Speaker Biographies, Abstracts and Presentations

Education, Culture and the Knowledge Economy Conference

June 6, 2008, University of Toronto

Tina (A.C.) Besley is currently a Professor of Counseling in the Educational Psychology and Counseling Department, California State University, San Bernardino, USA. She was formerly a Visiting Research Associate in Educational Policy Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA and spent five years as a Research Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK. Tina is a New Zealander with degrees in counselling and education and has been a secondary school teacher and a school counsellor. Tina’s research interests include: youth issues, in particular notions of self and identity and contemporary problems; school counseling; educational policy; educational philosophy; and the work of Michel Foucault and poststructuralism. She is on the editorial boards of six academic journals and has published in many reputable journals. Her international profile includes invited seminars and lecture courses in several countries including: Mexico, South Africa, Canada, China, Sweden, Poland, Italy, Taiwan, U.K, New Zealand, and Cyprus. Tina’s book, Counseling Youth: Foucault, power and the ethics of subjectivity (Praeger, 2002) is now in a paperback edition (Sense Publishers). With Michael A. Peters, she has written Building Knowledge Cultures: Education and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of the Self (Peter Lang, 2007, in print) and is co-editor of Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research (Peter Lang, 2007).

Girls, Social Media and Education
In the last five years social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and YouTube have grown from a niche activity to one that involves tens of millions of Internet users who are predominantly young and female. More than half (55%) of all of online American youths ages 12-17 use online social networking sites according to a new national survey of teenagers conducted by Pew Internet & American Life Project. Older teens, particularly girls, are more likely to use these sites and, for girls, social networking sites are places to reinforce pre-existing friendships rather than to make new friends or flirt, as for boys. It has been noted that high school girls, particularly the popular ones, have a sophisticated understanding of social networks. For instance, they know why it is important to be a hub; how to control information for their own benefit; how to spread information depending on their goal (to throw a party, to harass someone, etc.); how to be exclusive and isolate others from the group; the importance of weak links; how to brand themselves; who to trust in what circumstances; the power of developing pent up demand. While high school girls often lack maturity and judgment, these are exactly the skills required for the digital age. This presentation explores the phenomena of social networking as aspects of a new mode of social production, examining the gender dimension and the talent of girls in social media in order to investigate the means to harness this talent for educational purposes.

Besley Presentation

Economic Geography and the Internet
The internet was supposed to bring about a "death of distance" because the marginal cost of distance in communication is effectively zero online. In this presentation, I will summarize five different research papers that show how online activity nevertheless varies across location for consumers, for firms, and for academics. For consumers, local tastes and local offline retail options affect online behaviour. For firms, the costs and benefits of internet use vary across locations. Furthermore, the benefits of online advertising vary across locations. Finally, for academics, the benefit of online collaboration varies with the distance between collaborators. Generally, these papers show that the benefit of using the internet depends on where you live and work.

Goldfarb Presentation

Ariel Katz (Faculty of Law, University of Toronto) joined the Faculty of Law in 2004 and holds the Innovation Chair in Electronic Commerce. He received his LL.B. and LL.M from Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and his SJD from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto. His general area of research involves economic analysis of competition law and intellectual property law, with allied interests in electronic commerce, the regulation of international trade and particularly the intersection of all these fields. Professor Katz came to the University of Toronto after practicing competition law for 4 years at the Israeli Antitrust Authority. While there, he litigated several merger appeals and restrictive arrangements cases before the Antitrust Tribunal and negotiated regulatory settlements. Professor Katz currently teaches courses on intellectual property, cyberlaw, and the intersection of competition law and intellectual property.

Collectivizing Rights; Privatizing Taxation: The Unarticulated Function of Copyright Collectives

Katz Presentation

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard has been with the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2002. His diverse current research focuses on pension systems, demographics, high-skilled immigration, offshoring, the productivity impact of information technologies in the services sectors, and European economies and structural reforms.

Prior to joining the Institute, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard worked with the Danish Ministry of Defense, NATO in Eastern Europe, the United Nations in Iraq and in the private financial sector in New York City. He is a graduate of the Danish Army's Special School of Intelligence and Linguistics with the rank of first lieutenant, the University of Aarhus in Aarhus, Denmark and Columbia University in New York.

