive and biologically meaningful scale. We've been trying to do that with paper" -- the old-fashioned way of trying to link data to action -- "but it's too damned expensive and lethargic. "This is a fundamental power of the Internet," he says. "It drives a huge growth in citizen engagement. We're definitely feeling the power. It's the greatest thing. All of this is being done by school kids, families, retired folks." "If you look at the conservation of birds, you're really looking at the stewardship of the landscape, using birds as indicators," says Gill. "We're starting to manage the landscape in real time. What the Web does is transform this into a global community on a local scale. That ranges from rain forests in Guyana to urban America and everything in between." Audubon just sent a team to Guyana, setting up a project with the Makushi Indians -- hunters and gatherers in the rain forest. The Makushi "have discovered the Internet," says Gill. "Our goal is to develop this count-care-and-act program so that it works for them. They count things useful to them -- turtles, parrots. At the same time, they share that monitoring with other communities across the globe. "It's closing the circle, changing their lives. Our goal is to change the world. One place at a time. "This is much more complicated than rocket science." The Mating Fields The woodcocks have returned to the singing grounds. Less than three miles west of the Mall in Columbia, the show is about to begin. Before a full moon, the quail-size males start their mating ritual, sounding "peents" and then exploding up from the tufty grassland, the wind through their feathers creating a whistling sound. The woodcocks climb to great heights and then start their crowd-pleasing gymnastics. They fall like autumn leaves, in spectacular swoops with enticing chirps and whistles. Then they land and do it again. And again. The female woodcocks are deeply impressed. So are the humans who come to watch them. The mating fields are called "singing grounds." Brought together one recent Saturday afternoon by a flurry of e-mail among their peers, seven volunteers from the Columbia area were creating more singing grounds. "We used the historical records we had," says Jeff Schwierjohann (pronounced SWEER-john), the 32-year-old wildlife biologist who manages the 1,000-acre Middle Patuxent Environmental Area just west of Columbia. "When woodcocks were very dense, their singing grounds were right in the areas where we're re-creating them now. "The reason we manage for woodcocks is that they require a lot of different habitats. If you manage for them, you manage for diversity of wildlife and vegetation. Males will roost at night in tall meadow and grassland. Females require young early forests -- saplings -- for cover and food. It's important to have good soil because 90 percent of their diet is earthworms." The population of the woodcocks in Howard County had been declining since the 1960s, says Schwierjohann, not so much because of the disappearance of wild areas as because of the end of farming, with its complex and man-made pattern of open land and forests, fallow fields and crops. The Rouse Corp., which developed Columbia and deeded to Howard County the land that became the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area, several decades ago carefully planted much of the area with ornamental autumn olive trees and lawnlike fescue. This recent Saturday, the volunteers from the Howard County Bird Club, the Sierra Club and the League of Women Voters were taking lopping pruners and pickaxes to the suburban growth. They were restoring the land to tufts and open patches of native warm-season grasses that offer cover for the wildlife, openings for small animals to move around, and nesting areas. "There were no recorded nests or displays of woodcocks here for years," says Schwierjohann. "This year, there are more displays and more singing than in the past several years combined." This is hardly the first instance of mankind restoring bird species, of course. Ending the use of DDT contributed to such famous success stories as the return of the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. Those early successes, however, were a result of massive top-down federal action, prompted by the Endangered Species Act of 1973. At the Middle Patuxent Environmental Area, by contrast, initiatives like the woodcock effort were generated by hundreds of volunteers from the Scouts to the sheriff's office, self-organizing at the grass-roots level with the kind of speed, fluidity and informality that was simply too hard before the Internet. Among the people who think that technology is allowing humankind to evolve a global consciousness as a result of its new complex adaptive systems is Murray Gell-Mann, winner of the Nobel prize in physics and a pioneer in the study of complex systems at the Santa Fe Institute. Gell-Mann is also a fanatic birder, the sort of person who flies off to Madagascar to bird-watch, a man who took part in his first Christmas bird count in 1940, when he was 11. "The Internet has accelerated a phenomenon of people finding one another with all sorts of consequences, some wonderful and some terrifying," he says. "It's always been true that birdwatchers and other amateur naturalists were very much concerned about the issues directly related to nature conservation. Lately they've understood the links to a much wider spectrum of issues, such as energy, air and water pollution, a whole range of population issues, and even problems posed by rural poverty. "There has been an explosion of interest in the