Judy Estrin, long-time technology leader and former CTO of Cisco, will be speaking as part of the CITS Distinguished Speaker Series on October 27, 2008 at UCSB. Next week we will post an event flyer with full location and timing details as we blog more about her new book, due out on Tuesday, Closing the Innovation Gap.

But, to wet your appetite, here is a , New York Times Bits post from today on her new book.

The New York Times today published "The Future of Reading Digital Versus Print" the first in a series of articles that will look at how the Internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. The article is an informative piece on the on-going debate of the effects of web activity that at face value is reading but in some circles is not considered "true" reading because it doesn't involve paper text or the great works.

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Over the July 4th holiday weekend, I went to Yosemite National Park for the better part of a day. While taking the short walk from a parking and bus area to the majestic lower falls, I saw a college-aged woman totally engaged in text messaging while sitting on a rock fence on the side of the trail.

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Rob Patton, the CITS Program Manager since 2002, had his last day with CITS yesterday. Rob and his family are moving this summer and thus he is moving on from CITS. Rob will be missed—he was a large part of the growth and development of CITS. We thank Rob for his service and hard work and wish him the best of luck on his next adventure!

The World Information Access (WIA) project has just published a report that includes data on the arrest and prosecution of political bloggers around the world. According to the report, arrests of political bloggers have been on the rise over recent years, with a dramatic uptick in 2007, even though levels overall remain relatively low with 64 bloggers being prosecuted since 2003.

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Over the past year, folks from CITS, Transliteracies, and other campus research projects have been working toward a proposal to support research and graduate education around social computing. While social computing as a general area could encompass much of what we do with wired and wireless devices, our group has been focused on several related and core issues associated with social computing:

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In the gateway seminar to the Technology and Society PhD emphasis, which this quarter is being led by Bruce Bimber, there was a discussion a few weeks back on the ethics of scientific participation in various kinds of military research. As luck would have it, I had been planning to read Disrupting Science by Kelly Moore, which examines how scientists in the late 1940s through early 1970s contested the relationship between the military and science (and scientists as individuals and universities as major employers of scientists for that matter).

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As the 2008 campaign continues, I thought I would make note of a recent book, Web Campaigning, by Kirsten Foot and Steven Schneider that folks might be interested in. The book uses a broad constellation of data on websites from various levels of races to trace how campaigns have been using websites and Internet-enabled tools.

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