Keep track of Berkman-related news and conversations by subscribing to this page using your RSS feed reader. This aggregation of blogs relating to the Berkman Center does not necessarily represent the views of the Berkman Center or Harvard University but is provided as a convenient starting point for those who wish to explore the people and projects in Berkman's orbit. As this is a global exercise, times are in UTC.
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Here’s John Williams’ theme from Jurassic Park slowed down a thousand percent, but kept at the same pitch. It’s really sort of awesome:
Jurassic Park Theme (1000% Slower) by birdfeeder
I found this at Geek.com, who found it at Gawker, who found it at Reddit. So, it may not be breaking news, but it’s still pretty damn awesome.
To quote Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing: “Stop ACTA & TPP: Tell your country’s officials: NEVER use secretive trade agreements to meddle with the Internet. Our freedoms depend on it!” ACTA (Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement) is a global trade agreement that’s like SOPA except that it’s secret and does not require legislative approval. TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement) is a secret 9-country deal (including the US) that is even more restrictive than ACTA.
Today is a day of international protest. Please consider registering your concern via this form from Fight For the Future.
Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a new study called “The tone of life on social networking sites” where they examine adult meanness and cruelty. This complements their piece on “Teens, kindness, and cruelty on social network sites.”
Like teens, most adults find people on social network sites to be kind. But what fascinates me about both the adult and teen studies is that frequent users are more likely to witness negative exchanges. (Not surprisingly, young people are more likely to be frequent users which helps explain part of why young people report higher exposure to negativity. Cuz, guess what? Adults and teens aren’t that radically different.)
But what I want to know is: why?
Most folks will probably jump to the conclusion that SNSs produce the meanness and cruelty and, thus, frequent use means more exposure. I suspect that this isn’t the case. Instead, I suspect that the types of people who are drawn to and use SNSs frequently are more likely to engage in drama, meanness, and cruelty. But who are these people?
I especially want to know more about the adults who are more likely to have negative experiences. And I really want to know if there’s a connection between teens and adults when it comes to negative experiences. For example, are teens who have bad experiences online likely to have parents who have negative experiences? Or are they totally unrelated? I can imagine it going either way. More things to think about…
In the meantime, if you’re interested in the issues of bullying, drama, meanness, and cruelty, make sure to check out these two Pew reports. They’re fascinating!
Here, according to the ProjectVRM wiki, are the ideal characteristics of VRM tools:
Note “mobile phones” in #1. Like a car or a wallet, a mobile phone is personal. Ir also supports our independence, helps us express intent, and is substitutable. Bearing all these things (and more) in mind, Ting.com has come to market with the clear intent of doing the best it can to support customers’ VRM intentions.
Go down Joe Andrieu’s list of user driven services…
… and you’ll find that Ting comes about as close as any mobile phone company can come to respecting all those things.
Ting is an MVNO — a Mobile Virtual Network Operator. That means it operates as a phone company, but does not own facilities. Instead it re-sells the raw base offerings (minutes, texts, quantities of data) that it buys from a carrier with facilities. In this case, Sprint. It works everywhere in the U.S. that Sprint does, but it has a much more friendly and sensible set of offerings and pricings than any of the major mobile phone companies. It’s about as gimmick-free as you can get. That is, Ting is the very opposite of what Scott Adams in The Dilbert Future calls a “confusopoly.” Sez Scott,
A confusopoly is a situation in which companies pretend to compete on price, service, and features but in fact they are just trying to confuse customers so no one can do comparison shopping.
Cell [mobile] phone companies are the best example of confusopolies. The average consumer finds it impossible to decipher which carrier has the best deal, so carriers don’t have normal market pressure to lower prices. It’s a virtual cartel without the illegal part.
Ting is a VRM company. Its management and other personnel have been involved in many VRM discussions and events, and a number of VRM folk have been involved in Ting’s beta as well. Our family, for example. So far we’re loving it. The data service especially is surprisingly good. At our kid’s high school in rural New Hampshire, both voice and data service is pretty much perfect.
Here are some of the stories about the Ting launch that have hit so far:
Plus these from Zemanta:
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The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects. The deadline for applications for our Summer 2012 Internship Program is this Sunday! Harry Lewis recalls the early days of Facebook at Harvard
From Harry Lewis's blog post, "Early Online Harvard Facebook Email Thread"
Zeynep Tufekci discusses digital dualism
From Zeynep Tufekci's blog post, "Breaking Bread, Breaking Digital Dualism"
The Citizen Media Law Project explores social media in the courtroom
From Eric P. Robinson's post for the Citizen Media Law Project blog, "See No Evil: Study Says Judges Don't Find Jurors Using Social Media"
Wayne Marshall explains "the Toto ‘Africa’ meme"
From Wayne Marshall's blog post, "Is 'Africa' 'Actually' African?"
metaLAB cofounder visualizes global art
From Matthew Battles's blog post for metaLAB, "Visualizing global art
"
Weekly Global Voices: Maldives: Marred by Violence
From Saffah Faroog's blog post for Global Voices Online, "Maldives: Marred by Violence"
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This Buzz was compiled by Rebekah Heacock. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here. |
January…wasn’t that almost a month ago? Almost! Better late than never, we say. February is turning out to be very exciting here at PRX, but lets take a look at some highlights from last month.
“I consider the discovery of Public Radio Remix (PRX) to be one of the most important and certainly most enjoyable things that happened to me in 2011, I feel that strongly about it, and it has essentially become the soundtrack to my life. The PRX site defines the station as: ‘…the best of public radio on shuffle.’
There is no real way to describe it and capture it in all its fabulousness though, but now visitors to the LongLocks HairSticks Boutique can enjoy it as they shop for hair jewelry, read our articles, or explore the Style & Angst blog! You will find the bright orange PRX stream player located at the bottom of the article pages found on the boutique.”
“The two forces, the tech sector and public media, need each other: The tech sector will gain from public media’s high-quality content, commitment to community, and public service mission; and public media will gain from technology’s network efficiencies, professional and social connections, and radical new distribution paths.”
- idea is to have one main photo server that other people link to.
- Political issues will be most difficult.
Harry: I write to provide you with an update re: on-line face books. X and I did meet with three students from HCS to review issues relating to on-line facebooks.I know Eliot house has locked the world, as it does physically. [HRL: A reference to the fact that Eliot House kept its gates locked against even other Harvard students more than other Houses did--another issue I was dealing with.] I would prefer that we develop a standard for harvard-wide access and make it as easy as possible for the Houses to plug their data into it, so there will be a disincentive for customization. Of course any house that wants to work directly with HCS could continue to do so, at some greater cost to itself.
We shared with the students the standards/guidelines we had previously discussed with you. The students agreed to do everything they can to secure the student images (photos); however, given that the access vehicle for the on-line facebooks is Netscape, it will be possible for those within the Harvard domain to download copies of the facebooks. We agreed that we should provide information to students which references the appropriate sections of the handbook which would let them know they should not tamper with the images in any way. There is no way, however, for HCS to completely secure the image within the Harvard domain. We are now at the point where HCS would like a sample set of data from me so that they can begin to think about the web facebook application. We learned during our meeting with the students that three houses have facebooks on-line: Pforzheimer, Mather and Eliot. The first two I was able to access which means they are available within the Harvard domain. I could not get into the Eliot one which probably means the server it is on is not available outside of Eliot. Given that some Houses have already moved to on-line facebooks and that others want to shall we just share the guideliens[sic] we developed with the houses so that they know how we view their participation in this project, including their responsibility to inform the students of the fact that they are going to have the image and data on-line for those students who have not restricted directory information and who have not exercised their option to inform the Houses that they don't want their image on-line. We could then have HCS follow-up house-by-house to develop the on-line facebooks. However, it does seem to me that some Houses may want to work with HCS in the design of the Facebook but may want to keep it on their own server and not provide access to the Harvard domain. Do you have any strong preference in this regard?
Do you want me to send our recommended guidelines to the Assistants to the House Masters, or, do you want to discuss this with the Masters at one of your regular meetings?
Also, HCS would like to have the on-line facebooks moved to another server in the long-term rather than keeping it on their server (which, of course, was provided to them by HASCS [Harvard Arts and Sciences Computer Services]). I discussed this with Y, because it seemed to me that if any unit has responsibility for FAS-wide computing support, it is HASCS. However, Y is concerned about the resouces[sic] he would need (staffing and computing) to provide the level of service (help assistance, general inquiry assistance) that would arise from the facebooks being on-line. He also felt that given all of the other projects he needs to complete, that this one has low priority. So, if HCS begins this process, they will have to be committed to keeping the facebooks on their server for the long-term. I will be sure the students we met with know this.OK. Let's get started and face the longterm issue if we are fortunate enough to be successful.
by Harry Lewis (noreply@blogger.com) at February 10, 2012 07:07 PM
[live-blogged yesterday] I’ve come in 30 minutes late (Sorry! I had it marked wrong on my schedule) to a panel at the Kennedy School about politics and the Net. The panel is outstanding: Susan Crawford, Micah Sifry, Nicco Mele, Alexis Ohanian [reddit] and Elaine Kamarck, moderated by Alex Jones.
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
As I enter, Susan is saying that SOPA was put forward to make PIPA [Senate version] look reasonable, but it obviously backfired. But, she warns, the type of concerted effort that defeated SOPA is special and rare; we can’t count on it happening again.
Nicco says that Google has doubled its lobbying budget, spending $10M this past year. But it hasn’t made much of a dent against the tight relationships among the entertainment industry lobbyists and Congress. “This is not the end of this issue,” he says, referring to the battle over Hollywood content. “It’s more like a battle in the middle of the opening third.” He adds, “The power of the grassroots to shape and drive the debate…was a shock to the insular world inside the Beltway.”
Alex: Suppose there had been the outcry but not the going dark? Was it going dark that did it?
Nicco: It was an expression of the intensity of the situation. It might have had the same outcome. Google didn’t go dark and drove a huge amount of traffic to anti-SOPA sites.
Susan: Google joined a parade smaller sites like Reddit.com had started.
Alex: Is this a watershed moment?
Elaine: No. Sometimes DC gets things wrong. E.g., a Medicare bill was repealed after 16 months because the seniors went nuts about it. This was pre-Internet. “Old ladies were throwing rotten eggs at Dan Rostenkowski.” Also, in 2006 there were local protests against a bipartisan immigration reform law. SOPA was a perfect example of a bunch of old guys — Chris Dodd et al. — not understanding that they were playing with fire. They didn’t take into account the intensity the Net citizens felt. There’s nothing fundamentally different from what we’ve seen before: Sometimes the folks in Washington just don’t get it.
Alex: We tried to get people on the other side to join us, but I’ll take their side. An op-ed yesterday said that the anti-SOPA digital tsunami was an abuse of democracy.
Micah: That was a frustrating op-ed because he doesn’t imagine that the citizens who were linking and faxing had agency. He assumes they were all duped by Google etc. Citizens can inform themselves, make up their minds, and take action. That said, I think it’s worth noting that some of these companies have immense power. It’s fair to ask how far can they responsibly use that power? I’d argue that most of these companies are in a more responsive relationship to their users than much of old media, especially not Hollywood and the recording industry. They are far more likely to listen to their customers and respond to them. Also, anyone who raises the issue of abusive media power needs to be asked how Fox News helped create the Tea Party Movement, cheerleading people to go to the first rallies. The media coverage on Fox took place before the manifestation of what it was “covering.” For me the fact that the anti-SOPA movement was a civic-commercial hybrid is fascinating.
Alex: Truman ordered the Army to bust up a train strike. Google and the Web overall have become the nervous system of the world. At what point does the power of a privately owned nervous system becomes so great that its even considering withholding services becomes inappropriate?
Alexis: The op-ed was malarkey. All sites are made equal, so if Wikipedia closed down for a week, there would be a new instance of it almost immediately. Likewise if the search engines went down. It is such a frictionless market.
Susan: Legally, infrastructure like transportation and physical access lines is different from the content. When it comes to train line or someone providing cable access to your home, there are extraordinarily high start-up costs. They can be natural monopolies since it may not make sense to have more than one. Google is not a natural monopoly.
Elaine: Laying a transatlantic cable is a big, expensive undertaking. Those infrastructure companies are governed like utilities. The Net access providers claim that they should be able to charge Google more for carrying their content, and that battle will play out over the next decade. So, there are clashes, but the SOPA battle isn’t like that. The US federal govt is not prepared to think about governing the Net. You can see this in its approach to cybersecurity. There’s a nasty cycle: cybercrime is one of those crimes you can pretty much guarantee you’re never going to be caught at. We’re not ready as a country to think about regulating the Net to prevent it. The MPAA and RIAA are really not ready to deal with this. They’re playing an old game. They and a lot of people in Washington don’t understand the issues.
Alex: What are the issues where the govt ought to be thinking about regulation?
Nicco: I don’t think we have a handle on these issues yet. Our leaders lack a fundamental understanding. One way to deal with this would be to introduce a mandatory retirement age for Congress. [it's a joke, sort of.] They’re fundamentally out of touch with how most Americans are living their lives.
Alex: How seriously should we take Anonymous? The nihilistic impulse and incredible skill?
Micah: It’s hard to generalize about Anonymous. It’s a shape shifter. I asked someone researching them if she could assure me that they’re not the Russian Mafia. She said she couldn’t; you just don’t know. And it’s not just Anonymous: the Arabs and Israelis are going after each other. We should also keep in mind that on sites like Reddit.com and CraigsList.com you get daily acts of altruism.