conservation of nature as the number of amateur naturalists has grown fantastically, and their awareness of interlinking, likewise. All of this is growing." A most literal form of grass-roots work is taking place on the Eastern Shore at Chino Farms, a 5,630-acre Queen Anne's County spread planted primarily in row crops. Its owner, Henry Sears, a Massachusetts cancer surgeon and amateur birder, decided to start restoring native Eastern prairie. He got in touch with Douglas Gill, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Maryland, and two springs ago set aside 230 acres to rebuild, re-create and restore native coastal warm-season grassland comparable to what the first Europeans in America found. The results have been "oh my God, phenomenal," says ecologist Gill. "Within one month of planting, in came one of our target birds, the grasshopper sparrow. It's in sharp decline nationwide, but they just poured in. God knows where they came from. But boy did they find it. We banded nearly 400 grasshopper sparrows. In the prairie's second year another target species, the dickcissel, which migrates to Venezuela and is on the watch list, showed up and there were eight nesting pairs. It's unbelievable. We didn't expect to see those for years." More remarkable is how easily news of success now reverberates throughout our wired world -- and to what effect. "What was a novel initiative two years ago is now being copied all over the country," Gill says. "There are Web sites for grasslands restorers. It's serving as a model. People are calling me up all the time, asking what I've found. Managers of national wildlife refuges have been given their marching orders -- manage not only for waterfowl, but for grasslands. We're gardening grassland for the birds. "The virtuous circle," says Gill -- citing the exact opposite of a vicious circle, in which positive action leads to more positive action in an ever-increasing spiral -- "is definitely there." At the confluence of the Great and Little Pee Dee rivers in South Carolina, in a 30,000-acre forest called the Woodbury Tract, is another striking example of the emergent power of the Web. It is part of a sustainable forestry initiative by International Paper, the forest products behemoth. "For the last 15 to 20 years, we have been concerned about the declining populations of Neotropical birds," says Jimmy Bullock, the company's manager for sustainable forestry and wildlife. "The Swainson's warbler has been a particular species of concern. It's a pretty rare species. We have found that if we make small clear-cuts -- 30, 40 acres -- and distribute the cuts across the landscape instead of having just a few large cuts, it performs like a natural disturbance. "The warbler apparently likes the type of hardwood habitat that comes back 12 to 15 years after harvesting. Once the tree gets up to a certain age, for whatever reason, it is not as attractive to the warbler. So if we can get a mosaic of different age classes, the birds can find optimal nesting and breeding habitat. We have 56 active nests that we've found since 1997. That's unprecedented in the annals of Swainson's warbler research." In part, says Sharon Haines, manager of sustainable forestry and forest policy for International Paper, this concern is reinforced by a feedback loop. "Of late, we've had to answer questions from our customers about our sustainable forest activities. Some of the best information we have to share with them are the things that we are doing with bird species." Here's how an increasingly fast and frictionless virtuous circle works: "The customers' questions probably began about four to five years ago," says Haines. "Might be a producer of lumber -- a Lowe's or someone like that -- concerned about where their product is coming from. It also can be an office products company like Staples. They're getting questions, pressures, from their customers, from environmental organizations. We're actually putting people on full time, dealing with them. "It's definitely the grass-roots community types. Now, because of the Internet, they are much better able to share information." "It's safe to say they are demanding more," acknowledges Haines. "I'm not sure they understand what they are demanding." Wiring the Planet "This is just an example where the Web is mediating a collective thought process that has feedback effects. It is affecting the distribution of the species," says Robert Wright, author of "The Moral Animal." It is reminiscent, Wright says, of Teilhard's idea that technology would connect minds into a "brain for the biosphere as the human species consciously assumes stewardship of the planet." It explains, he says, why "serious people take Teilhard seriously." "The bird-watching, Step 1, brings an increased sensitivity to the role of the environment in the health and happiness of birds," says Ralph H. Abraham, one of the progenitors of complex systems theory who is a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Then Step 2 is an extension of this sensitivity to the happiness of the entire biosphere, including the living conditions for the human species themselves. The emergent property is this global consciousness. "Before the World Wide Web, the bird watchers were a bunch of independent agents. After, the emergent behavior is in the increase in the connectivity between them, as in a neural net" -- the industry term for advanced computers that can see patterns and learn from them. "When you increase the connectivity, new intelligence emerges," Abraham says. "The World Wide Web makes the consciousness of birders akin to a flock of