Monday, May 24, 2010
AN APPEAL TO MY READERS
I have a problem. In another week or a bit more, I had planned to start a Game Theoretic analysis of Rawls' A THEORY OF JUSTICE. Now, I have published a book on this subject [UNDERSTANDING RAWLS] in which there is a 37 page long formal analysis of the Bargaining Game at the heart of Rawls' theory. It would be insane for me to try to type that into my blog! Can anyone make a suggestion? Is it online anywhere in the blogosphere? Would anyone be willing to read that much about Rawls? Or should I just make a reference to it and move on to other subjects. All help gratefully received.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Google books knows about it, but no preview is available. You could perhaps scan the relevant section into a PDF file and post a link to it? (I will let you grapple with copyright issues.) I am sure you must have thought of this already -- but if you have the original ms. in electronic format somewhere, you could easily copy and paste, no?
ReplyDeleteCould you provide the chapter title and page numbers? Anyone with access to university library can ask for an interlibrary loan of the chapter as PDF, and then the PDF file could be uploaded here or (if that's not possible) at some other venue for your readers. My only concerns would be whether the PDF can be made quickly enough (it could take just a couple of days or weeks) and whether it violates copyright.
ReplyDeleteAlas, I no longer have the floppy disks on which the book was once saved. The book is out of print at the moment, so there may not be any copyright issues. I may have to take a break in the Blog while I go to Paris in June and then try to solve all of this. There are actually a number of things I have published that I would like people to read. I didn't think this through carefully enough when I started. I was having too much fun.
ReplyDeleteIf you'll excuse a slight digression, I'd like to propose something.
ReplyDeleteThe copyright issue is worth taking into consideration. Your publisher is not likely to care a great deal if you reproduce a chapter of your own book, especially if it is out of print. There's something else to consider, though. You should consider releasing the contents of the blog under a free license, such as Creative Commons. This would allow people to upload its contents to a website like Wikiversity (http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity), which is a sister-site of Wikipedia which strives to collect high-quality learning materials and make it freely available online. MIT has recently decided to make much of its courseware freely available online at the website http://ocw.mit.edu/. Perhaps you had other designs for the contents of this blog, but I thought you might be interested in this possibility, given your political commitments.
So, if you decide to do something like this, you should know that whatever material is reproduced from copyrighted works would most likely not be eligible for transclusion in Wikiversity (or similar sites), unless you own the rights to the material and are able and willing to re-release them. Of course, other people could simply fill in the gaps later on with summaries of the copyrighted material.
I had meant to propose this earlier, but forgot. Something to consider.
Ori, we are now way above my paygrade [computer world wise], but that sounds very interesting. Princeton may be interested in it as a book,but the idea of having it permanently available as a course, in effect, is very appealing. Let's see whether anyone is still reading it in several weeks!
ReplyDeletep.s. I thought anything I put on my blog already was freely available to anyone in the blogosphere. Is that not true?
ReplyDeleteThe English word 'free' has a double meaning -- think of the French words 'gratis' and 'libre'. The content of the blog is free in the former sense: anyone may browse to this site and read your posts, without having to pay. But the content is not free in the latter sense, since it is copyrighted. (Original creations are protected by copyright whether or not they bear a copyright notice.) People may not freely adapt, reproduce, or build upon your work. This prevents your work from (among other things) being transcluded into a site like Wikiversity.
ReplyDeleteOne way to make it free is to waive all rights to this content, effectively releasing it into the public domain. Typically, however, people choose to release their work under a free license which allows them to waive some rights while retaining others. This allows authors to specify how their work may be used. For example, you may specify that people may build upon your work, but that they must attribute your original contributions. To give another example, you may also specify whether or not anyone may use the content for commercial purposes. The Creative Commons licenses are currently the most popular. They were authored by Creative Commons, a non-profit organization. (One of their founders is Lawrence Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford. I am fairly sure he and your son know each other. In fact, Tobias undoubtedly understands and can explain all this far better than I could.) MIT releases their open courseware under a Creative Commons license. The Virginia Department of Education has recently began releasing curricula under a Creative Commons license, to cite another example.
If you're interested in this, you might want to visit the Creative Commons web site. They do a good job of introducing the idea of free culture and how it interacts with intellectual property laws.
Their address:
http://creativecommons.org/
Creative Commons in Education:
http://creativecommons.org/education
(I'm not affiliated with Creative Commons, or any of the other entities mentioned above -- I'm simply enthusiastic about the idea of free culture, and thought you might find it interesting.)
Ori, Thanks. Tobias visited at Stanford, and I have heard him mention Lessig. I will ask him. All of this is very new to me.
ReplyDeleteMy school's library has both a copy of /Understanding Rawls/ and nice scanners; assuming the legal issues are sorted out, I'd be happy to scan the relevant chapter. I'm currently on vacation, though, so I wouldn't have scan ready until next week.
ReplyDeleteNoumena, I think I have someone else doing it, but I am not sure. I will get back to you. Thank you.
ReplyDelete