Susan: User empowerment/agency is almost always the right reaction to bad acts and bad speech.
Alex: How about identifying malefactors?
Micah: It’s a good thing you can’t. If we reengineered the Net so you could, the people who would be hunted down would mainly by dissidents. It’s a double-sided sword.
Elaine: You’ve expressed the Zeitgeist of the Net. At some point, criminals will get smarter and will steal billions of dollars from people on Facebook. There’s a crisis point for the Net coming. It won’t be shut down, but it will fundamentally change. It’s not inconceivable that in 20 yrs will have a different Net because people will demand it because someone will have stolen thousands of dollars from us all, or they will withdraw from the one Net and instead will form cloistered nets.
Susan: I agree. There will be a meltdown and people will react with fear. We need to train our reps to understand what the Net is so that they can have an intelligent response.
Alexis: People are afraid of hackers. But the problem is that security is terrible. Banks need to take online security much more seriously.
Alex: Has Wikileaks changed the way people share info?
Susan: The State Dept. no longer shares cables with the Defense Dept.
Alexis: The weak point is always human.
Micah: When I hear you talking about criminals attacking the banks, I think the criminals are running the banks. We’re moving away from trust in centralized institutions and more trust in ourselves. I mentioned Kickstarter.com at the start of this panel [missed it!], and it’s taking off to the extent that in Detroit they’re starting to refer to it as a grassroots WPA. Nicco and I think that the anti-SOPA moment was different because it wasn’t just a shout, but it was when a large community began to realize its own power to shift how things work.
Elaine: Seniors aren’t an interest group?
Micah: Yes, but they worked through a single lobbying group.
Susan: Now they have network.
Alex: But you said we can’t do this too many times…
Suan: But now that the Internet community can see itself, it is forming new associations and networks…
Alex: Hollywood doesn’t seem interested in working together…
Alexis: Hollywood should see the Net as another channel to make money. 10% of the entries at Sundance this year were funded by fans via Kickstarter.
Alex: The anti-SOPA group spanned politics. Matt Drudge was part of it. Are either the Dems or the Repubs better at this?
Alexis: It’s become a political issue.
[And just under the wire, Micah gets in a Google-Santorum joke.]
Q: The Net can be brought down any time…
Susan: It would be extremely difficult to bring it down. The root servers are echoed all over the world. The real risk is that physical cables between companies can be cut. We have too few Internet providers. The great thing about the Net is that it works just well enough — a best-effort network. The NSA has a tremendous amount of info about the threats and attacks. That info should be shared with the operators of the networks and banks in ways that are safe for them so they can cooperate. But you don’t want to burn the village to save it.
Q: What are the lessons from SOPA for citizens and for smaller sites?
Alexis: It’s easy to put up a one-off site to help organize and get attention. That just takes some html and a good idea.
Nicco: How much do you think of Reddit as a political force?
Alexis: It’s not. The people there are. The SOPA protest bubbled up from subreddits. At that point it got the attention of the staff. For us, it was 12 hours of lost revenues, but traffic was up the next day. We built Reddit as a meritocracy. We strive to make sure that if something comes to the front page, it’s genuinely popular.
Nicco: The point of the Constitution is to regulate lunatic populism.
Elaine: No, you take populism into account when governing.
Nicco: Someday Reddit’s mgt may be faced with a decision about going against the community’s preferences.
Alex: The huge anti-SOPA outpouring was only about 10M, which is less than a plebiscite.
Elaine: This is an issue with no clear answer. They heard the outcry, and the reps who had signed on without reading the bill pulled back. This happens not just with Net issues. E.g., Cap and Trade.
Q: [me] Is there a Net constituency, Net values, and does the Net shape political consciousness?
Micah: We’re seeing a change in consciousness: a willingness to dig and share. The Net is conducive to those values, although not everyone who uses it will share those values. But many of these sites have constituencies. This is a sharing economy. The Net is enabling something that was always there in American culture: barn raisings, rent sharing. And some of the things you can do are organically natural: I don’t think you can convince 75M American teens that they’re all thieves. And they’re going to be voters. They’re going to ask what sorts of businesses they can build on top of that sharing.
Q: Alexis, how have you been tweeting during this panel?
A: Katrina has been tweeting in my name. That’s trust!
Q: Tim Wu has made a compelling argument that historically information empires start out open and then become monopolies. Google is young and it’s already finishing our sentences [auto-complete], which is a powerful way of shaping consciousness. The more people are searching, the easier it is to improve your service, so there are economies of scale in search. Hence, monopolies could emerge that have serious barriers to entry.
Nicco: The history of personal computers + connectivity is about empowering individuals and making it easier for small things to destroy big things. I’m not convinced that Google’s advantage is large enough to make it a monopoly.
Micah: I worry that Google can manipulate search results in undisclosed ways. If they favor results that favor their own products, which they’re starting to do now, they’re taking a risk. Their value is that they give us the best results, and if they don’t do that, other sites may get traction. And if they start favoring their own products they can be accused of antitrust violations. They have immense power and I don’t see how to get them to be more transparent without giving up trade secrets.
Alexis: We’re allies with Google as a matter of convenience. If they started lobbying in DC against Net interests, everyone would abandon them. And we think when it comes to building products, we could beat ‘em.
Q: Google is becoming a content producer. Might they switch to pro-SOPA?
Alexis: I don’t know, but if they did, we’d line up against them.
Q: People in this room could switch search engines, but for many people, it’d be harder.
Susan: There’s something about the Google logo that’s like the clown in a horror movie. They haven’t broadened their model beyond targeting ads. Antitrust authorities look at Google very hard. The FTC and DoJ are watching.
Q: Why didn’t Facebook protest SOPA?
Micah: FB is one of the more serious monsters. They signed onto some of the letters but there was no serious activity by the leaders. They want to get into China and don’t want the Chinese govt to think they’re a platform for dissension. Interpret all their actions in that context.
Susa: They see themselves like a media property. They’re the ESPN of the network. Watch FB’s relationship with the carriers. They’re going to want special treatment so that FB becomes the Internet for you. AOL tried it and Americans loved it.
January…wasn’t that almost a month ago? Almost! Better late than never, we say. February is turning out to be a very exciting month at PRX, but lets take a look at some highlights from last month.
I consider the discovery of Public Radio Remix (PRX) to be one of the most important and certainly most enjoyable things that happened to me in 2011, I feel that strongly about it, and it has essentially become the soundtrack to my life. The PRX site defines the station as: ‘…the best of public radio on shuffle.’
There is no real way to describe it and capture it in all its fabulousness though, but now visitors to the LongLocks HairSticks Boutique can enjoy it as they shop for hair jewelry, read our articles, or explore the Style & Angst blog! You will find the bright orange PRX stream player located at the bottom of the article pages found on the boutique.
Yesterday, Human Rights Watch reported that the Russian government deliberately shut down the we
MetaLAB cofounder Robert Gerard Pietrusko has collaborated with Stewart Smith and Bernd Lintermann in a piece called trans_actions: The Accelerated Art World 1989–2011, which explores the impact of the worldwide explosion of art biennials through immersive, panoramic visualizations of data on the global art market and the migration of art, artists, and their audiences.
The dynamic charts in trans_actions convey the impression that (the biennials) are not really places, but “emergent transnational contact zones,” with artists and curators traveling from around the world to places like Moscow, Istanbul and Sydney. Nearly half of biennials today happen in countries beyond the West, and non-Western biennials such as Sao Paulo, Havana, or the Johannesburg Biennale, which has only happened twice, are already considered the main drivers of global art discourse. But trans_actions also raises questions: is there really no longer a center in the decentralized world of biennials? What about the famous Venice Biennale and Kassel’s Documenta—do they still speak for the whole of the art world? And why does the Dak’Art Biennale remain the only event of its kind on the African continent? (Excerpt from the project page at the ZKM web site, translated from the German.)
The piece is now on view at the ZKM Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany—a promising taste of great things to come from metaLAB’s emerging collaboration with the ZKM Centre, a partnership that will encompass exhibitions, digitization, and documentation of ZKM’s remarkable media archive. The screenshots above don’t capture the sumptuous dynamism of the show’s animations; to get a feel for the full experience, visit the project page at the web site of the ZKM Centre.
Africa Is a Country, a wry but passionate blog devoted to “Africa” — the idea, not (simply) the song — in contemporary media (but “not about famine, Bono, or Barack Obama”) has been threatening to make a weekly series out of the genuinely remarkable resonance of Toto’s 1982 soft-rock anthem. It’s a begrudging tribute of sorts to the song’s “resilience as a piece of media about Africa.” Did you know that in addition to dozens of covers, which they promise to feature, the song is also popular sampling fodder for hip-hop producers (among them, Madlib)?
It promises to be entertaining, whether or not you can withstand the earworm. This week they pointed to a new appearance of what they’re calling “the Toto ‘Africa’ meme” courtesy of r&b crooner Jason Derulo, which, I have to admit is both “inane” as they note over there and a pallid by-the-numbers attempt to reproduce the feel and form of “Watcha Say,” his debut single and highest charting song (it hit #1).
I can’t help but be reminded of a strange and oddly apropos discovery about Toto’s “Africa” I made a few years ago, which may be of passing interest to some of you, especially fellow followers of Africasacountry.
Here’s how it happened: my dear friend and colleague, Sharon, is a doctoral student in anthropology who studies the transmission of traditional Malian dance, especially in transnational contexts. A longtime trad-African dancer herself, she has studied and danced in Mali, the US, and France. Anyway, long story semi-short, when Sharon was getting hitched a few years back she asked me whether I might help her arrange some music for her reception (an awesome & lively affair, full of drums and dance, in which a young & chubby Nico got to prance about with the august & strikingly spry Dr. J. Lorand Matory).
Her idea was to take one of the common rhythms from the Malian repertory and mash it up with some pop or hip-hop tracks that employ the same patterns. The idea was suggested to her by the fact that her local teacher, Joh Camara, himself would reference Will Smith’s “Gettin Jiggy Wit It” as a sort of mnemonic device when introducing students to the didadi rhythm. You know, the na-na-na-na-nana-nah bit. You can hear it pretty clearly in this performance I turned up on the ‘Tube (esp between 0:40 and 1:00):
This seemed like a fun task, especially given how much I love tracing patterns across different repertories. But after a few days of intense humming along to myself and attempting to trigger things in the recesses of musical memory, I had come up with relatively little. However, while I had only located a couple tracks that make reference to the rhythm, I had seemingly stumbled across an almost incredible possibility: that Toto’s “Africa,” which seemed like one of the least African songs I could imagine, might actually be based around an actual African rhythm. (And I use actual there twice because it’s a magic word, like Africa.)
Here’s what I shared with Sharon:
I have to confess that I’ve found it rather challenging to think up other songs that employ the same rhythm(s) as Didadi (aside from the tight fit that is “Gettin Jiggy Wit It”). Been racking my musical memory, which has led to some false leads and close fits, but nothing else — until this afternoon — save for a funny refrain from a Cypress Hill song (“la la la la la la la la” in “Hand on the Pump”).
Funny enough — actually I think you may find this discovery fascinating — as I was trying once more this afternoon to think of other songs that might match (and I’m being fairly exacting in wanting a good match — a direct rhythmic overlay), I started humming the rhythm to myself: buh-duh-duh-duhduh-duh-duh. Eventually a vaguely familiar bassline / chord progression emerged from my murky brain. I couldn’t place it, though, and couldn’t remember any words, so I just sang along with the melody until I reached the chorus, where, I hoped, I might remember a single Googlable word. When I got there, I was stunned: the word was “Africa” and the song, natch, “Africa” by Toto! What a hilarious coincidence! I have no idea whether the group was intentionally figuring Africa with that rhythm — it’s never sounded very African to me, but it sure does now!
Anyhow, I’m afraid that means I have only turned up 3 songs that use the same rhythm(s) as Didadi. And two of them are quite cheesy. But this is all in good fun, right? Anyhow, see attached and tell me what you think. For now, I’ve chosen to leave Joh’s performance unedited, so you hear the entire ~2:00 rendition that he gave us, the full arc, including all his variations and the general accretionary/crescendoing dynamic. If that works for you, that’s cool. If not, we can do some editing. Just let me know what you think. It’s easy enough to loop any of the measures he plays or to cut something here or add something there. I could extend any of the songs mashed with the drums, or shorten them, or change their order. I could also change the tempo so that it is faster or slower or gets faster over time (Jo does gradually get faster, and that’s one change I’ve made: now he stays at the same tempo, which helped me to mash/match things up).
Now, judging by this Wikipedia entry and it’s detailed accounts by members of Toto of the way the song came together, it sounds like the guys in Toto might have more or less entirely stumbled upon this felicitous rhythmic concordance. Meter minutiae aside (however fascinating), I find this quotation from drummer Jeff Porcaro most pregnant:
… a white boy is trying to write a song on Africa, but since he’s never been there, he can only tell what he’s seen on TV or remembers in the past.
At any rate, you can imagine the bizarro eureka moment as I pulled that schmaltzy tune out of some dark corner of my mind. As for the main keyboard riff’s Africanness, you’ll have to decide for yourself. Here’s the “mashup” I sent to Sharon (which, suffice to say, was a little too goofy to work for the wedding):
I hear the drums echoing. Do you?
A bit of good news for those of us keen on open government: The Senate Judiciary Committee today voted 11 to 7 to allow television cameras into the Supreme Court.