birds, or a termite colony in which the individuals act in harmony. A consensus emerges on what to do. The behavior of the whole thing changes. "The reason this is so exciting is that it is totally grass-roots, bottom-up emergent behavior. The World Wide Web increases the connectivity between individual birders into a kind of global consciousness," Abraham concludes. "It cares in its altruistic loving soul for the interest of the birds. "What we're hoping for is a global increase in the collective intelligence of the human species, without which we cannot survive on this planet. All who dream of a sustainable future for their children and grandchildren are begging for a quantum leap in the consciousness of the human species. If that happens, it is the best and most important thing to happen to the environment." Although he died before the invention of the microchip, "Teilhard was incredibly prescient," says Thomas M. King, the Jesuit theologian at Georgetown University who has written or edited three books on the paleontologist who strove to connect science to theology. "A global culture is forming, as opposed to national cultures," King believes. John Perry Barlow, a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Internet civil liberties organization, goes further: "We're not just wiring our consciousness, we're wiring the planet and all its biological activity. Teilhard was talking about not simply our consciousness, but evolution in its totality. "The changing patterns of the birds are the consequence of their consciousness interacting with our consciousnesses, being mediated by the neuro-system of the Web. Previously there hasn't been a good method for large-scale interaction between the greater 'us' and the greater 'them.' Now there is a method for remediating. We can watch what they're doing and they can watch what we're doing and respond to it. "It means that we're all just a little bit smarter, and the planet itself is a little bit smarter. There is an increased likelihood that a symbiosis is formed. "Sounds good to me. Very promising. Speaking as a human being, and also speaking as a friend of the birds." BirdSource and its projects, such as the Christmas Bird Count and the Great Backyard Bird Count, can be found at <a href="http://birdsource.cornell.edu ">birdsource.cornell.edu</a>; Journey North at <a href=" http://www.learner.org/jnorth">www.learner.org/jnorth</a>; BirdCast -- including Doppler radar images of birds -- at <a href=" http://www.birdcast.com">www.birdcast.com</a> and <a href=" http://www.birdcast.com/home.html">www.birdcast.com/home.html</a>; and a satellite map of a migrations at <a href=" http://www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/d-e/eagle_e_map040301.html ">www.learner.org/jnorth/images/graphics/d-e/eagle_e_map040301.html</a>

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NPR: VIRAL MARKETING FOR MOVIES
by Ken Friedman 20 May '01

20 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 National Public Radio (R) -- National Public Radio (NPR) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- May 18, 2001, Friday SHOW: ALL THINGS CONSIDERED (8:00 PM ET) VIRAL MARKETING FOR MOVIES ANCHOR: SCOTT SIMON SCOTT SIMON, host: Now whether a movie succeeds or not at the box office often has little to do with what we identify as quality. It can come up or down to word-of-mouth recommendation, what one friend tells another. Buzz might be the other word. Most famous example in recent years is probably "The Blair Witch Project." That was a small-budget project which became a hit based largely on the traffic of its Web site. Now that kind of publicity has a name. It's called viral marketing, and it's most successful, as you may expect, with the 18- to 24-year-old age group. Viral marketing works by drawing people in by creating a cyberworld that is related to the film but not explicitly so. It's advertising but not obviously so. Amorette Jones is executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Artisan Entertainment, a pioneer of viral marketing. She insists that viral marketing is immensely successful. Ms. AMORETTE JONES (Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Artisan Entertainment): It absolutely works. A lot of people have talked about "The Blair Witch Project" Web site. SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: And I think what was so fantastic about that is that we really recognized the power of the Web, how wide-reaching things happen and how quickly you get the word out. You build that urgency and build the buzz and enormous traffic. Since we had the experience with "Blair Witch Project," we've followed up with several other Web sites that have had that viral component... SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: ...that is all important in a campaign. SIMON: Question of the day in these economic times: How do you get people to visit a Web site? Ms. JONES: Our first goal is to work with the filmmakers in a collaborative effort to put together something incredibly creative and original online. And we start out with that, and we then develop a campaign that specifically targets users to develop that traffic. So in the same way that we develop an overall marketing campaign for a theatrical release, we also develop a campaign for the Web site launch. What our goal is, is with these Web sites that don't necessarily have the banner across the top, 'The movie's coming to your market on this date; go buy your ticket,' we try and develop a site that's going to feel authentic to the film, so it's going to feel that they worked together in