Events/Talks: Upcoming Berkman Center Events, November 16 & 17

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Upcoming events and digital media

[1] [MONDAY 11/16/09] "Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social
Systems" with Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute
(http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2009/11/eagle)

[2] [TUESDAY 11/17/09] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Kudunomics:
Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy" with Sam
Bowles, Santa Fe Institute, Behavioral Sciences Program
(http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/bowles)


LAW LAB SPEAKER SERIES on BIG DATA, GLOBAL DEVELOPMENT, and
COMPLEX SOCIAL SYSTEMS
================================================================
11/16/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St.,
Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu).
This event will be webcast live.

Topic: Big Data, Global Development, and Complex Social Systems
Guest: Nathan Eagle, Omidyar Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute

Petabytes of data about human movements, transactions, and communication
patterns are continuously being generated by everyday technologies such
as mobile phones and credit cards. This unprecedented volume of
information facilitates a novel set of research questions applicable to
a wide range of development issues. In collaboration with the mobile
phone, internet, and credit card industries, my colleagues and I are
aggregating and analyzing behavioral data from over 250 million people
from North and South America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I will discuss a
selection of projects arising from these collaborations that involve
inferring behavioral dynamics on a broad spectrum of scales; from risky
behavior in a group of MIT freshman to population-level behavioral
signatures, including cholera outbreaks in Rwanda and wealth in the UK.
Access to the movement patterns of the majority of mobile phones in East
Africa also facilitates realistic models of disease transmission as well
as slum formations. This vast volume of data requires new analytical
tools - we are developing a range of large-scale network analysis and
machine learning algorithms that we hope will provide deeper insight
into human behavior. However, ultimately our goal is to determine how we
can use these insights to actively improve the lives of the billions of
people who generate this data and the societies in which they live.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete
description, see the event web page:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/lawlab/2009/11/eagle


BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on INFORMATION AND PROPERTY RIGHTS IN
THE WEIGHTLESS ECONOMY
================================================================
11/17/09, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St.,
Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person (rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu).
This event will be webcast live.

Topic: Kudunomics: Information and Property Rights in the Weightless Economy
Guest: Sam Bowles, Santa Fe Institute, Behavioral Sciences Program

Why is a good idea like a kudu (Tragelaphus strepsiceros)? For most of
human history – the first 150,000 years of it at least – valuable
resources like kudus and other large game were difficult to own
individually. As a result when captured, they were shared. The emergence
of agriculture 11,000 years ago made land and other forms of wealth
productive enough to be worth demarcating and defending, and thus
allowed for the evolution of the modern possession-based individual
property rights in land, domesticated animals, and goods.

In the resulting economy of grain and steel, as Adam Smith conjectured
and was eventually demonstrated in the Fundamental Theorem of Welfare
Economics, exchange on competitive markets allowed the decentralized
implementation of an efficient allocation of resources as long as
property rights were complete and enforceable.

But the economy of grain and steel is being displaced by a weightless
economy in which the information and network connections that constitute
the new wealth cannot be weighed, measured, or fenced. Good ideas are
indeed like the large game that once formed a major part of our
subsistence: the pursuit of a new operating system, a new drug, or a hit
tune is uncertain, and when the hunt is successful, it is not only
wasteful not to share the prey, it is often impossible to prevent it
from being stolen.

Will intellectual property rights domesticate the kudu? Or will
innovations like a new song or program remain more valuable ‘in the
wild’? Answers will be provided by a model and history of the long-term
development and transformation of property rights drawing on recent
behavioral experiments and econometric estimates of wealth dynamics in
hunter gatherer societies. An evolutionary model and computer
simulations will show how systems of property rights might respond to
the challenges of the weightless economy.

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete
description, see the event web page:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2009/11/weinberger