The text of Senate Bill 1945 is short and sweet. It would insert into the U.S. Code the following line:
The Supreme Court shall permit television coverage of all open sessions of the Court unless the Court decides, by a vote of the majority of justices, that allowing such coverage in a particular case would constitute a violation of the due process rights of 1 or more of the parties before the Court.
Simple, and it could solve the gross misbalance in the importance-to-access ratio of the court. The Supreme Court is all but actively hostile to permanent fixations of its proceedings: no cameras, no television. Audio only became readily available in 2010. But it's also the court with the largest pool of potentially interested citizens - its rulings can affect every man, woman, and child in the country. So why is it easier to film a minor civil trial of no account in the Midwest than it is to record an earthshaking case in the Supreme Court of the United States?
It's time for the court to get in step with the times. I understand the discomfort that the justices might have, suddenly being on the nightly news. And the risk of showboating by lawyers and justices, or of becoming the butt of a Daily Show gag is real, no doubt. It's not hard to imagine what comedians might do with Justice Ginsberg's reported penchant for the occasional in-session nap. But Sen. Patrick Leahy is right: Even if "they do not want to be made fun of through an unflattering video clip or to be quoted out of context... that happens to the rest of us in public service all the time."
Justice Scalia apparently worries that televised proceedings might mislead the public. "For every ten people who sat through our proceedings gavel to gavel," he cautioned last October, "there would be 10,000 who would see nothing but a 30-second outtake from one of the proceedings, which I guarantee you would not be representative of what we do.” And that's not unreasonable. But the argument doesn't stand up in the modern era.
Thirty-second clips are an artifact of broadcast news, and were an understandable necessity to produce a comprehensive accounting of the daily news in 30 minutes. Now the media is shifting to an online world, where news is consumed on demand and there are no limits to the size and duration of what's accessed on the Internet. The solution for Scalia's concern is not less televised coverage, but more. If every case before the court is recorded and available online soup to nuts, those 10,000 people would have every moment of the proceedings at their fingertips, and would be far less likely to be misled.
(Another problem with Scalia's argument against televised proceedings: He feels a 30-second outtake on the news would mislead viewers, so instead he leaves the description of events up to the broadcasters. If you can't trust broadcasters to choose a 30-second clip that properly portrays the proceedings, why trust them to explain what happened with only their words and possibly untrustworthy memories?)
There's still a long, rocky path before this bill could become law, of course. An 11-to-7 vote indicates that getting through the whole Senate could be difficult, and the House could be even tougher to convince. And that's to say nothing about the separation of powers issue. Can Congress tell the Supreme Court to let the cameras in?
Nonetheless, the fact that the Senate Judiciary Committee has made this step is a positive sign. The use of technology to increase transparency is worth exploring, and the higher up the officials who are thinking about it, the more likely it is that the government will follow through.
Arthur is the research attorney and editor for the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center and a correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor. He tweets occasionally at @NominallyBright.
(Image of Supreme Court in sunshine courtesy of Flickr user JillinMD licensed under a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.)
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Largely stalled since Ralph Nader's controversial run in 2000, the Greens must find a way through America's two-party system
Roseanne Barr, actor and comedian, aspires to grander things. She's a candidate for the Green party of the United States' presidential nomination.
Barr's announcement highlights the state of American politics these days. The major parties seem owned and operated by the 1% – the wealthy and powerful interests that have all but taken control of Congress and state governments in the past decade. Minor parties like the Greens are hobbled by laws, written by major parties, that make serious challenges at high levels next to impossible; and their candidates tend either to be unknown or implausible in other ways. This conundrum is less the case in some other countries, where the Greens, enabled in part by laws friendlier to greater political diversity, have won seats in national legislatures.
America's Greens are best-known for their presidential candidates in recent years, most notably Ralph Nader in 2000. He had a long record of activism on behalf of ordinary people and took earnest positions, but refused to give way when it became clear that his candidacy was helping George W Bush into the White House. His and his supporters' insistence that there was no serious difference between Bush and Al Gore, absurd on its face (Exhibit A: the US supreme court), did the Greens no favors. Later, the 2008 Green presidential candidate, Cynthia McKinney, had credentials as a former member of Congress, but her positions – including both 9/11 and Tupac "truther" overtones – were considered extreme. But no one paying attention could doubt the real differences, at least in their campaign promises, between Barack Obama and John McCain.
Obama, of course, broke many of his promises. After mostly doing Wall Street's bidding for three years and putting climate change on the backburner, he has in recent weeks paid more liberal-leaning attention to the issues that motivate protesters and environmentalists; in the latter case, his administration blocked, for the time being, the Keystone XL pipeline that was to bring tar sands oil from Canada to the US Gulf coast. On most issues, however, Obama has governed from the political right, including assertions of executive power – including a penchant for secrecy and antipathy to civil liberties – that are even more extreme than Bush's. The Republicans, meanwhile, have moved much further to the right. They flaunt their love for the 1% and contempt for the environment (when it gets in the way of commerce, at any rate).
In such circumstances, one might imagine an opening for a third party that, among other things, believed in civil liberties; advocated genuine reform of the corporatism that now rules the economy and government; and pushed for an energy policy that sharply reduced America's carbon footprint. The Greens' platform endorses all three. But are their candidates plausible?
Certainly Barr, while by no means a dummy, is not. Even she agrees: if we are to believe this tweet, she expects Jill Stein to win the nomination at the party's July convention in Baltimore. In other words, her campaign is a statement and not much more.
Stein is plainly a serious person with well-considered positions. A doctor who graduated with honors from Harvard and Harvard medical school, she has run several times for statewide office there, and won a significant number of votes in a 2006 campaign for Massachusetts secretary of state. But she hasn't won any elections outside of her home town of Lexington, and few people could plausibly suggest that she has anything remotely near the experience needed to be president.
If she is nominated, Stein will perform a useful service: reminding the public – provided the political press bothers to pay any attention (not a given) – that Obama has broken many promises that the Republicans would never make in the first place. But the Greens would have more influence if they could recruit someone with more obvious gravitas.
More important, though, the Greens and other minor parties have not done enough of the hard work it takes to become power players in America's political system. The deck is stacked against them, yes, but they could all be doing more to find and push candidates at the local level. They have won some races, to be sure. But only when they start to gain orders-of-magnitude more seats on school boards, town and county governments and state legislatures, will they be a real force.
• Follow Dan Gillmor on Twitter @dangillmor
The Federal Research Public Access Act has been reintroduced in the U.S. House. It would require federally-funded research to be made public within six months of publication (with security exceptions, natch). More here.
Go FRPAA! (Ok, not the catchiest slogan ever.)
Fascinating report by Pew Internet on the emotional climate adults find on social networking sites. From a summary of the report circulated by Pew:
85% of SNS-using adults say that their experience on the sites is that people are mostly kind, compared with 5% who say people they observe on the sites are mostly unkind and another 5% who say their answer depends on the situation.
At the same time, 49% of SNS-using adults said they have seen mean or cruel behavior displayed by others at least occasionally. And 26% said they had experienced at least one of the bad outcomes that were queried in the survey.
It’s easy to see how this compares with our expectations about social networks. For me, I was pleasantly surprised at the 85% number, and would have guessed the 49% would have been higher. After all, I’ve seen occasional mean acts even on mailing lists among people who have come to know one another pretty well over the years. And you can’t have a blog for long without attracting some mean-spirited comments, On the other hand, it’s hard to know what to make of this compared to non-digital social networks. Would 49% of adults say that they have seen mean or cruel behavior at work? Among their extended set of real-world friends? At parties they’ve gone to? It’s hard to know exactly what an online network compares to structurally.
China is expanding its campaign against online “rumours,” targeting online microblogging accounts. Most recently, China has unveiled plans to expand real name registration for microblogging services such as Sina and Tencent Weibo. Under the new system, Weibo users would be required to register their accounts with their real names and other personally identifying information. Currently, China is conducting a pilot version of the name registration policy in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzho, and Shenzen.
Chinese officials claim that the new system is designed to help crack down on “unfounded rumors and vulgarities,” but many netizens suspect it is simply an opportunity for further surveillance and censorship. Senior Chinese Information Office official Wang Chen, has stated that the name registration system responds to the requests of citizens who wish to preserve the health of China’s Internet development. But many users have expressed concerns that the new system, stripped of the safeguards of anonymity, will produce a chilling effect on speech critical of the government positions.
Microblogging services have proven to be a sore spot for Chinese officials looking to control online information flows. With the number of Chinese microblogging accounts having quadrupled in 2011, Weibo services have rocketed to the forefront of online tools for rapidly disseminating real-time information about current events and political opinion. The ability of users to instantaneously share and spread information while remaining anonymous has made microblogging services especially difficult to monitor and control.
Should the pilot programs be successful, it seems clear that the loss of online anonymity will have significant implications for the future use of Weibo platforms for sharing political dissent.
My friend Daniel Sheerin in the State Department’s eDiplomacy group (where I sadly recently ended my second and final year as a Franklin Fellow — what a great group!) sent me a quotation from Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan to balance the quotation I use in Too Big to Know and just about whenever I talk about knowledge.
The quote I’ve been using is: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, not his own facts.” I like it first because it’s put so well, but mainly because it expresses a promise that knowledge has made to us in the West: If we can just sit down and look at the facts, all reasonable people will agree. I think the Net is showing us that that’s not a promise that can be kept.
But, of course that’s not the only thing Moynihan said on the topic. Dan points to the this from the Senator: “I fear that rationality is but a weak foil to the irrational. In the end we shall need character as well as conviction.”
Much better! But, I’m not convinced that character + conviction is going to win the day, and since Moynihan was in politics, I suspect that he agreed. Today the formula is probably more like: Character + Conviction + $5,000,000 ad budget.
BTW, I’ve always liked Bertrand Russell’s remark (approximately): “One cannot be argued out of a position that one was not argued into.”
And also BTW, Dan highly recommends Moynihan’s letters.
Q: “What’s the difference between a tweeter and a customer?”
A: “One complains, the other buys.”
Just had to write that down. The Q and the A came in the midst of a VRM conference call that also touched on CRM, VRM+CRM, sCRM, trust frameworks, identity and other stuff.
Not saying that’s a fair characterization, by the way. Just that it’s an interesting one.
Have you ever wondered who PRX’s most licensed producer is? Or what about the station that licensed the most pieces? Maybe you’ve asked yourself what piece gets the most listens? Or maybe what new group sold the most? You can find all of this out and much, much more in the PRX Zeitfunk Awards: 2011.
Also included is useful stats and interesting facts about PRX and some funny stuff from staff.
Zeitfunk means “you’re awesome.” Keep doing what you’re doing!
Did you make the list? Tweet it, Facebook it, let the world know: use #Zeitfunk2011 on Twitter.
New York Times author David Carr has a wonderful, mouth-watering piece about the joys of sitting to dinner with a group of friends and eating home-made bread baked from a recipe passed on from the host’s mother. Then he finishes the column with this point about face-to-face interaction:
All of which is a way of saying something that is probably obvious to others who are less digitally obsessed: you can follow someone on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, quote or be quoted by them in a newspaper article, but until you taste their bread, you don’t really know them.
I agree with most everything he says in the column because, besides the last paragraph, his column is a antidote to digital dualism–the idea that online and offline worlds are somehow separate entities, one “virtual” and the other “real.” But his column brings back digital dualism at the end–and does a disservice, in my opinion, to the rest of his points. He starts by explaining how the dinner group first met each other mostly online, then had this beautiful dinner together, and then shared the recipe over email–and ponders whether or not Google would ever find this recipe. (It seems that Carr asked the host, Clay Shirky, for the recipe and I have a feeling that it might soon end up where Google can find it.)
All these examples of how the online interacts with offline are clear example of why questions like “face-to-face or online friendship?” or “was online or offline more important in the Arab spring?” are not fruitful. The answer is yes. Because there is no “virtual” world separate from this world. As Nathan Jurgenson, who often writes about “digital dualism”, puts it the correct model to understand the Internet is not that the Internet is the “Matrix” and this world is “Zion” a la the movie Matrix. The world is one.
However, that one world is not the same one as the world before the Internet. What’s analytically and politically important is that the online is NOT the same as the offline, not that online and offline are somehow two separate planets. Bits and atoms have different properties and their current integration creates many novel configurations we have not yet adapted to as societies.
Bits are easy to copy while preserving their full organization, atoms are not (in other words, in the online world we have whatever Scotty in Star Trek used to beam people up by deconstituting them molecule by molecule and reassembling them someplace else. (Oops, if you are in an industry where your product is in bit form). Bits travel much easier than atoms, making bits much harder to censor and isolate (I’m looking at you, Mubarak). The architecture in the online world depends on the underlying code while the architecture of the offline world depends on laws of physics. Hence, online, we don’t have the same balance of privacy and visibility that come from the physical properties of space and time: that offline speech disappears after it is uttered; that, offline, we can usually see who is looking at us; offline walls, doors, locks and windows operate in a predictable manner. (That is why Facebook can be so jarring at times: it often ignores deeply ingrained cultural conventions based on laws of physics. It puts all your friends in the same room, by default–and its new timeline defies rules of flow of time as we knew it).
This lack of dualism applies to other technologies which separate the person from their words (which is the nexus of what Plato was vehemently objecting to when he decried the invention of writing and hence the separation of the human from their utterances. That critique is not invalid and remains applicable). When I was a child in Turkey in the pre-Internet era, I would have running conversations in my head with my favorite authors. These authors were quasi-people in my life because I had a void in my personal world. It’s not that I was asocial, on the contrary. I had many friends and I played in the streets and did all the kid things –and enjoyed them– but I also had a deep interest in topics that I was unable to find anyone around me to talk with in person (I suspect this is not an uncommon experience). So, I’d go for walks and have conversations in my head. With authors. Whom I’d never met and probably would never meet.