complement, although it's not necessarily a straightforward promotional push. SIMON: Mm-hmm. What were you trying to do with the "Center of the World" Web site? Ms. JONES: We have a film that was shot entirely on digital, picture directed by Wayne Wang, and Wayne had decided within the body of this film that he was really going to push the envelope and to develop a picture that spoke to a lot of what's happening today in society. What our goal was with the Web site is to work with Wayne and again... SIMON: Let me interrupt you. You get to put some naughty pictures in this, don't you? Ms. JONES: Yeah, absolutely. We did. It wasn't for the sake of putting naughty pictures up on the Web. What we attempted to do with the sites, and I think what we successfully did, is we were able to develop a provocative piece of advertising, of promotion. SIMON: Mm-hmm. Ms. JONES: You know, in this site, as you go into the site, you go through the rules, you go into a strip club, you participate in a striptease. You then, as the user, can choose to have a lap dance. You then take the next step and you go behind the scenes and have this very voyeuristic experience in a dressing room with the dancer. And then, at the end of the site, you have a one-on-one interaction with the dancer in a very intimate setting, and there is a chat function in which the user is able to communicate with this dancer. As the user, you're in this very intimate setting and you're in this very provocative arrangement, yet it's so not intimate. And that was one of the points that Wayne was trying to make in the picture, and that's one of the points that we were making with this Web site. SIMON: Ms. Jones, thanks very much for speaking with us. Ms. JONES: Absolutely. Thank you. SIMON: Amorette Jones is executive vice president of worldwide marketing for Artisan Entertainment. And this is NPR, National Public Radio. May 19, 2001 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 National Public Radio (R) -- National Public Radio (NPR) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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From NYT: HE-MAILS, SHE-MAILS: WHERE SENDER MEETS GENDER
by Ken Friedman 20 May '01

20 May '01

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company --------------------------------------------------------------------------- http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/technology/17TALK.html May 17, 2001 HE-MAILS, SHE-MAILS: WHERE SENDER MEETS GENDER By JOYCE COHEN WITH their wedding party scattered across 3,000 miles, Gladys We and Tony Nathan did much of their wedding planning by e-mail. For their first-anniversary gift last September, their bridesmaid Grace Cheng compiled all the wedding correspondence into a handmade book. About 90 percent of the book consisted of messages sent among the bride and her bridesmaids. A paltry 10 percent was messages among the men. The women held forth not just on wedding minutiae like heel height and earring style, but also on a whole lot more -- "stories about our days, support over little frustrations, congratulations on little triumphs," said Ms. We, a graphic designer in Vancouver, British Columbia. "The groomsmen sent a couple of wedding jokes and reminded each other of the tux fitting." Ms. We continues to exchange e-mail daily with her female friends. "A message is a bright spot in the day," she said. "It's like a kaffeeklatsch of girlfriends getting together to talk." She added, "My husband finds it odd." Of course he does. He's a guy. But it does not seem at all odd to many e-mail users, who can't help noticing that women are so often voluble and open on screen, while men are terse and tight-lipped. "My female friends write huge, long things -- the latest gossip and every little, minute detail of what's going on, and really specific stuff about school and social life and everything," said Leslie Wright, a student at Barnard College. "With guys, it's more like an outline." Indeed, communication researchers who are beginning to study the e-mail behavior of men and women say they are finding real differences. But they are also finding some surprises in how those differences are expressed. In general, they say, women tend to use the electronic medium as an extension of the way they talk -- lavishly and intimately, to connect with people and build rapport. Men, in both speech and text, incline toward a briefer, more utilitarian style, the researchers say -- a style they variously term instrumental, functional or transactional. But some researchers have detected something else going on. The disinhibiting effect of e-mail, they say, makes it possible for people of few words -- men, usually -- to convey thoughts and feelings that they would find nearly impossible to say aloud. David Becker, a Manhattan lawyer, fits the pattern of the taciturn male. He uses e-mail often with a group of male friends from college and said that "95 percent of the messages are coordinating stuff to do with our free time." He added, "There's usually a practical reason for the e-mail, like, `What are we doing tonight?' or `Can you get out of work early?' not, `Let's catch up.' " The replies are short and informational, he said, though they sometimes include insults and clowning around. E-mail messages from his former girlfriend, however, "read like a one- sided phone conversation," Mr. Becker said. "She would send me, literally, thousand-word e-mails with questions and thoughts and all this stuff." Though he would not always read the message immediately, "I would never delete one without reading it," he said. "If I replied at all, it