Jacob Funk Kirkegaard has previously presented and published on various topics at EU Ministerial Conferences, the European Commission, the OECD, ASEAN, the IMF, Financial Times, CNN International, Wall Street Journal, as well as numerous other media outlets, private financial institutions and academic institutions and journals.

Accelerating Decline in America's High-Skilled Workforce: Implications for Immigration Policy 

Kirkegaard Presentation

Les Oxley FRSNZ, FMSSANZ, FIEMSS is Professor in Economics, Department of Economics, University of Canterbury, Adjunct Professor School of Economics and School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of Western Australia and Adjunct Professor Chiang Mai University, Thailand. He is also Associate Researcher, BRCSS-Network, New Zealand and was Deputy Chair of the 2006 New Zealand Performance Based Research Fund (PBRF).

His research interests include: modelling and testing theories of economic growth especially those involving measures of human capital; financial econometrics; the knowledge economy/society; intellectual property; energy economics and cliometrics. He is one of the Foundation Editors of the Journal of Economic Surveys (Blackwell), is on the editorial boards of several international journals, including Environmental Modelling and Software and Mathematics and Computers in Simulation.

His current research includes; defining and measuring the size, scale and effects of the ‘knowledge economy’ in New Zealand; measures and effects of innovation on the New Zealand economy in the late 19^th/early 20^th century; latent variable-based measures of human capital. His research is funded, in part, with support from the New Zealand Royal Society (Marsden Fund) and Foundation for Research, Science and Technology (FoRST).

For his contributions Les Oxley received the award of Elected Fellow, Royal Society of New Zealand (FRSNZ) in November 2004, following the award of Elected Fellow, Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, (FMSSANZ), in August 2000. He has served on the Marsden Fund Social Sciences Panel, the Business and Economics Panel of the Performance Based Research Fund and, as Principal Investigator, has been awarded three Marsden Fund grants.

Knowledge Workers and the Changing Pattern of Global Migration: Some Experience from New Zealand
Although it is widely accepted that in knowledge societies and knowledge economies knowledge plays a key role in economic activities and social life, our understanding of what counts as knowledge is often incomplete and crucially, difficult to measure. In some of our earlier work we have analysed definitional and measurement issues that resonate in a knowledge economy/society environment. That work raised, among other things, the notion of codified versus tacit knowledge; social and cultural capital and also potential social and cultural differences in how knowledge is measured, appreciated and rewarded. The explicit features of knowledge enable it to be codified and thus, disseminated globally. This can lead to all knowledge simply being reduced to explicit knowledge. However, researchers draw our attention to the unarticulated, contextualised and tacit dimension of knowledge.

The work presented here seeks to explore the role of and relationship between, the two forms of knowledge (tacit and codified) in the trans-national mobility of migrant Chinese knowledge workers. It combines quantitative data on skilled Chinese immigrants who moved to New Zealand from Mainland China after 1990 and case study interviews with migrant Chinese knowledge workers to provide evidence on the value of different forms of knowledge for migrants in accessing and carrying out their work and daily living. We argue that tacit knowledge is not separate from, but interactive with explicit knowledge through cultural values, social networks, institutional arrangements and interpersonal relationships. These are crucial to the process through which these skilled Chinese immigrants enter and adapt to New Zealand’s knowledge society. Therefore, the development of policy in relation to this should build on this wider concept of knowledge.

Oxley Presentation

Oxley, L. and McAleer, M. (2007). Economic and Legal Issues in Intellectual Property. Blackwell Publishing. 

Trinh Le & John Gibson & Les Oxley (2005). Measures of human capital: A review of the literature, Treasury Working Paper Series 05/10, New Zealand Treasury.

Guest Lecturer at The New Zealand Treasury (26 February 2002): Are Brains Good For Growth? The Human Capital Debate.