And, somehow I just couldn’t manage this conversation as well with authors who I knew were dead. I was fully aware the odds were almost impossible –heck, I didn’t even speak English then– and I was a kid having these conversations walking by the sea by myself in a little sleepy town in Turkey. But there was always this tantalizing possibility that one day, I’d have that conversation with that person: books and my world were not dualistic, they were augmented. And I knew that the only true separation, the only true duality was death, and hence my deep disappointment whenever I learned a favorite author was not a contemporary. (A poignant Turkish proverb asks: “Is there a village beyond death?” ["ölümden öte köy var mı?])
These days I meet people sometimes first online, sometimes first offline, but almost always have interactions that span both modalities. When a friend recently told me (online) that he was going on a pretty amazing trip, my first reaction was “how cool.” My second reaction was, “um, heck, does this mean I can’t email you with my random thoughts on stuff we’d been talking about?” Connectivity has become augmented and for me and the deeper divide has become not whether or not connectivity is online or offline, but whether there is some kind of connectivity or not.
There is certainly a difference between emailing someone and, say, sitting in a cafe by the Bosphorus; however, I am not able to categorize it merely as one is good/the other is bad. Each form has strengths and weaknesses depending on the topic, person, location, moment… Some things are better discussed over email. But sometimes you need to be able to hold out a hand. And as Carr mentions in reference to my work, interaction is one of the key mechanisms through which ties can strengthen or weaken–and certainly accessibility through online interaction is part of this mix. In fact, ubiquity of online platforms might increase the isolation of those who either through choice, disposition, or opportunity are not willing or able to be part of mediated, digital sociality and hence create a third level of “social” digital divide. (First level being basic access and second level being skill).
You might think my own experience is unique (and as a traveling academic I am certainly not typical), and Carr is also not typical. But recent survey findings reveal that ordinary people are also increasingly establishing “migratory” friendships–In two separate studies, about 20 to 25% of respondents report friendships which begin online and migrate offline (Wang and Wellman 2010; Gennaro and Dutton 2007) so this is certainly not the exclusive domain of the digerati.
I am not at all claiming that this augmentation of bits and atoms does not have profound consequences; it does. For example, thanks to the Internet, we are more increasingly able to connect with people with whom we share affinities rather than people we happen to live next to (but it also works the other way around — when I moved to Chapel Hill, I chose to live where I live so I would be neighbors with someone I knew previously and with whom I had mostly interacted online before). This is what sociologist Barry Wellman calls “networked individualism”: instead of being completely confined to historical “boxes” of family history and geography, we can open up to constructed ties of interests and affinities. This is a profound change and it is still playing out in the early stages. (Carr and others worry that this might lead to “filter bubbles” as we get our information mostly from chosen friends. Maybe, maybe not, as I reflect on this here.)
The fact of online and offline augment, rather than categorically oppose, does not change the fact that there is something deeply human and imitable about in-person interaction. Babies, even when a few days old, respond to a human smile differently than a non-smiling human, and distinguish between a representation of a face and a shape that has elements of a face but is not arranged like one. To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I never managed to meet in person with one of the authors with whom I had these deep, personal but internal conversations, Edita Morris, and tell her she changed my life. She was alive when I read her book but died a few years after. By exposing me to the existential horror that can be brought about by scientific knowledge, something I had not considered before, her novels about the aftermath of the atom bombs started me away from the path of the child driven by scientific curiosity and one who wanted to be a scientist herself to who I am as an an adult–a person who wants to understand and help shape how science and technology interact with our world. If I had the Internet then, I could have at least emailed her.
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Upcoming Events and Digital Media
February 8, 2012
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Remember to load images if you have trouble seeing parts of this email. Or click here to view the web version of this newsletter. Below you will find upcoming Berkman Center events, interesting digital media we have produced, and other events of note. Two great Berkman opportunities with upcoming deadlines: The Berkman Center is currently accepting applications for our Summer 2012 Internship Program - deadline this Sunday, February 12th. Additionally, the deadline for applications for the Nieman-Berkman Fellowship in Journalism Innovation is Wednesday, February 15th. Apply now!
berkman luncheon series
Mate Choice in an Online Dating SiteTuesday, February 14, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live. 
The 21st century has witnessed a transformation of the American dating scene: Online dating—previously a marginalized social practice—has skyrocketed in popularity to become one of the primary ways that singles meet and mate today. While clearly an empirical topic worthy of study in its own right, data from online dating sites also offer an unprecedented opportunity to address questions of longstanding interest to social scientists. In this talk, I introduce a new social network dataset based on behavioral data from a popular online dating site; discuss the utility of these data for understanding the shape of contemporary stratification systems; and provide a first look at the dynamics of inequality, exclusion, and gender asymmetry that characterize the early stages of mate choice. Kevin Lewis is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Sociology and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. RSVP Required. more information on our website>
special event
Film screening: "Bully" and Forum DiscussionWednesday, February 15, 5:00pm ET, Longfellow Hall, Harvard Graduate School of Education. Hosted and organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in conjunction with the Berkman Center and Facing History and Ourselves. 
Directed by Sundance and Emmy-award winning filmmaker, Lee Hirsch, Bully follows five kids and families over the course of a school year. As teachers, administrators, kids and parents struggle to find answers, Bully examines the dire consequences of bullying through the testimony of strong and courageous youth. Through the power of their stories, the film aims to be a catalyst for change in the way we deal with bullying as parents, teachers, children and society as a whole. more information on our website>
berkman luncheon series
The Promises of Web-based Social ExperimentsTuesday, February 21, 12:30pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, Cambridge, MA. This event will be webcast live. 
The advent of the internet provides social scientists with a fantastic tool for conducting behavioral experiments online at a very large-scale and at an affordable cost. It is surprising, however, how little research has leveraged the affordances of the internet to set up such social experiments so far. In this talk, Jerome Hergueux will introduce the audience to one of the first online platforms specifically designed for conducting interactive social experiments over the internet to date. He will present the preliminary results of a randomized experiment that compares behavioral measures of social preferences obtained both in a traditional University laboratory and online, with a focus on engaging the audience in a reflection about the specificities, limitations and promises of online experimental economics as a tool for social science research. Jerome Hergueux is a PhD candidate in Economics at Sciences Po Paris and the University of Strasbourg and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. RSVP Required. more information on our website>
video/audio
David Weinberger on Too Big To Know
We used to know how to know. Get some experts, maybe a methodology, add some criteria and credentials, publish the results, and you get knowledge we can all rely on. But as knowledge is absorbed by our new digital medium, it's becoming clear that the fundamentals of knowledge are not properties of knowledge but of its old paper medium. Skulls don't scale. But the Net does. Now networked knowledge is taking on the properties of its new medium: never being settled, including disagreement within itself, and becoming not a set of stopping points but a web of temptations. Networked knowledge, for all its strengths, has its own set of problems. But, in knowledge's new nature there is perhaps a hint about why the Net has such surprising transformative power. David Weinberger — senior researcher at the Berkman Center and co-director of the Harvard Law School Library Lab — talks about some important take aways from his new book "Too Big to Know." video/audio on our website>
video/audio
Felipe Heusser on Open Government Data for Open Accountability
Felipe Heusser — Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation, and a Berkman Fellow — gives an overview the spread of transparency policy through freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of 'Open Government Data' as the latest chapter of the transparency story, highlighting how it potentially may impact 'open accountability' and the rise of a new breed of online watchdogs. video/audio on our website> |
Other Events of NoteEvents that may be of interest to the Berkman community:
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See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, and conferences not listed in this email. Our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.
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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.  |
Arne Duncan spoke at Harvard’s Ed School on Monday, and he gave a speech that I thought had some very good points (and I’m not a huge Arne Duncan fan). His speech–Fighting the Wrong Educational Battles–argued that some of our either-or thinking about education is counter productive. He highlighted two areas: First, he rejected those who argue that poverty/income is the sole determinant of educational outcomes, and therefore work on school reform is pointless without poverty reform. I don’t disagree that poverty is a major cause of educational inequality in this country, but I agree with Arne that those facts are no reason not to work tirelessly to improve schools. Changing U.S. school funding and poverty alleviation policy would be great. Until that happens, let’s work together to make the best schools we can.Second, he argued that the teacher evaluation debate shouldn’t be about “should it be all test scores or not” but that both extreme positions are mostly silly. Testing has huge problems, but test data can be helpful in answering the complex question of who is a good teacher and how can we help all teachers get better (see my post about evaluation in Singapore for insights from that country). And our talent development for teachers is pretty much a disaster in the U.S.–we cerify all teachers as satisfactory when we know lots aren’t, and we don’t provide much in the way of meaningful professional development–, so it is relatively hard to do worse than the status quo (though Tennessee certainly seems to be making the effort).
So I think Arne’s right on both of those counts. Those are indeed dumb debates. Lets make schools better and alleviate poverty. Lets make teacher evaluation better and have vigorous debates over the role that test data should play, but let’s not throw out test data entirely.
So in a speech devoted to encouraging better debate, I thought this shot was bizarre and misguided:
But in fact the response of some in the U.S. education establishment to schools that produce dramatic gains in student learning has been much more critical, even dismissive.
That curious visitor would be puzzled by those who respond to successful no-excuses schools by making excuses for why they don’t really matter.
Of course, no one should object to understanding the limitations and strengths of this new research on gap-closing schools. But the skeptics of successful schools have jumped from critique to critique, none of which have found much confirmation in rigorous research.
Name names Arne. Who are these unfair, critique jumping skeptics? I think the critics of no-excuses schools have held several very consistent positions about these schools:
1) They are test prep factories, and we have dumb tests. The no-excuses charters were born in a very particular policy context that rewards schools only for progress in improving standardized test scores in reading comprehension and math. Public schools have evolved to meet all kinds of civic and educative functions– the new charters don’t necessarily have the same educational commitments (some do, but not all). Many of these no-excuses schools are designed from the ground up to optimize test preparation. Kay Merseth’s study of charter schools documents the tendency towards this kind of instruction. If we had great tests, this might not be so bad, but we don’t. So I think there are legitimate grounds for discussion about whether or not optimizing standardized test scores constitutes a good education.
2) They don’t teach all students. Part of the way that charter schools optimize test scores is by restricting entry through selection mechanisms and counseling out students who they don’t want to keep. Some of this is unavoidable–you need to get into a charter through a lottery, and a lottery is a selection mechanism. But charters do take advantage of the opportunity to counsel out/expel/remove some students, and these most difficult of students are the kids the public schools have an obligation to retain and educate. There is some interesting evidence that the KIPP schools do a good job of selecting students that look very similar to their peers in public schools, but it’s not clear that all charter schools do the same. And it also isn’t clear to me that having similar demographics constitutes taking the same group of students. A very small handful of students in school occupy the bulk of the time and energy of the system to deal with (as beautifully articulated by math teacher Ryan Gann here). Forcing these kids back into public schools won’t change the demographic distribution, but makes life much easier for charters.
3) They rely on unsustainable human resource investments. Many charters are staffed by people who devote their whole waking lives to schools. Good on them, but people should have families, hobbies, lives, etc. We don’t have enough of monks to staff the entire U.S. public education system.
4) They get more funding than other schools. Thank you hedge fund magnates. There are all kinds of ways, from building funds to funding for tutors to free consulting support, that charters get more money per student than their peers.
5) On the whole, charters don’t outperform regular schools, and we don’t close bad charters: The distribution of high performing “no-excuses” schools isn’t that different from the distribution of good urban public schools. Arguably we have a lot of money and policy attention going to an intervention that produces outstanding results at about the same rate as the current system. Moreover, we can’t seem to get rid of the crappy charter schools, even though the whole point is that their “charters” should be revoked if the schools are lousy. (To be fair, charter advocates tear their hair out about this even more than charter critics).
Not all of these critiques argue that charter schools are bad.Maybe not all of these critiques are right. But these critiques have been unwavering and they rest on reasonable empirical evidence and have not, in my mind, been rigorously, irrefutably disproved. Maybe Arne is attacking some other group of unfair no-excuses critics, but since he didn’t say who they were, we don’t know.
Here’s my main point: this was a cheap swipe in an otherwise good speech. If Arne’s goal is to raise the caliber of the debate, I’m not sure that a sweeping accusation of unnamed no-excuses critics as unfair and inconsistent is the best way to meet that objective.
Tuesday, February 7, 6:00 pm
Austin West Classroom (111), Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
Free and Open to the Public
RSVP Required via the form below
Sponsored by the Harvard Law School Library and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society
A Panel Discussion about Connecting Democracy: Online Consultation and the Flow of Political Communication
with
Peter Shane, Jacob E. Davis and Jacob E. Davis II Chair in Law at the
Ohio State University and Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law
School Library (co-editor of the book)
David Lazer, Associate Professor, College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University
Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT
Matthew Baum, Marvin Kalb Professor of Global Communications, Professor
of Public Policy, Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School of
Government
John Palfrey, Berkman Faculty Co-Director, Henry N. Ess III Professor of
Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Harvard Law School
Pew Research Center for the People & the Press has released the results of a new survey that shows that cable TV news is remaining the main source of political news. The Internet is climbing as a political news source, although social media are not yet major sources of political news. Local news, network news, and local newspapers are plummeting.
Filipe L. Heusser [pdf] is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “Open Data for Open Accountability.”
