The gymnastics scoring in this year's Olympics has generated some controversy, as usual. Some of the controversy feel manufactured: NBC tried to create a hubbub over Nastia Liukin losing the uneven bars gold medal on the Nth tiebreaker; but top-level sporting events whose rules do not admit ties must sometimes decide contests by tiny margins.

A more interesting discussion relates to a change in the scoring system, moving from the old 0.0 to 10.0 scale, to a new scale that adds together an "A score" measuring the difficulty of the athlete's moves and a "B score" measuring how well the moves were performed. The B score is on the old 0-10 scale, but the A score is on an open-ended scale with fixed scores for each constituent move and bonuses for continuously connecting a series of moves.

One consequence of the new system is that there is no predetermined maximum score. The old system had a maximum score, the legendary "perfect 10", whose demise is mourned old-school gymnastics gurus like Bela Karolyi. But of course the perfect 10 wasn't really perfect, at least not in the sense that a 10.0 performance was unsurpassable. No matter how flawless a gymnast's performance, it is always possible, at least in principle, to do better, by performing just as flawlessly while adding one more flip or twist to one of the moves. The perfect 10 was in some sense a myth.

What killed the perfect 10, as Jordan Ellenberg explained in Slate, was a steady improvement in gymnastic performance that led to a kind of grade inflation in which the system lost its ability to reward innovators for doing the latest, greatest moves. If a very difficult routine, performed flawlessly, rates 10.0, how can you reward an astonishingly difficult routine, performed just as flawlessly? You have to change the scale somehow. The gymnastics authorities decided to remove the fixed 10.0 limit by creating an open-ended difficulty scale.

There's an interesting analogy to the "grade inflation" debate in universities. Students' grades and GPAs have increased slowly over time, and though this is not universally accepted, there is plausible evidence that today's students are doing better work than past students did. (At the very least, today's student bodies at top universities are drawn from a much larger pool of applicants than before.) If you want a 3.8 GPA to denote the same absolute level of performance that it denoted in the past, and if you also want to reward the unprecendented performance of today's very best students, then you have to expand the scale at the top somehow.

But maybe the analogy from gymnastics scores to grades is imperfect. The only purpose of gymnastics scores is to compare athletes, to choose a winner. Grades have other purposes, such as motivating students to pay attention in class, or rewarding students for working hard. Not all of these purposes require consistency in grading over time, or even consistency within a single class. Which grading policy is best depends on which goals we have in mind.

One thing is clear: any discussion of gymnastics scoring or university grading will inevitably be colored by nostalgic attachment to the artists or students of the past.

We're going to do a live webcast of our workshop on "The Future of News", which will be held tomorrow and Thursday (May 14-15) in Princeton. Attending the workshop (free registration) gives you access to the speakers and other attendees over lunch and between sessions, but if that isn't practical, the webcast is available.

Here are the links you need:

• Live video streaming
• Live chat facility for remote participants
• To ask the speaker a question, email citp.questions@gmail.com

Sessions are scheduled for 10:45-noon and 1:30-5:00 on Wed., May 14; and 9:30-12:30 and 1:30-3:15 on Thur., May 15.

We're excited to announce a workshop on "The Future of News", to be held May 14 and 15 in Princeton. It's sponsored by the Center for InfoTech Policy at Princeton.

Confirmed speakers include Kevin Anderson, David Blei, Steve Borriss, Dan Gillmor, Matthew Hurst, Markus Prior, David Robinson, Clay Shirky, Paul Starr, and more to come.

The Internet—whose greatest promise is its ability to distribute and manipulate information—is transforming the news media. What's on offer, how it gets made, and how end users relate to it are all in flux. New tools and services allow people to be better informed and more instantly up to date than ever before, opening the door to an enhanced public life. But the same factors that make these developments possible are also undermining the institutional rationale and economic viability of traditional news outlets, leaving profound uncertainty about how the possibilities will play out.