would be, `My day is going fine, I'll talk to you later.' " There are more subtle differences, as well. Ms. Wright and her female friends tend to read their e-mail as soon as they receive it and reply at once. "Even if I don't have a lot of time, I will respond right away and be, like, `I don't have time now, but will write a longer e-mail later,' "she said. "If I e-mail a guy, I have to wait a few days to get a response. Guy friends are horrible that way, but guys who are interested in you are better." Dr. Linnda Caporael said she felt obligated to humanize her messages. Not only does she answer her e-mail promptly, but she adds detail, even when her correspondents are seeking a one-word answer. "I say, `Yes, that's fine,' or `Yes, that's O.K.,' " said Dr. Caporael, who teaches social science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. A "no" answer gets a more elaborate explanation. "Why can't I just say no?" she said. "If I know someone, I will answer even longer." Of course, many factors besides sex -- including age, income, education and status -- influence what is said, and there are many forms of electronic communication. There are private messages and public ones; e- mail messages sent for social, business or romantic reasons; those traded within single-sex or mixed groups; and notes between people who know each other well, a bit, or not at all. "No generalization applies to all forms of computer-mediated communication," said Dr. Susan C. Herring, associate professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University at Bloomington. "The key word is context." Still, when it comes to public e-mail -- message boards, mailing lists and chat rooms -- Dr. Herring and other researchers have noted how typical speech patterns translate into online text. Her research shows that in online groups, "men tend to make strong assertions," disagree with others and use profanity, insults and sarcasm. By contrast, women tend to use mitigated assertions along with questions, offers, suggestions and polite expressions, she said. They are supportive and agreeable, peppering their messages with more emoticons and representations of laughter, like "haha," "heehee" and "lol," for "laughing out loud." Except for an inclination to start or fan flame wars, men in online groups tend to limit the interaction, while women encourage others to engage, said Dr. David Silver, an assistant professor at the University of Washington and the director of the online Resource Center for Cyber Culture Studies (www.otal.umd.edu /~rccs). "Men come online to give information or give an answer, and in essence stop the conversation," he said. "Women add a question, tweak a thread or make things more complicated. I have found mailing lists dominated by women to be much more interesting, collegial and communitarian." Still, the loose-lips effect of e-mail, which leads people to write as candidly as if they were writing in a diary, despite knowing their words will be read on the other end, is especially powerful for some men. Those who are usually reluctant to divulge personal information or betray emotion often find that e-mail provides a layer of distance they find liberating. "The electronic distance that lets men write so freely is akin to their preferred way of speaking -- without a direct face-to-face alignment that makes a lot of men uncomfortable," said Dr. Deborah Tannen, a professor of linguistics at Georgetown University and a pioneer in the field of sex differences in language. E-mail can impose a "beneficial distance" that is useful for times when verbal communication is "too rich," Dr. Herring added. "For many men, e-mail may take some of the emotional charge off loaded emotional situations." For example, Mike Murnane, a real estate broker in Palo Alto, Calif., finds it much easier to express his affection for his grown children -- three daughters and a son -- through e-mail. "In person, my girls and my wife talk frequently and rapidly, and I don't get a chance to say much," Mr. Murnane said. "With the phone, at least for me, there has to be some reason to call. But with e-mail you can say any random thing -- a thought or something that happened -- and send it off quickly. It's easy for me to acknowledge what my children do in a very loving way." His middle daughter, Maria Murnane, keeps a computer file of her father's e-mail messages. "I cherish them, because he is so shy and nonexpressive," she said. "I get the sweetest e-mails and he says things he never says in person." E-mail works well, too, when it comes to conflict. Martin Ogawa, who works at an online directory service in San Francisco, prefers e-mail for difficult discussions with his fiancée, Cheryl Kaplan. "When I know she is upset with me, I will send her an e-mail instead of calling," Mr. Ogawa said. "It's less confrontational. It makes it easier to resolve the issue and move forward." Whatever the difficult subject -- a concrete one like finances or a murky one like their relationship, "e-mail helps me approach the subject in a less aggressive manner," said Ms. Kaplan, a lawyer. "On the phone, I don't give Martin enough time to give his side because I'm too busy giving him my version." Still, she would always prefer a real conversation. "If I wrote a response, I'd be typing for days," she said. "A million things are going through my head, and all I want to do is pick up the phone and talk about it." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/17/technology/17TALK.html --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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