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
How is the open Web been changing accountability and transparency? Filipe is going to share two ideas: 1. The Web is making the Freedom of Information Act (FOIOA) obsolete. 2. An open data policy is necessary to keep freedom of information up to date, and to move toward open accountability.
Lots of people praise transparency, he says. There are multiple systems that benefit from it. Felipe shows a map of the world that shows that most parts of the world have open government policies, although that doesn’t always correlate with actual openness. We continue to push for transparency. One of the cornerstones of transparency policy is freedom of information regulation. In fact, FOIA is part of a long story, going back at least back to 1667 when a Finnish priest introduced a bill into the Swedish parliament. [Entirely possible I heard this wrong.]
Modern FOI laws require governments to react to requests and to proactively provide information. (In response to a question, Filipe says that countries have different reasons for putting FOI laws in place: as a credential, to create a centralized info system (as in China), etc.), etc. Felipe’s study of 67 laws found five clusters, although overall they’re alike. One feature they share: They heavily rely on reactive transparency. This happens in part because FOI laws come out of an era when we thought about access to documents, not about access to data. That’s one big reason FOI laws are increasingly obsolete. In 2012, most of the info is not in docs, but is in data sets.
Another reason: It’s one-way information. There’s no two-way communication, and no sharing. Also, gatekeepers decide what you can know. If you disagree, you can go to court, which is expensive and slow.
In May 2009, data.gov launched. The US was the first country to support an open data policy. Sept. 2009 the UK site launched. Now many have, e.g., Kenya and the World Bank. These data are released in machine-readable formats. The open data community thinks this data should be available raw, online, complete, timely, accessible, machine processable, reusable, non-discriminatory and with open licenses.
So, why are these open data initiatives good news? For one thing, it keeps our right to FOI up to date: we can get at the data sets of neutral facts. For another, it enables multiway communication. There are fewer gatekeepers you have to ask permission of. It encourages cheap apps. Startups and NGOs are using it to provide public service delivery.
Finally, Felipe runs an NGO that uses information to promote transparency and accountability. He says that access to open data changes the rules of accountability, and improves them. Traditional gov’t accountability moves from instituational and informal to crowd-source and informal; from a scarcity of watchdogs to an abundance of watchdogs; and from an election every four years to a continuous benchmark. We are moving from accountability to open accountability.
Global Voices started a project called technology for transparency, mapping open govt apps. Also, MySociety, Ushahidi, Sunlight Foundation, andCuidadano Inteligente (Felipe’s NGO). One of CI’s recent apps is Inspector of Interests, which tries to identify potential conflicts of interest in the Chilean Congress. It relies on open data. The officials are required to release info about themselves, which CI built an alternative data set to contrast with the official one, using open data from the Tax and Rev service and the public register. This exposed the fact that nearly half of the officials were not publishing all their assets.
It is an example of open accountability: uses open data, machine readable, neutral data, the crowd helps, and provides ongoing accountability.
Now Felipe points to evidence about what’s going on with open data initiatives. There is a weird coalition pushing for open data policies. Gov’ts have been reacting. In three years, there are 118 open data catalogs from different countries, with over 700,000 data sets. But, although there’s a lot of hype, there’s lots to be done. Most of the catalogs are not driven at a national level. Most are local. Most of the data in the data catalogs isn’t very interesting or useful. Most are images. Very little info about medical, and the lowest category is banking and finance.
Q: [doc] Are you familiar with miData in the UK that makes personal data available? Might this be a model for gov’t.
Q: [jennifer] 1. There are no neutral facts. Data sets are designed and structured. 2. There are still gatekeepers. They act proactively, not reactively. E.g., data.gov has no guidelines for what should be supplied. FOIA meets demands. Open data is supplied according to what the gatekeepers want to share. 3. FOIA can be shared. 4. What’s the incentive to get useful open data out?
Q: [yochai] Is open data doing the job we want? Traffic and weather data is great, but the data we care about — are banks violating privacy, are we being spied on? — don’t come from open data but from FOIA requests.
A: (1) Yes, but FOI laws regulate the ability to access documents which are themselves a manipulation to create a report. By “neutral facts” I meant the data, although the creation of columns and files is not neutral. Current FOI laws don’t let you access that data in most countries. (2) Yes, there will still be gatekeepers, but they have less power. For one thing, they can’t foresee what might be derived from cross-referencing data sets.
Q: [jennifer] Open data doesn’t respond to a demand. FOI does.
A: FOI remains demand driven. And it may be that open data is creating new demand.
Q: [sascha] You’re getting pushback because you’re framing open data as the new FOI. But the state is not going to push into the open data sets the stuff that matters. Maybe you want to say that WikiLeaks is the new FOI, and open data is something new.
A: Yes, I don’t think open data replaces FOI. Open data is a complement. In most countries, you can’t get at data sets by filing a FOI request.
Q: [yochai] The political and emotional energy is being poured into open data. If an administration puts millions of bits of irrelevant data onto data.gov but brings more whistleblower suits than ever before,…to hold up that administration as the model of transparency is a real problem. It’d be more useful to make the FOI process more transparent and shareable. If you think the core is to make the govt reveal things it doesn’t want to do, then those are the interesting interventions, and open data is a really interesting complement. If you think that you can’t hide once the data is out there, then open data is the big thing. We need to focus our political energy on strengthening FOI. Your presentation represents the zeitgeist around open data, and that deserves thinking.
Q: [micah] Felipe is actually quite critical of data.gov. I don’t know of anyone in the transparency movement who’s holding up the Obama gov’t as a positive model.
A: Our NGO built Access Inteligente which is like WhatDoTheyKnow. It publishes all the questions and responses to FOI requests, crowdsourcing knowledge about these requests. Data.gov was the first one and was the model for others. But you’re right that there are core issues on the table. But there might be other, smaller, non-provocative actions, like the release of inoffensive data that lets us see that members of Congress have conflicts of interest. It is a new door of opportunity to help us move forward.
A: [juan carlos] Where are corporations in this mix? Are they not subject to social scrutiny?
Q: [micah] Can average citizens work with this data? Where are the intermediaries coming from?
A: Often the data are complex. The press often act as intermediaries.
Q: Instead of asking for an overflow of undifferentiated data, could we push for FOI to allow citizens’ demands for data, e.g., for info about banks?
A: We should push for more reactive transparency
Q: [me] But this suggests a reframing: FOI should be changed to enable citizens to demand access to open data sets.
Q: We want different types of data. We want open data in part to see how the govt as a machine operates. We need both. There are different motivations.
Q: I work at the community level. We assume that the intermediaries are going to be neutral bodies. But NGOs are not neutral. Also, anyone have examples of citizens being consulted about what types of data should be released to open data portals?
A: The Kenya open data platform is there but many Kenyans don’t know what to do with it. And local governments may not release info because they don’t trust what the intermediaries will do it.
Following in the tracks of our model pre-digital “augmented” book, McLuhan/Agel/Fiore’s 1967 The Medium is the Massage, Adam Michaels and I are beginning to cook up a vinyl LP project that will consist in a remix of The Electric Information Age Book. The idea is to work up a ludic soundtrack for our print excavation of a moment from the e-Book’s prehistory that riffs off of Agel’s own quirky Columbia Records project, marketed as THE FIRST SPOKEN ARTS RECORD YOU CAN DANCE TO.
If you aren’t familiar with this curio from the late 1960′s, you’ll find an online copy at Ubu web.
Which stations bought the most last year, and which sold the most? PRX’s Zeitfunk Awards are out in the wild, along with programming ideas for stations, after the jump!
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| February 7, 2012 |
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Tuesday, February 7, 12:30 pm
Berkman
Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
RSVP required for those attending in person via the form below
This event will be webcast live at 12:30 pm ET and archived on our site shortly after.
Over the past decade 'transparency' has become one of those key words in
the debates on modern governance. A pervasive cliché captured by the
rhetoric of politics, which has raised 'transparency' as a perfect
paracetamol to potentially remedy problems as diverse as accountability,
growth, public service delivery and participation. For years, the
cornerstone of transparency policies has been the 'Freedom of
Information Act', a regulation that since the mid 1960's has spread from
3 to nearly 80 countries around the globe, but which maybe increasingly
gaining obsolesce in the context of the digital age.
Open Government Data policy, is the latest chapter of the transparency
story. It is moving the paradigm from 'access to public documentation'
(FOIA) towards 'access to public data', avoiding obsolesce, and keeping
up to date our right to access public information that increasingly
flows through a digital ecosystem.
Though the implementation of Open Data policies is likely to impact a
diverse variety of sectors, 'accountability' is certainly one of the
main domains of impact. The bursting rise and spread of online
accountability tools and watch-dogs such as the Sunlight Foundation
(US.), MySociety (UK), Ushahidi (Kenya), and Ciudadano Inteligente
(Chile), are good examples of how the web is creating a more powerful
sort of open and crowd sourced accountability. More eyes now rest upon
government, the question is 'how' (if) does this matter.
The talk will quickly overview the spread of transparency policy through
freedom of information regulation, and point out to the rise of 'Open
Government Data' as the latest chapter of the transparency story,
highlighting how it potentially may impact 'open accountability' and the
rise of a new breed of online watchdogs.
Felipe is the Founder and Director of Fundación Ciudadano Inteligente, a Latin American NGO based in Chile that uses information technology to promote transparency and active citizen participation. He graduated as a Lawyer from the P. Universidad Católica (Chile) and holds a Master degree in Public Policy from the London School of Economics (UK), where he is also a PhD Candidate in Government with research in the field of Freedom of Information, Regulation, and Internet Technology. Felipe is also an Ashoka Fellow for the News and Knowledge program, and achieves work experience in both the Chilean NGO and Government sectors, working for Un Techo para Chile, and both Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Labour. In 2010, he organized the first Personal Democracy Forum for Latin America, and currently coordinates the Open Data research project for Latin America in collaboration with IDRC, ECLAC (UN) and W3C.
As a Berkman Fellow at Harvard University, Felipe’s research aims to bridge the relationship of traditional Freedom of Information regulation with recent-born open data policies, highlighting how this relationship changes according to the habitat where these policies are embedded.
A nice feature story on metaLAB has appeared in the Harvard GSAS News by staff reporter Bari Walsh. Entitled In with the new, it describes the lab’s foundation, the core founders group, and some of our ongoing research and teaching concerns.
That’s Jesse on the left with James and Joseph on the right playing with our LED/Kinect remixer, running a digital copy of the McLuhan/Agel/Fiore lp recording version of The Medium is the Massage.
As I read this essay on “The Death of the Cyberflâneur” by Evgeny Morozov who argues that the Internet lost its early quality of leisurely strolling and encountering the unexpected, I kept thinking about how this did not fit my experience. While there are many parts to Morozov’s essay –some of which I am not going to discuss here at all– I want to focus on the idea of “wandering around” the Web and encountering the unplanned in light of the emergence of the “social web”. For me, the social web has greatly increased exactly this quality of the Internet –encountering the unsearched and the unplanned– and I don’t believe this is because I am exceptional but rather it is because connectivity through people –the social web– yields more diverse and surprising encounters than mere connectivity through topics or information-the early Internet.
To go back to Morozov’s essay: there are two parts to his claim why the Internet is less about the aimless encounter: first is empirical, and the second is structural. Here’s the empirical argument:
Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore. The popularity of the “app paradigm,” whereby dedicated mobile and tablet applications help us accomplish what we want without ever opening the browser or visiting the rest of the Internet, has made cyberflânerie less likely.
First let’s get some numbers out of the way. Is it true that “hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore”? In a recent (December 2011) and nationally representative survey, Pew Internet found that 74% of all online adults answered “yes” to the question if they do go online for “no particular reason except to have fun or to pass the time.” I don’t think this is blip. In my 2010 surveys with college students a whopping 77.9% said “very often” when asked how often they went online “for no reason at all”—and I’ve probed this question many times since 2005 and I have similar numbers for all the years.
I’ve asked Evgeny Morozov about his data and he pointed to a Microsoft advertisement survey—the survey had scant public information but actually shows a 4% increase in amount of surfing from 2007 to 2010; and surfing remains the second most popular activity after email. Morozov also referred to the famous Wired article which argued that the “The Web is Dead.” I’m sympathetic to the argument in the Wired if interpreted structurally: that the Web is being taken over by “walled gardens” like Facebook and single-purpose apps. Data-wise, though, the Wired piece does not speak to this argument of encountering the unexpected or wandering around (it’s comparing peer-to-peer and video traffic to “Web” traffic, for example). (Also, see this critique.)
So, let me consider structural argument which I find a lot more interesting. Here it is in a nutshell:
As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”
This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about. … Compared with Facebook’s highly deterministic universe, even Microsoft’s unimaginative slogan from the 1990s — “Where do you want to go today?” — sounds excitingly subversive. Who asks that silly question in the age of Facebook?
I have to say that at face value, this is an attractive argument, and one that has been echoed by others: the “filter bubble” or the “daily me”—and indeed raises deep questions about how to design for serendipity:to find not merely what we are looking for, but to wander and to stumble upon things a la the flâneur, to encounter the unexpected, to savor the surprise.
However, in my personal experience, platforms like Facebook and Twitter have greatly increased the amount of unplanned and interesting information I encounter exactly because they are person-to-person spaces rather than information-spaces. Online, I interact with people with whom I share at least one strong interest–but thanks to the social Internet, I am not exposed to just that limited topic but the much wider universe of what my friends share. And this is always much broader than the narrower affinity that first connected me with that particular person.