Our tentative topics for panels are:

• Data mining, visualization, and interactivity: To what extent will new tools for visualizing and artfully presenting large data sets reduce the need for human intermediaries between facts and news consumers? How can news be presented via simulation and interactive tools? What new kinds of questions can professional journalists ask and answer using digital technologies?
• Economics of news: How will technology-driven changes in advertising markets reshape the news media landscape? Can traditional, high-cost methods of newsgathering support themselves through other means? To what extent will action-guiding business intelligence and other "private journalism", designed to create information asymmetries among news consumers, supplant or merge with globally accessible news?
• The people formerly known as the audience: How effectively can users collectively create and filter the stream of news information? How much of journalism can or will be "devolved" from professionals to networks of amateurs? What new challenges do these collective modes of news production create? Could informal flows of information in online social networks challenge the idea of "news" as we know it?
• The medium's new message: What are the effects of changing news consumption on political behavior? What does a public life populated by social media "producers" look like? How will people cope with the new information glut?

Registration: Registration, which is free, carries two benefits: We'll have a nametag waiting for you when you arrive, and — this is the important part — we'll feed you lunch on both days. To register, please contact CITP's program assistant, Laura Cummings-Abdo, at lcumming@princeton.edu. Include your name, affiliation and email address.

Postings here have been a bit sparse lately, which I hope to remedy soon. In the meantime, you can get a hearty dose of tech policy blog goodness over at my course blog, where students in my course in Information Technology and Public Policy post their thoughts on the topic.

When an invitation to the facebook group came along, I was happy to sign up as an advocate of ScienceDebate 2008, a grassroots effort to get the Presidential candidates together for a group grilling on, as the web site puts it, "what may be the most important social issue of our time: Science and Technology."

Which issues, exactly, would the debate cover? The web site lists seventeen, ranging from pharmaceutical patents to renewable energy to stem cells to space exploration. Each of the issues mentioned is both important and interesting, but the list is missing something big: It doesn't so much as touch on digital information technologies. Nothing about software patents, the future of copyright, net neutrality, voting technology, cybersecurity, broadband penetration, or other infotech policy questions. The web site's list of prominent supporters for the proposal – rich with Nobel laureates and university presidents, our own President Tilghman among them – shares this strange gap. It only includes one computer-focused expert, Peter Norvig of Google.

Reading the site reminded me of John McCain's recent remark, (captured in a Washington Post piece by Garrett Graff) that the minor issues he might delegate to a vice-president include "information technology, which is the future of this nation's economy." If information technology really is so important, then why doesn't it register as a larger blip on the national political radar?

One theory would be that, despite their protestations to the contrary, political leaders do not understand how important digital technology is. If they did understand, the argument might run, then they'd feel more motivated to take positions. But I think the answer lies elsewhere.

Politicians, in their perennial struggle to attract voters, have to take into account not only how important an issue actually is, but also how likely it is to motivate voting decisions. That's why issues that make a concrete difference to a relatively small fraction of the population, such as flag burning, can still emerge as important election themes if the level of voter emotion they stir up is high enough. Tech policy may, in some ways, be a kind of opposite of flag burning: An issue that is of very high actual importance, but relatively low voting-decision salience.

One reason tech policy might tend to punch below its weight, politically, is that many of the most important tech policy questions turn on factual, rather than normative, grounds. There is surprisingly wide and surprisingly persistent reluctance to acknowledge, for example, how insecure voting machines actually are, but few would argue with the claim that extremely insecure voting machines ought not to be used in elections.

On net neutrality, to take another case, those who favor intervention tend to think that a bad outcome (with network balkanization and a drag on innovators) will occur under a laissez-faire regime. Those who oppose intervention see a different but similarly negative set of consequences occurring if regulators do intervene. The debate at its most basic level isn't about the goodness or badness of various possible outcomes, but is instead about the relative probabilities that those outcomes will happen. And assessing those probabilities is, at least arguably, a task best entrusted to experts rather than to the citizenry at large.

The reason infotech policy questions tend to recede in political contexts like the science debate, in other words, is not that their answers matter less. It's that their answers depend, to an unusual degree, on technical fact rather than on value judgment.