Professor Oxley may be contacted directly at les.oxley@canterbury.ac.nz 

Michael A. Peters is Professor of Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his Bachelor’s degree in English Literature, and an honors degree in Geography, before attaining his teaching diploma and teaching in New Zealand high schools for seven years, the last two as head of department. While teaching he completed a major for a Bachelor of Science in Philosophy and returned full time to complete his Master in Philosophy, with first class honors, and PhD in Philosophy of Education with a thesis on the philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein. He has just completed a second book on the subject entitled Wittgenstein as Pedagogical Philosopher (Paradigm Press, 2008) with Nick Burbules and Paul Smeyers. He held a personal chair at the University of Auckland, NZ (2000-03) and Research Professor at the University of Glasgow, UK (2000-05), as well as numerous posts as adjunct and visiting professor throughout the world. He is the executive editor of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Blackwell) and editor of two international ejournals, Policy Futures in Education and E-Learning (both with Symposium) and sits on the editorial board of over fifteen international journals. He has written over forty books and three hundred articles and chapters, including most recently: Global Citizenship Education: Philosophy, Theory, Pedagogy (Sense, 2008); Global Knowledge Cultures (Sense, 2007); Subjectivity and Truth: Foucault, Education and the Culture of Self (Peter Lang, 2007); Why Foucault? New Directions in Educational Research (Peter Lang, 2007); Building Knowledge Cultures: Educational and Development in the Age of Knowledge Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006); Knowledge Economy, Development and the Future of the University (Sense, 2007); Education, Globalization and the State in the Age of Terrorism (Paradigm, 2005), Deconstructing Derrida; Tasks for the New Humanities (Palgrave, 2004). He has a strong research interests in distributed knowledge systems, digital scholarship and elearning systems and has acted as an advisor to government on these and related matters in Scotland, Spain, NZ, South Africa and the EU.

Education and the Culture of Openness: New Architectures of Collaboration
This paper provides a view of the changing liberal political economy of an aspect of the global digital economy focusing on Open Education as a movement comprised of digital ‘knowledge cultures’ that build on overlapping and nested convergences of open source, open access, open publishing, and open archiving movements. The paper relates this movement to the concept of ‘openness,’ and its underlying political values, as well as forward in terms of analysis of the present historical moment of the emerging paradigm of ‘social production.’

Peters Presentation

Peters Presentation References

Ayelet Shachar is the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Multiculturalism at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, and for the 2007-08 academic year was the Jeremiah Smith Jr. Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Her teaching and research interests include: citizenship, immigration law, transnational legal processes, multi-level governance regimes, highly skilled immigrants, and state and religion.

Professor Shachar has published extensively in leading law reviews and social science journals. She is the author of Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Women's Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2001; winner of the American Political Science Association’s Best First Book Award). This work has influenced legal and public policy debates in Canada and abroad. Her new book, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2008.   

The Global Race for Talent
Professor Shachar will summarize the theoretical perspective developed in her 2006 NYU Law Review piece on the rise of a “global race for talent.” In this race, competing jurisdictions scramble to attract and retain highly skilled migrants as a tool to retain or gain an advantage in the new global economy. Her talk will then shed light on the "borrowing" of the Canadian-style point system by other advanced industrial countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and most recently, the United Kingdom. Professor Shachar will also briefly explore the recent US proposal to adopt a Canadian-style point system to attract highly skilled migrants.

Shachar, A. “The Race for Talent: Highly Skilled Migrants and Competitive Immigration Regimes" NYU Law Review 81 (2006), 148-206. 

Shaheen Shariff is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Education at McGill University. Her research and teaching are grounded in the study of law as it impacts educational policy in two general areas: a) human rights, constitutional and tort law as it informs legal pluralism, censorship and diversity in schools; and b) an emerging policy vacuum relating to on-line student communications including privacy rights, safety, cyber-libel, school supervision and legal responsibilities.

Her publications include numerous refereed journal articles and book chapters as listed at http://people.mcgill.ca/shaheen.shariff/ and three books: 1) Censorship . . .or . . . Selection?!: Confronting a curriculum of orthodoxy through pluralistic models, Sense Publishing, Netherlands; 2) Cyber-bullying: Issues and solutions for the school, the classroom, and the home, Routledge (Taylor & Frances Group, U.K.) just published; and 3) Confronting Cyber-bullying: What schools need to know to control misconduct and avoid legal consequences, Cambridge University Press, New York (in press, due Spring, 2009).