The trick to understanding this effect is to understand that people’s affinities don’t lump neatly, nor do they ever overlap completely. In other words, we are, fortunately, not clones of each other. Stereotypes work as broad generalizations at the aggregate, statistical level but break down spectacularly at the individual level: show me a stereotypical “X”, and I’ll show you traits he/she does not share with other stereotypical “X”s.
For example, I have strong interests in social impacts of technology, human rights and democracy and the Middle East–and often make friends based on that basis. However, I have other strong interests which do not fit into any of those categories—and, crucially, so do my friends. Social media thus exposes me to other interests of my friends, and exposes my friends to other interests of mine—and I am surprised everyday by the richness and diversity of these encounters. A friend I met because of shared interest in the emergence of the Internet and the Middle East may pleasantly introduce me to a music genre I dabbled in but never had the time and expertise to dive into. From another, I encounter the intricacies of representing light on metallic surfaces on oil paintings. Somebody shares an article on how bilingualism changes the brain. Baby pictures, sunsets and cat videos, of course, also pass through my stream. But along musings on nature parks in Latin America. There is a new restaurant in town—well, in a town I’ve never been to. It goes on and on and on in a great deal of richness, diversity and complexity.
In fact, encountering things I did not explicitly care about happens to me significantly more than the days I had to click-click-click my way around “cyberspace” because as much as I thought I wandered around, I could never wander around within the richness and depth of my encounters through the social web.
At this point, you might say that I have interesting friends and that is an anomaly. Perhaps, but that is not the point. The point is that I have friends who are not clones of me but have enough similarity with me that they introduce me to topics that I did not know I was interested in, but may plausibly be, if it just popped in front of me. This is likely true for most people for structural reasons.
Crucially, my online encounters introduce me to spaces that are both adjacent to (interests of people somewhat like me) but also far (not my interests) from me. In the old days of seeking by information, I was more likely to encounter only information I was seeking (Duh) but not manage to get too far unless I truly started clicking randomly–but how do you do that? Search for “random”? In the new era of connecting to people, I am exposed to a lot more because “people” are a lot broader than “categories of information” which are, by definition, narrow.
To put an empirical point on this, look at this striking finding from the latest February 2012 Pew survey.
It is commonly the case in people’s offline social networks that a friend of a friend is your friend, too. But on Facebook this is the exception, not the rule. A fully connected list of friends on Facebook would have a density of 1 (everyone knows everyone else). The average Facebook user in our sample had a friends list that is sparsely connected. As an example, if you were the average Facebook user from our sample with 245 friends, there are 29,890 possible friendship ties among those in your network. For the average user with 245 friends, 12% of the maximum 29,890 friendship linkages exist between friends.
For those of us familiar with research on this topic, this number, 12%, is very striking. Most of the time, it is fairly safe to assume that a person’s friends form “close triads”—people you know also know each other–and this creates a structure that looks like a triangle: everyone is connected to everyone else. What this 12% number is saying is that on Facebook, your Facebook friends are almost never friends with each other, i.e. rather than triangles, they form “open triads”. People in closed triads tend to be more similar each other either due to origins of the connection (living in the same environment) or due to convergent homophily (people exposing/converting each other through multiple encounters over time).
Finally, here’s the best empirical finding on this topic: Look at this striking study of 250 million people on Facebook [in a true experiment, no less] by Eytan Basky explained here:
Although we’re more likely to share information from our close friends, we still share stuff from our weak ties—and the links from those weak ties are the most novel links on the network. Those links from our weak ties, that is, are most likely to point to information that you would not have shared if you hadn’t seen it on Facebook. The links from your close ties, meanwhile, more likely contain information you would have seen elsewhere if a friend hadn’t posted it.
In other words, platforms like Facebook connect you with people who connect you with information you simply would not have encountered yourself—and these connections happen especially through your weaker ties who, structurally speaking, are more likely to be in open triads with your other friends, i.e not friends of your their friends. I suspect this may be even truer for Twitter.
I don’t deny there is something to the argument that the shift to walled gardens comes with particular threats, but I disagree that the shift to the social Internet kills diversity, surprise, or richness. An Internet that is collection of sites which brings together, say, “people interested in model airplanes to talk about model airplanes” is going to be a lot less likely to expose us to the unexpected than the social Internet which connects us to people in their fuller richness.
It is not the Internet of things, or Internet of information, which keeps the Web brimming with the unexpected: it’s the Internet of people. Sometimes nothing is a more surprising and complex bundle of the unexpected as another human being.
The Federal Judicial Center
has released a study which
concludes that "detected social media use by jurors is
infrequent, and that most judges have taken steps to ensure jurors do
not use social media in the courtroom," and implies that juror use of
the Internet and social media during trial is not a growing problem.
Alison Frankel of Thompson-Reuters is skeptical about this conclusion, and I agree with her.
The FJC report was based on a survey e-mailed to all active and senior federal judges in October 2011. Of the 952 judges who received the survey, 508 responded – a response rate of 53 percent – from all 94 federal districts.
Of the 508 judges who responded, only 30 (six percent) said that they had experienced jurors using social media during trials and deliberations. Most (23 judges) had seen this during trial, rather than deliberations (12 judges), and judges reported seeing such activity more often in criminal cases (22 judges) than in civil cases (five judges). Three judges had experience with jurors using social media during both criminal and civil cases. Only two had experienced this in more than two cases of either type.
Among the sites and services that the judges observed jurors using, use of Facebook and Google were the most common, both reported by nine judges. Use of instant messaging was noticed by seven judges, while use of Twitter or an Internet chat room was detected by three each. One judge reported juror use of an Internet bulletin board, while one reported juror use of MySpace.
Seventeen of the judges also reported the substance of the jurors' activities: Five said jurors had done research on the case; four said that they had shared information about the case, such as its progress; three judges found jurors "friending" trial participants; and the same number of judges discovered jurors otherwise communicating with trial participants.
Of the 30 judges who discovered social media use by jurors, 28 indicated how they learned of the activity. Thirteen heard of it from fellow jurors, five were told by attorneys, and five said they found out via post-trial motions or interviews. Three found out from court staff, and two observed it themselves.
As the report itself points out, "the data from the survey represent judges’ reported experiences and perceptions of jurors’ use of social media to communicate about proceedings in which they are involved. The data are not actual empirical measures of such behavior." Study at 2.
And it seems dubious that the usage judges observed is all the usage there is, given how widespread Internet use is among the larger community from which jurors are drawn. While there is "no requirement that petit juries actually chosen must mirror the community and reflect the various distinctive groups in the population," Taylor v. Louisiana, 419 U.S. 522, 538 (1975), the jury pool from which trial juries are selected must "reasonably reflect[] a cross-section of the population suitable in character and intelligence for that civic duty." Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 474 (1953).
Two recent studies comparing juror and population demographics in New York reported on by the Cornell Journal of Law & Public Policy blog – one statewide, the other focused on Monroe County, which includes Rochester – found that generally jury pools generally reflect the demographics of the larger community, although the statewide report found racial and ethnic disparity in individual counties. Academics have given a number of reasons why racially-neutral jury pool selection processes can result in unrepresentative juror pools. See, e.g., Kim Forde-Mazrui, Jural Districting: Selecting Impartial Juries Through Community Representation, 52 Vand. L. Rev. 353, 356 (1999) (discussing various impediments to adequate racial representation).
But the issue here is how the jury pool correlates with frequent users of the Internet and social media, and then whether jurors who are such users can be convinced – or compelled – to not use these services while serving jury duty.
According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, overall 78 percent of adults use the Internet. (There are, however, some variations on usage based on age and education level.) About 77 percent of adults do so on a daily basis.
If a jury pool is representative of the adult population, it certainly includes these daily Internet users.
The fact that only two of the judges in the survey discovered the social media use on their own shows that such activity is hard to detect, both inside the courthouse and – especially – outside of it.
There are certainly numerous anecdotal instances in which jurors have been found to be using the Internet or social media during trial. The problem is that it may be impossible to really know how many jurors are doing this.
But that doesn't mean that it isn't happening.
Eric P. Robinson is the deputy director of the Donald W. Reynolds Center for Courts and Media at the University of Nevada, Reno. He previously worked at the Media Law Resource Center and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. In addition to his posts here, Eric also blogs at www.bloglawonline.com.
(Image of courtesy of Flickr user alex.ragone under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.)
We’ve got another promising Boston premiere this week (that’s Tuesday 2/7) at Beat Research.
Ekip Ritual is an ongoing collaboration between “nordestino” electro-percussion wiz, Kiddid, and Brazilian reggae/alt-pop vocalist Massarock. Drawing on soundsystem culture, Afro-Brazilian rhythms, and pop music sensibilities, the duo ride the “global bass” wave with aplomb.
Listen, say, to “Caixas Elétrica Antigas” (that’s “Electrical Boxes Old” according to Google), an apt title given the vintage gleam on the percussion that propels it:
Another strong offering, “Arroxa na Ecuridão,” shows that the vintage-contempo combo goes well beyond gimmickry —
Indeed, Kiddid has been going pretty deep into some of these sounds recently. Much of what you hear in the tracks above — despite an uncanny resemblance to time-honored beat-boxes — are sounds and (virtual) instruments he made himself. A longstanding passion and more recently a vocation, Kidid has been working for Puremagnetik for the past year, designing instruments for Live, Logic, and Kontakt, including his first big project, released last month: modeled after the Yamaha DX7, the DeeEx offers access to some classic-sounding 80s-esque synthesis. Apparently, he’s also just finished a project using the Operator and Analog synths and his designs are being considered for inclusion in Ableton Live 9.
As someone who’s been using Kiddid’s killer tracks as secret weapons for years now, none of that last paragraph comes as a surprise. But it sure whets my appetite for tomorrow’s show! Yours too? If so, you know where to find us –
Good Life Bar
28 Kingston St.
Boston
9pm-1am
FREE
CRCS Lunch Seminar
Date: Monday, February 27, 2012
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119
Speaker: Adelheid Voskuhl, Department of History of Science at Harvard University
Title: Engineering and crisis: technical and social elites in Germany and the US during the “Second Industrial Revolution,” 1890-1925
Abstract: Abstract:
German engineers constituted themselves as a newly emerging professional group in the two decades before the First World War and aimed to establish themselves also as a new social elite. They encountered intense competition with existing elites, however, that were trained in philosophy, history, theology, and law, and that had emerged in Germany as a distinguished civil-servant class earlier in the 19th century. One strategy for engineers to “catch up” with these existing elites was to mimic their social and intellectual behaviors and engage in “philosophy of technology,” that is, to start reading and writing philosophical texts in associations and periodicals that they established specifically for this purpose. They pondered questions about the relationship between industrialism and government, technocratic and democratic political systems, and ethical obligations of technological experts in fast-growing industrial societies. German engineers also turned across the Atlantic Ocean, to their American colleagues and peers, to seek advice and institutional and intellectual support on matters of gaining social respect as a new professional group. This German-American engineering cooperation was also formally constituted in associations and periodicals, and started out during the big world’s fairs in Philadephia and Chicago (in 1888 and 1893). My talk traces this cross-Atlantic exchange between 2 distinct engineering cultures, and corresponding philosophical cultures, and their understandings of the political, military, and social crises of the emerging industrial nation-states in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Short bio:
Adelheid Voskuhl is an associate professor in the Department of History of Science at Harvard University. Her teaching and research interests include the History and Philosophy of Technology from the early modern to the modern period, Modern European History, and History and Ethics of Engineering. She received her PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Cornell University in 2007, and holds graduate degrees in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge University and in Physics from Carl-von-Ossietzky-Universität Oldenburg. Her first book _Mechanics of Sentiment: Androids, Industrialism, and Selfhood in Eighteenth-Century Europe_ is slated for release in early 2013 with Chicago University Press.
Julianne Chatelain investigates why Rich Berlew’s Kickstarter project became one of the top ten of all time, and the #1 in the creative category. She provides a concise, insightful look at why user experience counts for a lot, even when you’re supposedly just making a business proposal: give me $57,750 and I’ll reprint one of my “Order of the Stick” web-comic compilations. Berlew received $400,000 in the first 12 days.
Mitch Weiss took this photo…of my nephew, Greg Cavanagh.
Greg doesn’t actually look that much like Jobs. Here, for comparison, is the original Jobs photo by Albert Watson, and here’s a photo I took of Greg a couple of summers ago:
Mitch’s photo shows you the power of lighting and composition.
Wer die Bourbon Street in New Orleans betritt, wird gleich zweifach überwältigt. Zum einen dadurch, dass es dort fast immer so riecht, als habe die Welt sich in den eigenen Schoss übergeben und nachher vergessen, sauber zu machen. Viel überwältigende aber ist die akustische Schlacht, die dort jeden Abend ab etwa 19 Uhr um die Besucher geschlagen wird. Töne werden zu Waffen, Musik wird zu Lärm, betäubend für Ohren und oft auch für die anderen menschlichen Sinne. In der Bourbon Street kann einem Riechen, Hören und Sehen vergehen.
In diesem Moment habe ich mich in den Worten Jim Morrisons gefragt: Was haben sie dieser heiteren Stadt angetan? Sie haben ihr musikalisches Erbe verwüstet und geplündert. Ihr vor Morgengrauen mit der Waffe des Konsums ins Herz gestochen, ihr die Ketten des musikalischen Mainstreams angelegt und ihr die Stimmung verdorben.
Wie bei nicht endenden wollendem Maschinengewehrfeuer werden aus Tönen Lärmsalven, abgefeuert von beiden Seiten der engen Strasse aus den dicht nebeneinander liegenden Lokalen auf jeden, der sich vom Mississippi oder vom Louis Armstrong Park aus kommend hineinwagt.