I'm excited to announce that Princeton's Center for InfoTech Policy is putting on a workshop on the policy and social implications of "Computing in the Cloud" – the trend where companies, rather than users, store and manage an increasing range of personal data.

Examples include Hotmail and Gmail replacing desktop email, YouTube taking over as a personal video platform, and Flickr competing with desktop photo storage solutions. Facebook, Myspace and other social networks have pioneered new kinds of tools that couldn't exist on the desktop, and more new models are sure to emerge.

I'm confident that this trend will reshape tech policy, and will change how people relate to technology. But I don't know what the changes are. By drawing together experts from computer science, industry, government and law, I hope the Center can help those of us at Princeton, and workshop participants from around the country, get a better sense of where things might be headed.

The workshop will be held on the Princeton campus on January 14 and 15, 2008. It will be free and open to the public. We will have a series of panel discussions, interspersed with opportunities for informal exchanges of ideas. We're still putting together the list of panels and panelists, so we haven't yet published a schedule. If you're interested in attending or want to get email updates about the workshop, please email David Robinson (dgr at princeton dot edu).

Here are some of the possible themes for panels we are exploring:

• Possession and ownership of data: In cloud computing, a provider's data center holds information that would more traditionally have been stored on the end user's computer. How does this impact user privacy? To what extent do users "own" this data, and what obligations do the service providers have? What obligations should they have? Does moving the data to the provider's data center improve security or endanger it?
• Collaboration and globalization: Cloud computing systems offer new sharing and collaboration features beyond what was possible before. They make shared creation among far-flung users easier, allow or require data to be stored in many different jurisdictions, and give users access to offerings that may be illegal in the users' home countries. How will local laws, when applied to data centers whose user base is global, affect users practice? Do these services drive forward economic growth — and if so, what effect should that fact have on the policy debate?
• New roles for new intermediaries: Cloud services often involve new
  intermediaries such as Facebook, MySpace, eBay, and Second Life, standing between people who might have interacted more directly before these services emerged. To what extent are these services "communities", as their providers claim? How much control do users feel over these communities? How much control do and should users actually have? How does the centralized nature of these intermediaries affect the efficiency and diversity of online experiences? Can the market protect consumers and competition, or is government oversight needed?
• What's next: What new services might develop, and how will today's services evolve? How well will cloud computing be likely to serve users, companies, investors, government, and the public over the longer run? Which social and policy problems will get worse due to cloud computing, and which will get better?

Today we're kicking off an online symposium on The Future of Scholarly Communication, run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton. An "online symposium" is a kind of short-term group blog, focusing on a specific topic. Panelists (besides me) include Ira Fuchs, Paul DiMaggio, Peter Suber, Stan Katz, and David Robinson. (See the symposium site for more information on the panelists.)

I started the symposium with an "introductory post. Peter Suber has already chimed in, and we're looking forward to contributions from the other panelists.

We'll be running more online symposia on various topics in the future, so this might be a good time to bookmark the symposium site, or subscribe to its RSS feed.

[Today we welcome back SG, a twelve-year-old who previously reviewed the B2 version of the One Laptop Per Child computer. SG had a chance to examine the latest (B4) version of the OLPC machine and write a new review. As before, the review is unedited, just as SG wrote it. – Ed]

After my first review, the administrators at OLPC were kind enough to send Mr. Felten the newer model of the computer, the B4, for me to review. The difference between the two models was quite dramatic. Between new games, new applications, design changes, and a few touch ups for the system, the B4 clearly outshines the B2. I didn’t even know about a bunch of problems in the B2 until they got fixed in the B4!

The minute I picked the new computer up, I saw the physical differences. There are bumps on the handle of the B4. The B2 has none. The flip- up antenna on the B2 was encased in hard plastic, and on the B4, it’s just thick rubber. The keyboards are pretty much the same, apart from a few minor differences along the top. Once I opened it up and started it, I noted how much quicker it booted up than the B2. Then I saw the icons. The B2 has less than half the icons than the B4, which has 13!