She is Principal Investigator on two major national and international projects on cyber-bullying funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and one Quebec project on multicultural issues. On the international project she collaborates with academics and lawyers in China, Japan, India, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Information on this project can be found at www.cyberbullying.co.nr.

Public Policy, Justice and Legal Issues Relating to Concerns Over Internet Use Among Students
Professor Shariff will speak about: institutional roles and responsibilities in monitoring and intervening in anti-authority student on-line expression that borders on defamation; balance between student free expression, privacy, supervision and in cyber-space (social networking sites, ratemyprofessor etc); reactive policy responses and the need for alternate responses.

Shariff Presentation

International Cyber-Bullying Project

Shariff, S. (in press). Confronting Cyber-Bullying: What schools need to know to control misconduct and avoid legal consequences. New York: Cambridge University Press (To be released Spring, 2009).

Shariff, S. (2008). Cyber-bullying: Issues and solutions for the school, the classroom, and the home. Abington, Oxfordshire, UK: Routledge (Taylor & Frances Group). 

Sergio Sismondo teaches philosophy and sociology at Queen's University in Kingston. Most of his research explores the philosophical consequences of seeing science as a thoroughly social activity; in this vein he has written widely on general issues in Science and Technology Studies. Sismondo is currently studying the political economy of pharmaceutical knowledge. He is the author of a number of articles and books, including An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (Blackwell 2004). Most relevant to the presentation at this conference, he is the author of several recent articles in medical journals, including "Ghost Management" in PLoS Medicine (September 2007).

Pushing Knowledge in the Drug Industry
The central mechanisms that encourage academic writing are only loosely related to formal markets. Academic medical publishing would appear to be the same, in that researchers write and publish for reasons of status, to shape knowledge and practice, and simply because of deeply ingrained norms. However, pharmaceutical companies play large roles in a significant percentage of drug-related publications, even by academics. These companies ‘ghost manage’ research and publication to serve their interests: contract research organizations run clinical trials, company statisticians analyze data, ghostwriters produce manuscripts, and publication planners find academic researchers willing to serve as authors, and then shepherd manuscripts through to publication; 40% of journal publications on new drugs are managed by publication planners for pharmaceutical companies. This study serves as an important reminder of how non-market economies of knowledge production and dissemination can be deeply shaped by and responsive to powerful external forces.

For further information on Professor Sismondo's presentation, please contact him at sismondo@queensu.ca.

Katherine J. Strandburg is associate professor of law at DePaul University College of Law where she teaches patent law, cyberlaw, trademark and copyright law, and information privacy law. She was a visiting professor during the 2007-08 academic year at New York University School of Law, will visit at Fordham Law School in fall of 2008 and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Illinois College of Law. Her research interests are in patent law; science and technology policy; law and network science; social norm theory; and information privacy law. Her past and forthcoming publications have appeared in the Boston College, Wisconsin, and Colorado Law Reviews and the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, among others. She has also co-authored three law professor amicus briefs to the Supreme Court on patent issues, including briefs at the cert petition and merits stages of the KSR v. Teleflex case. She was the recipient of DePaul College of Law’s 2004 Award for Outstanding Achievement in Scholarship.

Professor Strandburg obtained her law degree from the University of Chicago Law School with high honors in 1995 and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Richard D. Cudahy of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit. She is an experienced litigator and is licensed to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. She currently serves on the Amicus Committee of the Federal Circuit Bar Association and was a member of the AAAS Working Group on Developing a Research Exemption to Intellectual Property Protections.

Prior to her legal career, Professor Strandburg was a research physicist at Argonne National Laboratory, having received her Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1984 and done postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon. She was a visiting faculty member of the physics department at Northwestern University from 1990-1992. Some of her recent collaborative work returns to these roots, using a statistical physics approach to analyze the patent citation network. Results of that work have been published in both law and physics journals.

Sharing Research Tools and Materials: Homo Scientificus and User Innovator Community Norms
Patenting increased dramatically during the latter part of the 20^th century with university patenting significantly outpacing patenting overall. The rise in university patenting has been accompanied by concerns about the effects of increasing commercial interaction on the pursuit of basic research. One particularly controversial aspect of university patenting has been the patenting of "research tools" -- inventions which are used primarily in conducting research on other subject matter. There have been concerns that proliferation of patents on broadly useful research tools could impede research, especially in the university context.