Und das sind viele. Ich schaue mich um, aber es scheint die Besucher nicht zu stören, dass mit harten Waffen um ihre Aufmerksamkeit, ihr Eintreten und ihr Geld gekämpft wird. Es scheint sie auch nicht zu stören, dass der Kampf um akustische Aufmerksamkeit zu einem Dröhnen gerät, in dem sich einzelne Musikrichtungen kaum mehr auseinander halten lassen. Das Gemisch aus um die zehn Mann starken Jazzensembles, die mehr auf den Verstärker als auf ihr musikalischen Können vertrauen, aus dem Backbeat von Deep Purple und ACDC Songs und – oh Graus! – aus melodischen Fetzen von Justin Bieber Songs – ein Bruttolärmprodukt, in dem alles aufgeht. Gesteigert durch den Umsatzdruck der zahlreichen Lokale an dieser Hauptstrasse im French Quater ebenso wie durch die ungebremste Feierlust der Touristen, die keine Gnade kennt. Nicht einmal die der Selbstachtung. Die letzten Gäste werden mit dem Müll und den Strömen von Bier und anderen Flüssigkeiten vom Gehweg gekehrt, wenn bereits der Morgen graut.
Und dies ist dann der Moment, in dem New Orleans für einen Augenblick, vielleicht eine oder zwei Stunden, in einen Zustand zurückversetzt wird, in dem man die Geburtsstadt des Jazz wiederentdeckt, so wie sie vielleicht einmal. Dann lässt es sich akustisch genussvoll auf den Pfaden des ursprünglichen Jazz von Joe „King“ Oliver, Louis Armstrong und Jelly Roll Morton wandeln, wie einzelne Musiker oder kleine Ensembles sie spielen, wenn der Krach sich gelegt hat. Dann wird aus Lärm wieder Musik, und Töne werden zu Botschaften, die sich wundersam im Hören zu einem Gesamtkunstwerk fügen. Wenn ich sehr früh morgens mein Ohr an das French Quater lege, dann höre ich die leisen, melancholischen Töne und die flirrenden Stimmen des Dixieland. Die wahre Sprache von New Orleans.
Es ist die Melodieführung des „Canal Street Blues“, die mich lockt, viel zu langsam gespielt von einer einzelnen Trompete, die die Töne ineinander fliessen lässt. Ich folge der Melodie entlang einiger kleinerer Strassen, die die Bourbon Street mit dem Mississippi verbinden, und gelange an den kleinen Platz, an dem das „Café du Monde“ seinen 24-Stunden-Betrieb wie immer aufrecht erhält, um den wenigen frühen Ausflüglern und von der Nacht Übriggebliebenen Kaffee und ein Frühstück zu offerieren. Dort sitzt ein Mann auf einer der Bänke, den Kopf über die Trompete gesenkt, und spielt. Er hat eine schwarze Mütze und eine Sonnenbrille auf und scheint nichts von seiner Umwelt wahrzunehmen. Ich setze mich auf die Bank gegenüber und höre zu. Irgendwann spielt der Mann Gershwins „Not for me“. Doch, das ist für mich, denke ich, das ist meine Botschaft. Die Beignets in dem kleinen Pappschälchen neben mir werden kalt, und mein Herz wird warm.
In this segment of Ask a Researcher, I have a short dialogue with a fellow education researcher, Vance Martin, a post-doc at U. of Illinois. Vance has a chapter forthcoming in an edited volume about using wikis in a social studies methods class (and his dissertation on the optic is freely available: Using Wikis to Experience History). His experience with wikis appears to be at odds with the general patterns that I found in my research (as I reported in Will Free Benefit the Rich?), and I explain a bit about how I think my “30,000 ft view” of education technology patterns can inform design research studies, like those that teachers conduct in their own classrooms.
Justin,
Hi, my name is Vance Martin, I’m a post-doc at the University of Illinois. I received my PhD last year at the U of I, and my dissertation was on using wikis in my own classroom. I have taught history for the last 11 years, but at the college/community college level. I was very interested in your scenarios of edtech innovation, and will be interested to read the Ed Researcher article. I took a look at your quality instrument and don’t doubt your findings, but they do run counter to my own experiences, so I was emailing to simply discuss/get your thoughts. At a community college we have a different group of students who would not often fit into the affluent category. And if I were to categorize outcomes of my own students they would usually fall into your category 1. I’ve found that marginalized or less affluent students are usually the ones who prefer using wikis and creating their own information. Any affluent students I have will often muddle by in a project and score well, but don’t get the project or feel enfranchised. My project has usually been an ongoing textbook that all students add to, and what they research they also teach their classmates. And so more affluent white students, don’t get often get why we should include other views. Within the last year I’ve been teaching students at the U of I (senior social studies pre service candidates). Most of them would be classified as affluent, and they do not see the value of a wiki, other than for use similar to dropbox. Just wondering your thoughts if there is something about the different ages of the students? Perhaps it has to do with individual pedagogy and use of wikis as a particular project? Granted most of my experience has not dealt with k-12 settings, and if my current students are an example I’m not exactly sure how they’d use any social media in a classroom setting.
Vance
Hi Vance,
I think your reflections are exactly what I hoped my research can provoke.
All I can do with my data, is tell you what I know about a sample of wikis that I am certain is representative of publicly-viewable, education-related PBworks wikis used in identifiable U.S. K-12 settings and that I strongly believe to be representative of U.S., K-12 wiki usage generally. The patterns in my data suggest that wikis are used more persistently and for more higher-order skill development in affluent schools. My own experience in visiting schools is that far more opportunities are available for using social media in wealthier schools and in higher academic tracks. I also think that most wiki opportunities in most places are not particularly rich.
It sounds like my findings, in someways run counter to your experience, which means that your experience may be of particular interest. Maybe the patterns that hold for K-12 wikis don’t hold in higher education settings? Maybe there is something particular about how you are facilitating these learning experiences, or something particular about the kinds of students from marginalized backgrounds who persist into tertiary education? I’m not sure that I have enough of a sense of who your students are, what your courses are like, what previous experiences students have, and what projects you conduct with them to make an informed judgment or even a wild guess about what explains the patterns that you identify. But hopefully, what my research can offer is a larger landscape of what wiki usage in U.S., K-12 settings looks like, which hopefully can provide context as you conduct your own action research (formally or the kind that every teacher does through teaching) about the possibilities of using wikis and other social tools in your classroom. I don’t think I have any good answers to your questions, but I’m excited if my research played a role in helping provoke those questions.
For the second time in recent memory, the New England Patriots and the New York Giants delivered a competitive, exciting finale to the NFL season last night, from which the Giants emerged as Super Bowl champs. From a fan’s point of view, the game pretty much had it all: stellar individual and team performances, multiple lead changes, dramatic shifts in momentum, as well as some late-game tension and heroics (okay, maybe this isn’t from a Patriot fan’s point of view). However, upon further review, there was one aspect in which the game was, if not completely predictable, at least not as extraordinary as it might have been.
Let me preface my explanation by saying that I, like many of my fellow Americans, celebrated the evening with some casual small-stakes gambling. At the party I attended, a bunch of us agreed to buy into a Super Bowl Square pool. For those of you who haven’t seen this before, the rules vary depending on local preferences, but each square in a 10 x 10 grid usually corresponds to a pair of single digit numbers (e.g. 0-1, 9-8, 3-3, etc.). These number-pairs correspond to the final digit of the home and away team’s scores respectively. Each player “buys” a given number of squares for a given price and, if they “own” the square that corresponds to the final digits of the home and away team’s scores at the end of the game (or the half, or a quarter – ymmv), that player wins the pool (or some fraction thereof). Since the game is usually meant to be polite and accessible to party attendees who are neither serious about gambling nor football, the number-pairs are often randomly assigned after everybody has already bought their squares, but before the game has begun.
Now, if you stop to think about it, it should be pretty obvious that the second digits of football scores are not distributed randomly. Points can only be scored in combinations of 1, 2, 3, and 6, and there are some combinations which are historically more common than others. As a result, even though nothing has been decided in either the betting pool or the football game when the number-pairs are randomly assigned, some squares are now worth much less (are less likely to win) than others.
As it turns out, the 17-21 final score of the Patriots and Giants corresponded to one of the most likely combinations of second digits (7 and 1). I didn’t run the calculations myself, but pretty much every. single. person. who did agrees on the fact that 7 and 1 are, relatively speaking, much more likely than most of the 100 possible combinations of home and away team last digits. The precise extent to which people claim this combination is more likely depends on the method they use. I am not sure what the relative advantages and disadvantages of the various methods are, but among the sites I consulted, I intuitively prefer approaches like this one and this one, both of which were written by Dough Drinen and use actual game data since 1994 (when the current two-point conversion rules came into effect). If Doug’s done his math right, a 7-1 final digit outcome was among the ten most likely combinations. In the more precise language used in Doug’s analysis, the expected value of “owning” that square was quite a bit higher than the expected value of an average square.
So, why was the Patriots and Giants outcome almost improbable? When the Giants scored what wound up being the final touchdown with a little over a minute to go, the game seemed likely to finish with a relatively rare 7-2 combination once the Giants kicked the extra point. However (and here’s where both gambling and football get a bit more interesting), Giants Head Coach Tom Coughlin chose to have his team attempt a two-point conversion in an effort to reduce the possibility of a tie or a loss (should the Patriots somehow have scored a touchdown in the remaining minute). When the Patriots’ defense prevented the Giants from making the conversion, the score wound up 17-21 instead of 17-22, resulting in an outcome that was…well, almost predictable.
I find it hard to avoid thinking about the material impact of Coughlin’s decision: a truly awesome amount of money was riding on his choice when you aggregate all of the low- and high-stakes betting going on around a major sporting event like the Super Bowl. At a certain level, I guess that’s true at many points in the game, but it’s hard not to see it more clearly when the clock is ticking down and so much clearly depends on the outcome of a single play.
Of course, I have already said that the stakes were incredibly low in the specific case of my Super Bowl party. However, that did not prevent the lucky winner from appreciating the irony of the situation: the final digits in the score had suddenly gone from highly improbable to substantially more probable as a result of the failure of a somewhat improbable play that, on average, results in success a little more than half of the time (sorry if you need to read that last sentence twice). In case you haven’t already guessed it, that lucky winner was me!
The other day I was chatting with some folks at Berkman and this idea came up as a possibly fun and quirky experimental project. It’s not fully fleshed out, but maybe this can inspire more conversations to turn it into something feasible.
The goal of the project is to crate an Internet contraption that, in the spirit of a Rube Goldberg machine, runs on its own after having started it. It will be completely funded, defined, and carried out by the Internet using today’s micro-funding and micro-tasks platforms. The project would be the embodiment of crowdsourcing — it will both celebrate it and problematize it.
The creators of the contraption, will have very little say in the final project itself. Their role would be to define its stages and to set the structure that will hopefully lead to something awesome. Here is how it might work:
Step 1. The instigators will submit the project to a crowd-funding website like Kickstarter with a description of steps 2 and 3. The Kickstarter’s goal will be to raise the necessary funds to pay for stage 2 and 3, and to incentivize the micro-donors, the project will offer more decision power to those who donate more.
Step 2. A portion of the money raised in Step 1 will be used to hire micro-task workers on a platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk to come up for ideas for the final Step 3. The mot interesting ideas would receive higher payment. The micro-donors will get to decide what are the most creative ideas and will let a the crowd decide the one that will become for Step 3.
Step 3. The rest of the money will be used to hire people in the physical world who would carry out the project. These people will be hired on a system like TaskRabbit. Some of the ideas would be to create flash mobs that film themselves and stream the performance live on the Internet.
Some of the obvious questions are:
a) How do you make sure the turkers do not pick something boring, illegal or imposible.
b) What would happen if Step 3 asks people to create another identical project, hence leading to an infinte loop of human computation.
I’m giving my hometown book talk about Too Big to Know tomorrow, Monday, at the estimable Brookline Booksmith at 7pm. It’s free! Come!
Steve Cottle has done a great job live-blogging my wrap-up talk at the Tech@State event. Thanks, Steve!
I was the guest on Tummelvision a couple of nights ago, which is podcast tumble-tumult of persons and ideas. It doesn’t get much more fun than that. Thanks, Heather, Kevin, and Deb!
The Berkman Center has posted the video of my book talk. Look on the bottom left to find the player and the links.
KMWorld’s Hugh McKellar has posted his interview with me.
And NYTECH has just posted a video of my talk there on Jan 25. The talk is about 45 mins and then there’s a lively Q&A. Thanks NY TECH!
Brandeins has posted an interview with Doc Searls and me about Cluetrain. (They translated it into German.)
According to a survey publishsed in Science [abstract][Slashdot] scientists are routinely pressured to include superfluous references in their papers in order to boost the Impact Factor of the journal publishing their paper. The Impact Factor is (roughly) a measure of the importance/influence of a journal, based on a two year average of how often its papers are cited. Careeers are made by publishing in high Impact Factor journals.
This sort of corruption (which I talk about a bit in Too Big to Know) might seem like an inevitable imprecision in how we gauge something as vague as “infuence” if alternatives were not becoming available. Services like Mendeley can provide real-time readouts of which articles are being read and commented on. Google likewise can see how often articles are being linked to. Facebook can see how articles are being passed around social networks, some of which are quite expert. It would of course be good to have measures not gated by commercial entities. In any case, institutions of knowledge are currently relying upon an instrument that was always too blunt and now known to be corrupt.