As for games, entertainment, and the internet, this computer has bountiful resources. There were many new and fun programs. One of them, called “Block party”, is just plain old tetris with a different name. As I am not really gifted in tetris, I had a lot of fun losing repeatedly. The internet was a lot better on this newer laptop. In my last review, I complained about how slow it was and how the connection was so-so. In the B4, both of those problems have been fixed. It is quick, always connects, and is really very nice. If you don’t want to go on the web to read the new Freedom to Tinker article, “News Reader” lets you subscribe to websites’ feeds. In the games category, “Connect” is a game which can only be played on two separate OLPC laptops . The game is a little like tick tack toe. If you’ve ever played “Connect 4”, that’s the same game. If you want to watch some video clip from the web, “watch and listen”, OLPC’s media player, has you covered. Want some music? Use “tamtam”. This application is similar to Garageband, but not quite the same. Last but not least is “Record”. On the B2, “record” just took pictures with an okay camera. On the B4, you can take pictures with a pretty good camera AND record video with no time limit (as far as I can tell). I was surprised and overjoyed to discover I could take video with the new one.

One of the coolest applications is called simply “Chat”. It is basically an IM-ish kind of thing that works between all OLPC laptops. Since I got two laptops from OLPC, I could test out the chat application with my friends and family. I spent a lot of time having silent conversations with the friend sitting across the room, so that was fun. Etoys is another cool application, and it is definitely the program of a genius technologist. Although it is difficult to understand and use, once you get into the swing of things, it’s awesome. To use Etoys you make a “sketch” on the computer, then save it, and that’s where the fun begins. You can write “scripts” that make the sketch move around the screen in the way that you want. You can put it in “books” that have multiple pages for a flip book or make animations with it (ie. a bouncing ball, flying bird, eating kid, etc.). In Turtle Art, you get a chance to write a simple program that makes the turtle in the middle of the screen move. It’s very cool.

Last review, I said that my main problem with the computer was its slow speed and its battery charge. And I am happy to say that both of those problems have been fixed in the new version. It has more applications, higher quality camera, more games, a few design changes for the better, and much more. I tested how long it would stay alive by opening it and leaving it open. Surprisingly, it stayed awake for more than four hours! And some other testing revealed that the B4 does, in fact, auto save your documents and stuff if it runs out of battery while an unsaved document is on it. I like that feature, because there were many times with the B2 that I was typing and it just died, leaving me rather stunned for a couple seconds until I came to my senses and wearily plugged it in. Then it would take hours to charge up again. But in the B4, it charges up really quickly. Another minor turn for the better is the plug. Now they are greener, more round, easier to hold, and they have the XO sign on them.

I thought that this version was way better than the last one. It was just easier to figure out, more fun to spend time on, just better. It’s going to be hard to send it back to OLPC, but I’m going to have to. It’s great that they’re going to start selling them to the public. (You have to buy two, and you send one to a needy kid in a third world country and keep one for yourself. Read about it in the New York Times… …) I hope I can get one!

For a regular laptop, this would be the paragraph about its problems, its deficiencies. But the thing is, there aren’t any problems with this computer! Congratulations, OLPC. You’ve done it. Or will you come out with yet better laptops? Is that even possible? We’ll have to see…

Last week's review of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) machine by twelve-year-old "SG" was one of our most-commented-upon posts ever. Today I want to follow up on a few items.

First, the machine I got for SG was the B2 (Beta 2) version of the OLPC system, which is not the latest. Folks from the OLPC project suggest that some of the problems SG found are fixed in the latest version. They have graciously offered to send an up to date OLPC machine for SG to review. SG has agreed to try out the new machine and review it here on Freedom to Tinker.