Recent survey studies have alleviated some of this concern, finding that both university and industry researchers in the life sciences report surprisingly little difficulty in obtaining access to patented research tools. One major reason for this lack of problems with research tool patents is that researchers, especially in universities but also to some extent in industry, often simply ignore patents, while patentees forbear enforcing them.

The same studies demonstrate more significant problems with the dissemination of basic research inputs through sharing of biological materials, however. If one believes that a freer flow of research inputs is socially desirable, it is important to understand these results and to consider whether policy measures might assist the continued viability of the "ignoring patents" norm and promote the establishment of a more robust norm of sharing material inputs for research.

I suggest that the concept of "user innovation" provides one useful theoretical framework for approaching these issues. User innovation is innovation motivated by an intention to use, rather than sell, an innovative technology. Empirical evidence and common sense suggest that user innovation plays a significant role in the invention of research tools. Case studies have shown that user innovators often form user communities in which technical advances are shared in a process of "free revealing." This Chapter uses a simplified rational choice theory of social norms to illuminate the circumstances in which a norm of sharing is likely to arise among user innovators, and evaluates the issues of research tool sharing in this light, focusing on the effects of patenting and of the convergence of academic and commercial research in the life sciences. It then discusses the potential for policy changes to promote sharing norms in the diverse community of research tool innovators.

Strandburg Presentation

Michael J. Trebilcock, LL.B. (New Zealand) 1961, LL.M. (Adelaide) 1962, called to the Bar of New Zealand in 1964 and the Bar of Ontario in 1975, is University Professor and Professor of Law at the University of Toronto. Professor Trebilcock taught at the University of Adelaide, South Australia until 1969 when he came to Canada as a Visiting Associate Professor of Law at McGill Law School. He was appointed Associate Professor of Law at McGill in 1970 and joined the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto as a Professor of Law in 1972. He has served as National Vice-President of the Consumers' Association of Canada, Chair of the Consumer Research Council and Research Director of the Professional Organizations Committee for the Government of Ontario. He was a Fellow in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago Law School in 1976, a Visiting Professor of Law at Yale Law School in 1985, and a Global Law Professor at New York University Law School in 1997 and 1999. From 1982 to 1986 he was a member of the Research Council of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. In 1987 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and was appointed a University Professor in 1990. He was honoured with a University of Toronto Teaching Award in 1986, and was awarded the Owen Prize in 1989 by the Foundation for Legal Research for his book, The Common Law of Restraint of Trade, which was chosen as the best law book in English published in Canada in the past two years. He has since authored The Limits of Freedom of Contract and co-authored The Regulation of International Trade; Exploring the Domain of Accident Law: Taking the Facts Seriously; and The Making of the Mosaic: A History of Canadian Immigration Policy. Professor Trebilcock specializes in law and economics, international trade and contract and commercial law. He serves as Co-Director of the Law and Economics Program. In 1999, Professor Trebilcock received an Honorary Doctorate in Laws from McGill University and was awarded the Canada Council Molson Prize in the Humanities and Social Sciences. In the same year he was elected an Honorary Foreign Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Competitive Immigration Policies in International Talent Markets

Trebilcock Presentation

Samuel Trosow is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario, jointly appointed to the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Information and Media Studies (FIMS). Before coming to Western, he was a law librarian at the Boalt Hall Law Library at the University of California at Berkeley and previously private law practice in California. His doctoral work in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA focused on information policy issues. At Western Law his teaching assignments have included Intellectual Property, Information Law, Advanced Copyright Seminar, Graduate LL.M. Legal Theory Seminar and Urban Law. At FIMS he has taught Perspectives in Library & Information Science, Information Policy, Legal Issues for Information Professionals, International Documents, Legal Information Sources & Services, and a Seminar in the Political Economy of Information. He is the co-author of the recent book Canadian Copyright: A Citizen's Perspective (with Laura Murray, Between the Lines Press, 2007), maintains a blog at http://samtrosow.ca, and speaks frequently about copyright policy issues. During the 2007-08 year he is on sabbatical leave and is serving as the Visiting Faculty Scholar-in-Residence at the Canadian Association of University Teachers in Ottawa.