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The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects. Berkman's currently accepting applications for our Summer 2012 Internship Program! Jeffrey Schnapp cooks up a library smörgåsbord
From Jeffrey Schnapp's blog post for metaLAB, "Cooking up some dishes in the Library Test Kitchen
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John Palfrey liveblogs the Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching
From John Palfrey's blog post, "Harvard Initiative on Learning and Teaching: Kick-Off"
The Citizen Media Law Project reviews Twitter's new tweet blocking policy
From Arthur Bright's post for the Citizen Media Law Project blog, "Why Twitter's New Censorship Tool Isn't As Bad As It Seems"
Wayne Marshall discusses the Megaupload indictments
From Wayne Marshall's blog post, "Mega Uh-Oh"
Ethan Zuckerman teaches on news in the age of participatory media
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post, "News in the Age of Participatory Media"
Weekly Global Voices: Mongolia: The Mining Projects Leaving Herders Without Livelihoods
From Juliana Rincón Parra's blog post for Global Voices Online, "Mongolia: The Mining Projects Leaving Herders Without Livelihoods"
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This Buzz was compiled by Rebekah Heacock. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here. |
PRX’s mission is to harness technology to bring significant stories to millions of people. We’ve primarily focused on opening broadcast opportunities for producers with stations.
Last year, PRX introduced embeddable audio players — included as part of what we call “open streaming” — for producers with paid PRX accounts to use on an opt-in basis to share their work online. Not surprisingly, when we looked at last year’s stats the most listened-to pieces of 2011 allowed open streaming.
So we are excited to announce that as of now all new pieces on PRX will allow open streaming by default for all producers (producers can still opt-out to limit streaming if they prefer).
With one checkbox, open streaming allows:
For producers there are big advantages to opening your stream: more listening, more sharing, more ways for stations and audiences to find and connect with your work.
Over 8,000 individual pieces were licensed by stations from PRX last year, some more than once: 17,488 total licenses by hundreds of stations, reaching millions of listeners. Even as broadcast continues to get the biggest bang for distribution, increasingly producers want to get their work heard immediately on the web and PRX is continuously improving the ways we can help.
We’ll have more improvements to these streaming and sharing options coming soon, and are eager for feedback. For some more explanation check out:
At the Tech@State conf, a panel is starting up. Participants: Linton Wells (National Defense U), Robert Bectel (CTO, Office of Energy Efficiency), Robert Kirkpatrick (Dir., UN Global Pulse), Ahmed Al Omran (NPR and Suadi blogger), and Clark Freifield (HealthMap.org).
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NOTE: Live-blogging. Getting things wrong. Missing points. Omitting key information. Introducing artificial choppiness. Over-emphasizing small matters. Paraphrasing badly. Not running a spellpchecker. Mangling other people’s ideas and words. You are warned, people. |
Robert Bectel brought in Netvibes.com [I use NetVibes as my morning newspaper.] to bring real-time into to his group’s desktop. It’s customized to who they are and what they do. They use Netvibes as their portal. They bring in streaming content, including YouTube and Twitter. What happens when people get too much info? So, they’re building analytics so people get info summarized in bar charts, etc. Even video analytics, analyzing video content. They asked what people wanted and built a food cart tracker. Or the shuttle bus. Widgets bring functionality within the window. They’re working on single sign-on. There’s some gamification. They plan on adding doc mgt, SharePpoint access, links to Federal Social Network.
Even better, he says, is that the public now can get access to the “wicked science” the DOE does. Make the data available. Go to IMBY, put in your zip code, and it will tell you what your solar resource potential is and the tax breaks you’ll get. “We’re going to put that in your phone. “We’re creating leads for solar installers.” And geothermal heat pumps.
Robert Kirkpatrick works in the UN Sect’y Gen’ls office, called Global Pulse, which is an R&D lab trying to learn to take advantage of Big Data to improve human welfare. Now “We’re swimming in an ocean of real time data.” This data is generated passively and acively. If you look at what people say to one another and what people actually do, “we have the opportunity to look at these as sensor networks.” Businesses have been doing this for a long time. Can we begin to look at the patterns of data when people lose their job, get sick, pull their kids out of school to make ends meet? What patterns appear when our programs are working? Global pulse is working with the private sector as well. Robert hopes that big data and real-time awareness will enable them to move from waterfall development (staged, slow) to agile (interative, fast).
Ahmed Al Omram says last year was a moment he and so many in the Middle East had been hoping for. He started blogging (SaudiJeans) seven years, even though the gov’t tried to silence him. “I wasn’t afraid because I knew I wasn’t alone.” He was part of a network of activists. Arab Spring did not happen overnight. “Activists and bloggers had been working together for ten years to make it happen.” “There’s no question in my mind that the Internet and social media played a huge role in what happened.” But there is much debate. E.g., Malcolm Gladwell argued that these revolutions would have happened anyway. But no one debates whether the Net changed how journalists covered the story. E.g., Andy Carvin live-tweeted the revolutions (aggregating and disseminating). Others, too. On Feb. 2 2010, Andy tweeted 1,400 times over 20 hours.
So, do we call this journalism? Probably. It’s a real-time news gathering operation happening in an open source newsroom. “The people who follow us are not our audience. They are part of an open newsroom. They are potential sources and fact-checkers.” E.g., the media carried a story during the war in Libya that the Libyan forces were using Israeli weapons. Andy and his followers debunked that in real time.
There is still a lot of work to do, he says.
Clark Friefield is a cofounder of healthmap, doing real time infectious disease tracking. He shows a chart of the stock price of a Chinese pharma that makes a product that’s believed to have antiviral properties. In Jan 2003, there was an uptick because of the beginning of SARS, which as not identified until Feb 2003. In traditional public health reporting, there’s a hierarchy. In the new model, the connections are much flatter. And there are many more sources of info, from tweets that are fast but tend to have more noise, and slower but more validated sources.
To organize the info better, in 2006 they reated a real-time mapping dashboard (free and open to the public). They collect 2000 reports a day, geotagged to 10,000 locations. They use named entity extractin to find disesases and locations. A bayesian filtering system are categorized with 91% accuracy. They assign significance to each event. The ones that make it through this filter make it to the map. Humans help to train the system.
During the H1N1 outbreak, they decided to create participatory epidemiology. They launched an iphone app called “Outbreaks Near Me” which let people submit reports as well as get alerts, which beame the #1 health and fitness app. They found that the rate of submissions tracked well with the CDC’s info. Also FluNearYou.org
Linton Wells now moderates a discussion:
Robert Bectel: DOE is getting a serious fire hose of info from the grid, and they don’t yet know what to do with it. So they’re thinking about releasing the 89B data points and asking the public what they want to do with it.
Robert Kirkpatrick: You need the wisdom of crowds, the instinct of experts, and the power of algorithms [quoting someone I missed]. And this flood of info is no longer a one-way stream; it’s interactive.
Ahmed: It helps to have people who speak the language and know the culture. But tech counts too: How about a twitter client that can detect tweets coming from a particular location. It’s a combo of both.
Clark: We use this combined approach. One initiative we’re working on builds on our smartphone app by letting us push questions out to people in a location where we have a suspicion that something is happening.
Linton: Security and verification?
Robert K: Info can be exploited, so this year we’re bringing together advisers on privacy and security.
Ahmed: People ask how you can trust random people to tell the truth, but many of them are well known to us. We use standard tools of trust, and we’ll also see who they’re following on Twitter, who’s following them, etc. It’s real-time verification.
Clark: In public health, the ability to get info is much better with an open Net than the old hierarchical flow of info.
Q: Are people trying to game the system?
A: Ahmed: Sure. GayGirlInDamascus turned out to be a guy in Moscow. But using the very same tools we managed to figure out who he was. But gov’ts will always try to push back. The gov’ts in Syria and Bahrain hired people to go online to change the narrative and discredit people. It’s always a challenge to figure out what’s the truth. But if you’ve worked in the field for a while, you can identify trusted sources. We call this “news sense.”
A: Clark: Not so much in public health. When there have been imposters and liars, there’s been a rapid debunking using the same tools.
Q:What incentives can we give for opening up corporate data?
A: Robert K: We call this data philanthropy but the private sector doesn’t see it that way. They don’t want their markets to fall into poverty; it’s business risk mitigation insurance. So there are some incentives there already.
A: Robert B: We need to make it possible for people to create apps that use the data.
Q: How about that Twitter censorship policy?
A: Ahmed: It’s censorship, but the way Twitter approached this was transparent, and some people is good for activists because they could have gone for a broader censorship policy; Twitter will only block in the country that demands it. In fact, Twitter lets you get around it by changing your location.
Q: How do we get Netvibes past the security concerns?
A: Robert B.: I’m a security geek. But employees need tools to be smarter. But we can define what tools you have access to.
Q: Clark, do you run into privacy issues?
A: Clark: Most of the data in HealthMap comes from publicly available sources.
A: Robert K: There are situations arising for which we do not have a framework. A child protection expert had just returned frmo a crisis where young kids on a street were tweeting about being abused at home. “We’re not even allowed to ask that question,” she said, “but if they’re telling the entire world, can we use that to begin to advocate for their rescue?” Our frameworks have not yet adapted to this new reality.
Linton: After the Arab Spring, how do we use data to help build enduring value?
A: Ahmed: It’s not the tech but how we use it.
A: Robert K: Real time analytics and visualizations provide many-to-many communications. Groups can see their beliefs, enabling a type of self-awareness not possible before. These tools have the possibility of creating new types of identity.
A: Robert B: To get twitter or Facebook smarter, you have to find different ways to use it. “Break it!” Don’t get stuck using today’s tech.
Linton: A 26-ear-old Al Jazeera reporter was at a conf “What’s the next big thing?” She replied, “I’m too old. Ask a high school student.”
I’ve got a piece in this week’s Boston Phoenix discussing the spectacular shuttering of Megaupload and the collateral damage produced by an increasingly aggressive copyright regime in tandem with a remarkable nonchalance about preserving the digital libraries we build. Some will recognize this as but the latest instance of platform politricks, just another rug yanked out from under folks tryna dance with each other. (Though it looks like another series of SoundClowns may be on its way!)
Anyway, check it out and tell me what you think. Shouts to Carly Carioli for reaching out about the piece and, along with Sara Rosenbaum, helping to whittle it down into something pretty darn sharp, if I say so.
As for this space, allow me to share a few linked-up grafs below that ended up on the cutting room floor, as well as some germane and entertaining media:
As with its predecessors, the sudden shuttering of Megaupload leaves a whole lot of holes in the e-ther. Among other random disappearances to tick across my timeline: the only copy of a personal video a friend’s father had recently stored there; and the sole upload of Nehru Jackets, the acclaimed new mixtape from Himanshu Suri of Das Racist (at least until a few hours later, as Suri’s supporters quickly re-upped the zipfile to similar sites). No doubt thousands of other innocent files were disappeared on January 19, but none are likely to get their day in court.
Of course, it’s hard to sympathize with anyone who’s thinking is so clouded that they would entrust their only copy of something to a service that explicitly warned, in both its ToS and FAQ, of the possibility of complete data loss (with no liability on their part). And it’s even harder to sympathize with Kim Dotcom, the cartoonish founder of Megaupload. So apparently full of money, food, and hubris is Dotcom that Hollywood could hardly hope to cast a better villain. Indeed, few embody the foreign rogue in the crosshairs of SOPA and PIPA as well as Dotcom with his extravagant nose-thumbing at the MPAA and RIAA – never mind prior convictions for computer fraud, insider trading, and embezzlement.
But if Dotcom comes across as an odious parasite, it’s telling that many seem to prefer him as their middleman over more established gatekeepers. In the weeks before it was shut down, Megaupload had been getting under the skin of the recording industry not simply because of piracy; rather, the site was becoming a special thorn in the side because some of the industry’s marquee artists were publicly endorsing it. A promotional song and video (see below) featuring testimonials from the likes of Kanye West, will.i.am, Lil Jon, and Sean Combs began to make the rounds, as did rumors that producer Swizz Beatz had become CEO of the company. In the wake of the raid, Busta Rhymes took to Twitter to defend Swizz Beatz and Megaupload alike, arguing that the site offered a more promising and direct revenue stream to artists than Spotify.
Even if Megaupload was an obvious target, that doesn’t make it easier to hear the pathetic giant paper-crumpling sound of thousands of non-infringing files disappearing behind a JPG of an eagle carrying a bad pun in its talons. As the chilling effects spread to similar sites, one has to wonder whether Megaupload’s demise heralds the beginning of the end of yet another functional but far too ad-hoc system for sharing media with each other.
And just in case you can’t appreciate the logo on the right up there, here it is a little more up close, deconstructing its own silly self and making a mockery of our supposedly noble National Bird –
Actually, as the title of my piece implies, the real National Bird looks more like this –
I published Mediactive a little over a year ago. The project, including the sale of publication rights in Japan, is in the black financially. And I’m ready to try some experiments as I move toward version 2 of the book and website.
Barry Eisler, who published his latest thriller, The Detachment (highly recommended) with Amazon, suggested I try this: Cut the price, temporarily, to 99 cents — and watch what happens. In his case, the book rocketed up to the top of the Kindle sales rankings.
So I’ve done that. For a limited time, the Kindle version of Mediactive is just $0.99. Obviously I’m not going to move to the top sales spot. But I’m looking forward to seeing what happens.
Following Twitter's recent footsteps, Google announced that it would also begin censoring content on a country-to-country basis.
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