Second, I was intrigued by the back-and-forth in the comments over SG's gender. I had originally planned to give SG a pseudonym that revealed SG's gender, but a colleague suggested that I switch to a gender-neutral pseudonym. Most commenters didn't seem to assume one gender or the other. A few assumed that SG is a boy, which generated some pushback from others who found that assumption sexist. My favorite comment in this series was from "Chris," who wrote:

Why are you assuming the review was written by a boy?
At 12 we’re only two years from 8th grade level, the rumored grail (or natural default) of our national publications. SG, you’re clearly capable of writing for most any publication in this country, you go girl! (even if you are a boy)

Third, readers seem to be as impressed as I was by the quality of SG's writing. Some found it hard to believe that a twelve-year-old could have written the post. But it was indeed SG's work. I am assured that SG's parents did not edit the post but only suggested in general terms the addition of a paragraph about what SG did with the machine. I suggested only one minor edit to preserve SG's anonymity. Otherwise what you read is what SG wrote.

Though sentences like "My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high." seem unusual for a twelve-year-old, others show a kid's point of view. One example: "Every time you hit a key, it provides a certain amount of satisfaction of how squishy and effortless it is. I just can’t get over that keyboard."

SG is welcome to guest blog here in the future. Kids can do a lot, if we let them.

[I recently got my hands on one of the One Laptop Per Child machines. I found the perfect person to review the machine. Today's guest blogger, SG, is twelve years old and is the child of a close friend. I lent the laptop to SG and asked SG to write a review, which appears here just as SG wrote it, without any editing. –Ed]

I’ve spent all of my life around computers and laptops. I’m only 12 years old though, so I’m not about to go off and start programming a computer to do my homework for me or anything. My parents use computers a lot, so I know about HTML and mother boards and stuff, but still I’m not exactly what you would call an expert. I just use the computer for essays, surfing the web, etc.

Over the last few days, I spent a lot of time on this laptop. I went on the program for typing documents, took silly pictures with the camera, went on the web, played the matching game, recorded my voice on the music-making application, and longed for someone to join me on the laptop-to-laptop messaging system. Here is what I discovered about the OLPC laptops:

My expectations for this computer were, I must admit, not very high. But it completely took me by surprise. It was cleverly designed, imaginative, straightforward, easy to understand (I was given no instructions on how to use it. It was just, “Here. Figure it out yourself.”), useful and simple, entertaining, dependable, really a “stick to the basics” kind of computer. It’s the perfect laptop for the job. Great for first time users, it sets the mood by offering a bunch of entertaining and easy games and a camera. It also has an application that allows you to type things. The space is a little limited, but the actual thing was great. It doesn’t have one of those impossible-to-read fonts but it was still nice. When the so-so connection allows you to get on, the internet is one of the best features of the whole computer. With a clever and space-saving toolbar, it is compact, well designed, accessible, and fast.

But, unfortunately, the internet is the only fast element of the computer. My main problem with this laptop is how very slow it is. It’s true that I am used to faster computers, but that’s not the problem. It’s just really slow. I had to wait two minutes to get onto one application. That’s just a little longer than I can accept. Also, it got slower and slower and slower the longer I went without rebooting it. I had to reboot it all the time. We’re talking once every two or three hours of use! And one of the most frustrating things about the system was that it gave no warning when it was out of power (as it was often because it lost charge very quickly) but just shut down. It doesn’t matter if you’re working on your autobiography and you had gotten all the way to the day before yesterday and forgotten to save it, it just shuts off and devours the whole thing.

This laptop is definitely designed for harsh conditions. Covered in a green and white hard plastic casing, it is designed not to break if dropped. It has a very nice handle for easy transportation and two antennas in plastic that can be easily put up. Once you open it, you see the screen (pretty high resolution) and my favorite part of the computer: the keyboard. It’s green rubber so that dust and water won’t get in under the keys, and this makes the keyboard an awesome thing to type on. Every time you hit a key, it provides a certain amount of satisfaction of how squishy and effortless it is. I just can’t get over that keyboard. There is also a button that changes the brightness of the screen. The other cool thing is that the screen is on a swiveling base, so you can turn it backwards then close it. This makes the laptop into just a screen with a handle.

All in all, this laptop is great for its price, its job, and its value. It is almost perfect. Just speed it up, give it a little more battery charge hold, and you have yourself the perfect laptop. I’m sure kids around the world will really love, enjoy, and cherish these laptops. They will be so useful. This program is truly amazing.