Constraining the Flow of Knowledge in Post-Secondary Education: Copyright as Impediment to Teaching, Learning and Research
In recent years there has been a widening disconnect between the broader notions of users' rights articulated by the Supreme Court of Canada in CCH v. Law Society of Upper Canada and other cases, and on the other hand, the institutional practices of many Canadian post-secondary institutions. This presentation will identify these disparities, ask what accounts for them, consider their potential impacts, and suggest changes in policy necessary to insure that copyright does not become an impediment to teaching, learning and research.

Trosow Presentation

Charles Ungerleider, one of Canada's best known and most highly respected researchers in the field of learning and education, has taken a leave-of-absence from The University of British Columbia where he is a professor of the sociology of education to work as Director of Research and Knowledge Mobilization, for the Canadian Council on Learning - an independent, not-for-profit organization established to improve the quality and availability of information about learning for all Canadians. From 1998 until 2001, Ungerleider served as Deputy Minister of Education for the Province of British Columbia. Prior to assuming responsibility as Deputy Minister, he was Associate Dean for teacher education (1993-1998) at the University of British Columbia. Ungerleider, who has written about a range of topics in education from assessment to xenophobia, is author of Failing Our Kids: How we are ruining our public schools, a critical examination of the state of public schooling in Canada.

The Impact of Technology on Education: Do We Need Educational Policy and Curriculum Reforms?
Faced with depleting natural resources and increasingly uncompetitive industries, Canada - like other post-industrial nations - looks to an economy in which knowledge is the chief commodity, a seemingly limitless and environmentally clean future. Some advocates look forward to radical societal changes with the introduction of computers to the classroom.

The stock market once soared on the strength of economic growth in the technology sector. Advocates of increased use of computers spouted formulas about the exponential growth in information. They talked about the continually changing education requirements for technical occupations. They promised that with computers teaching would be transformed. Teachers would become "the guide on the side" instead of "the sage on the stage."

Parents and educators in the late 1980s and early 1990s were subjected to a variety of claims about the educational benefits of information and communication technologies. Schools, school districts, parent organizations, corporate Canada, and governments were swept up in frenzied attempts to ensure that students would be prepared for a future in which technologies - especially communication and information technologies - would figure prominently.

In his contribution to the panel, Charles Ungerleider will assess the impact of technology on education and assess whether educational policy and curriculum reform are necessary to educate for a technological present and future.

Ungerleider Presentation

Tal Z. Zarsky is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Haifa - Faculty of Law, where he teaches contract law, property law, telecommunications policy and cyberlaw. He is a fellow at the Haifa Center of Law and Technology. His research interests are internet law, information privacy law, e-commerce, telecommunications policy and the policy implications of social networks. His publications have appeared in a variety of legal journals and books, both in the US and Israel

He obtained is LL.B/B.A in Law and Psychology from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with high honors. He received his LL.M and J.S.D from Columbia Law School. His doctorate thesis addressed the legal implications of the data mining of personal information in the online realm. He is a fellow at Yale Law School's Information Society Project and an affiliate of the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information (CITI) at Columbia Business School.

Dr. Zarsky consults various governmental and legislative bodies on issues related to technology policy. He often lectures on these issues to judges, lawyers and other experts. He is admitted to practice law in both NY State and Israel.

Information Flows in Online Social Networks: Promises, Threats and Some Solutions
The vast benefits of online social networks stem from the effective information flow they facilitate. Yet the effectiveness of this information flow could be compromised. Should the state move to assure such effective flow? The answer to this difficult query will depend on the abilities of technological tools, economic forces, social norms and indirect legal rules to meet this objective. It will also depend on the form of information flow at hand (some forms of information are more susceptible than others) as well as the strength and form of the relevant social network. The talk will elaborate on some of the elements mentioned, and draw out several rules of thumb to address this thorny question. Finally, it would offer some policy recommendations to respond to the questions regulators and courts will be sure to face in this context in the very near future.

Zarsky Presentation