Anthropologist Christopher Kelty on programmers, networks and information technology

Kelty has studied the political economy of information; Free Software; cultural aspects of intellectual property law; reputation, trust and exchange in communities of software programmers; and the history of medicine in America. Kelty teaches classes in science and technology studies, the mechanization of thought processes, the history of memory systems, ...

Not all people involved with "hacking" are self-identified hackers. ... Entrepreneurs, visionaries, activists and lawyers are engaged in some of the same social worlds but may not call themselves hackers. In the end, the goal is to investigate the nature of social relations and shared attitudes toward the worlds we live in ... to find what ties people together in a given social world.

... information is not necessarily something that circulates on the Internet. It is something that can be understood socially as existing in a particular time and place through repeated interactions between people.

I also talk about the differences between communication networks and social networks and try to give the students a way of thinking about how one might have both a communication network and a social network at the same time.

... areas like this are quite hard for students to get their head around ...

I like to focus on banal, boring issues like standards, protocols, and IPR because I delight in showing how supposedly arcane technical problems actually turn out to be political.

... IP rights hand a kind of police power over to private bodies. ... The economic justification for the existence of IP is different from the actual uses to which people put it.

Chapter 2 of the Great Dot-Com Bust of 2000 has begun.

Few are the millionaires they expected to be: many are poorer than they were to begin with. Some are still frantically seeking jobs, while others are humbly grateful for finding even ill-suited ones.

"The true reality shock comes from trying to unlearn ways of doing things that you've been socialized into believing were the norm."

"If Webvan had spent as much intellectual and financial capital on finding out what customers wanted, and less on fancy technologies, it might still be around."

"In the old days, there used to be a term, 'buying your gross,'" said Rick Sands, chief operating officer at Miramax, referring to the millions of dollars studios throw at a movie to ensure a big opening weekend.

"You could buy your gross for the weekend and overcome bad word of mouth, because it took time to filter out into the general audience," he said. "Those days are over. Today, there is no fooling the public."

In the 1970's, she set out to become a brew master just as her father had been. She left India to train in Australia, then returned home to find that daughters were not welcome in India's breweries.

That door closing for her opened another one for India. Unemployed, she followed a love of biology and a chance referral to an Irish biotechnology company. At 25, she started their Indian operation from her garage, successfully extracting from papaya an enzyme used to tenderize meat, among other things, and from the swim bladders of tropical fish a collagen that helps clear beer.

"There is a dramatic gulf now between Iraqis and a lot of other Arabs. Young people here want to move on. In 10 years, this will be a very different place. If I can be a part of it, it will be like Hong Kong or Korea — but with an Iraqi face."

The checkered history of predicting the future has dissuaded policymakers from considering the long-term effects of decisions. New analytic methods, enabled by modern computers, transform our ability to reason about the future. The authors here demonstrate a quantitative approach to long-term policy analysis (LTPA).

Working with experts at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the FBI traced trails of a broader reconnaissance. A forensic summary of the investigation, prepared in the Defense Department, said the bureau found "multiple casings of sites" nationwide. Routed through telecommunications switches in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Pakistan, the visitors studied emergency telephone systems, electrical generation and transmission, water storage and distribution, nuclear power plants and gas facilities.

"We were underestimating the amount of attention al Qaeda was paying to the Internet," said Roger Cressey, a longtime counterterrorism official who became chief of staff of the President's Critical Infrastructure Protection Board in October. "Now we know they see it as a potential attack vehicle. Al Qaeda spent more time mapping our vulnerabilities in cyberspace than we previously thought. An attack is a question of when, not if."