Schrag on updating the IRBs

Zachary Schrag has a PDF up on recent efforts to update IRBs. Count me in as vehemently in favor of two of the proposals that are apparently up for discussion.

First, there is the coverage of fields that simply don't have the human risks that medical research does:

Define some forms of scholarship as non-generalizable and therefore not subject to regulation. As noted above, the current regulations define research as work “designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge.” Since the 1990s, some federal officials and universities have held that journalism, biography, and oral history do not meet this criterion and are therefore not subject to regulation. However, the boundaries of generalizability have proven hard to define, and historians have felt uncomfortable describing their work as something other than research.

I would add computer science to the list. A cleaner solution is as follows:

Accept that the Common Rule covers a broad range of scholarship, but carve exceptions for particular methods. Redefining “research” is not the only path to deregulation contemplated by the ANPRM, so a third possibility would be to accept Common Rule jurisdiction but limit its impact on particular methods.

Schrag's PDF gives limited attention to this option, but it seems the most straightforward to me. If a research project involves interviews, studies, or workplace observations, then it's just shouldn't need ethics review. The potential harms are so minor that it should be fine to follow up on reports rather than to require ahead-of-time review.


Schrag also takes aim at exempt determinations:

Since the mid-1990s, the federal recommendation that investigators not be permitted to make the exemption determination, combined with the threat of federal sanction for incorrect determinations, has led institutions to insist that only IRB members or staff can determine a project to be exempt. Thus, “exempt” no longer means exempt, leaving researchers unhappy and IRBs overwhelmed with work.

Yes! What kind of absurd system declares a project exempt from review but then requires a review anyway?

TechDirt on the latest draft of PROTECT IP

Tech Dirt has an analysis of the latest available version of PROTECT IP.

Yesterday, we got our hands on a leaked copy of the "summary" document put together by those writing the new version of COICA, now renamed the much more media friendly PROTECT IP Act. It looked bad, but some people complained that we were jumping ahead without the actual text of the bill, even if the summary document was pretty straightforward and was put together by the same people creating the bill. Thankfully, the folks over at Don't Censor the Internet have the full text of the PROTECT IP Act, which I've embedded below as well. Let's break it down into the good, the bad and the horribly ugly.

I find it hard to care about the nitty gritty details of the approach. The bill is still fundamentally about taking down DNS names on the mere allegation of infringement, and that seems like a very bad idea to me.

Brad on foreign CEOs

Brad Templeton describes a good way to explain the current distribution of nationalities in the tech field:

I gave him one suggestion, inspired by something I saw long ago at a high-roller CEO conference for the PC industry. In a room of 400 top executives and founders of PC and internet startups, it was asked that all who were born outside the USA stand up. A considerable majority (including myself) stood. I wished every opponent of broader immigration could see that.

I agree with Brad that, at least in the software field, we benefit tremendously from foreign workers.

I suspect most observers would agree if they thought about it. You don't have to look just at executives. Walk into any software shop and you will see a large fraction of the workers who were born abroad. Futhermore, talk to any software developer about the job market, and it's not like they are hurting for work. If we sent all the foreign workers home, it's not like we'd have more American programmers at work. We'd simply have less total computer work being done.

It seems that software is getting swept up in laws and regulation that were developed with other fields in mind. If you follow the political discussions on the topic, it is always about lower-skilled jobs in fields where it is tough to start a new company. This depiction simply does not match computer science.

It's the same sort of thing that happens with research oversight. Research oversight is driven by the needs of medical research, and it just doesn't match the ethical issues that computer researchers face.

Inducing infringement alive and well

Mitch Golden writes, in a good analysis of the legal state of LimeWire's file-sharing software, that inducing infringement was a key part of the October 2010 court case against them:

Interestingly, the court largely sidestepped the technical issues as to whether Gnutella itself had non-infringing uses or not, or whether a Gnutella client can be legally distributed. The court's decision instead turned on evidence submitted by the plaintiffs that LimeWire intended to facilitate filesharing.

I continue to feel that we are much better off leaving content carriers alone. Trying to make content carriers into IP policemen is not going to work out well.

Cedric on type erasure

I've been meaning to get around to posting on type erasure, and Cedric Beust beat me to it:

The main problem is that reified generics would be incompatible with the current collections.... The extra type information also impacts the interoperability between languages within the JVM but also outside of it.

I completely agree. I used to rail on erasure until I got more experience with it.

The interoperability issue is one big reason I now like erasure. With erased types, the interop layer uses only a very simple type system. Knowledge of complicated type systems stays within the compilers for individual languages.

An additional reason is that it puts the cost of type checking in the compiler rather than in the runtime. With erased types, the compiler works hard to do its type checking, and if it signs off, the code is known to be type safe. At runtime, the types disappear and the code runs at full speed.

This property is more than just pretty. It is very helpful to an engineer trying to build anything using the language. When you write code, you want to know how it is going to perform. With erasure, the things you write convert directly to machine code, just with extra details added such as which variable goes in which register. With reification, you end up with extra crud being inserted everywhere. To understand performance under reified types, you have to reason about this additional type crud. You'd rather not have to.

A major milestone for Scala+GWT

Stephen Haberman has announced that the majority of features in GWT's "Showcase" app are now available to Scala code as well. Aaron Novstrup did the original port to Scala, and Stephen's recent revamp of the GWT import code has gotten this much more functionality working.

Grzegorz Kossakowski has posted a compiled version on Dropbox for anyone that would like to click around in the final deployed version. A few of the things you will see working are:

• Generators (see the "source code" tab)
  
• Internationalization
  
• Code splitting
  
• Numerous built-in widgets
  

Scala+GWT still requires a lot of handholding to do anything with it, but this is a major milestone. Kudos to everyone who contributed!

Professors' letter against PROTECT-IP

A number of professors have signed a letter to the U.S. Congress opposing Protect IP:

The undersigned are 108 professors from 31 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico who teach and write about intellectual property, Internet law, innovation,and the First Amendment. We strongly urge the members of Congress to reject the PROTECT-IP Act (the "Act"). Although the problems the Act attempts to address-–online copyright and trademark infringement–-are serious ones presenting new and difficult enforcement challenges, the approach taken in the Act has grave constitutional infirmities, potentially dangerous consequences for the stability and security of the Internet's addressing system, and will undermine United States foreign policy andstrong support of free expression on the Internet around the world.

The most important point raised in the letter is that it is a violation of free speech. Forgetting the constitutional issue in the U.S., isn't it a bad way for people to interact online? Shutting down a DNS address is much like cutting a person's phone access, something that is simply not done unless the person is about to be arrested. The authors accurately call it an "Internet death sentence". It's far overboard.

The letter also raises the issues with secure DNS, but I believe this is a counter-productive argument. Secure DNS is a gift to anyone who wants to cut off DNS records. Sure, PROTECT-IP as it stands might not work, but all that means is that Secure DNS version 2 will be updated to have a government back door. The problems of PROTECT-IP are not technical.

Most of all, I really wish people could be more creative about digital copyright. You can copy bits, but you can't copy skill. Thus, we would do better to sell skill than to sell the bits that result from them. We can make that change, but expect Hollywood to fight it.