Berkman Center for Internet & Society

United States
The National Security Agency has confirmed that it has been operating a global electronic surveillance program, collecting information from Google, Facebook, and other tech companies under a program called PRISM, after Booz Allen employee and NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked inside documents. The news has triggered a widespread outcry from human rights advocates and organizations.

Saudi Arabia
In March, Saudi Arabian officials declared that the country would block access to three popular voice and messaging services—Viber, Skype, and WhatsApp—if the companies did not give the government access to local monitoring services. The government has followed through on its threat, blocking Viber on June 6. On June 11, the block was rescinded, though whether Viber has complied with government demands for monitoring access is unclear.

Iran
Iranian Gmail users were reporting evidence of phishing attacks, just days before last week’s presidential elections. The attacks, which appear to be originating from within the country, have been occurring for three weeks; in a blog post, Google Vice President of Security Engineering Eric Grosse said the attacks were likely politically motivated. Google security staff said the phishing attacks appeared to be conducted by the same group that conducted attacks in Iran in 2011 using a fraudulent Google certificate.

Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo has called the popular microblogging service “the pulse of the planet.” With a little less than eight percent of the world’s population on Twitter, that pulse has room to grow. Nevertheless, recent big data research into the geography of the Twittersphere sheds light on where users tweet, with whom they tweet, and what information they share. The findings illustrate that Twitter helps people transcend geographic boundaries that restricted communication in a pre-digital age.

A research team from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign examined location data from the Twitter Decahose, which includes 10 percent of tweets sent on a given day. The team examined more than 1.5 billion tweets sent from more than 71 million unique users over 39 days and documented its findings in a paper published online.

Extracting Location from Tweets
Twitter displays the long-tail phenomenon of user participation: 85 percent of tweets come from the top 15 percent of users, and one-fifth of tweets come from just one percent of users. Only 3 percent of tweets are georeferenced, meaning their metadata includes location information. Echoing the long-tail, two-thirds of georeferenced tweets come from one percent of users, representing a small subset of Twitter users.

Researchers dramatically expanded the number of located tweets through geocoding. They analyzed information from user-generated Location and Profile fields and inferred location for more than one-third of tweets from the Decahose. These fields remain fairly static as a user tweets, so future researchers may be better off geocoding users rather than tweets. This could simplify location-based Twitter research by reducing the number of data points to analyze, saving time and computing power.

Though Twitter users communicate in a variety of languages (the most multilingual areas being Hungary, Serbia, Lebanon, Israel, and the West Bank), they tend to provide their location data in English.

Where Do People Tweet From?
Where electricity exists. The map below overlays georeferenced tweets with NASA Earth’s City Lights images. Red dots represent georeferenced tweets, blue dots represent access to electricity, and white dots represent an equal balance of tweets and electricity.

The map reminds us that accessibility to digital tools still relies on accessibility to tangible infrastructure, though the proclivity of red illustrates that people tweet even when electricity is scarce. (The box around Japan reflects some tweets from boats but is also the relic of old third-party Twitter clients that “handled the country’s polygonal shape a bit oddly,” Leetaru explained in an email).

Most georeferenced Twitter users joined in 2010 (shown in green on the map below), with concentrations of European, Middle Eastern, and Southeast Asian users joining in 2011 (shown in blue on the map below).

Who Do People Communicate With on Twitter?

People on Twitter retweet and reference close-by and far-away users at almost equal rates. A map of geocoded retweets reveals patterns among continental communication. The researchers write:

“Latin America is more closely connected to Europe than to the United States, while Asia connects more closely to the U.S. and the Middle East connects to both the U.S. and Europe. The east coast of the United States is a clear nexus point for the country, through Europe appears to be more dominant than the United States in producing content retweeted by the rest of the world.”

Research from 2012 showed Twitter users tended to follow people geographically close to them and those located in areas easily accessible by flight. That paper examined pairs of followers, but the University of Illinois team maintains that retweets and references to other users are better indicators than followers of how much a user pays attention to another user’s tweets.

What Do People Share on Twitter?
Mostly social media. More than half of all links in tweets go to six domains: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, ask.fm, and Tumblr. Only 7.8 percent of all links people share on Twitter reference English mainstream news. The most popular sources for English-language news on Twitter include the BBC, Huffington Post, New York Times, and Guardian.

People link to articles about close-by and far-away news at almost equal rates. The map below compares regional references on Twitter and in Google News’ RSS feed. Blue dots represent more georeferenced Twitter coverage, red dots represent more mainstream media coverage, and white dots represent equal coverage.

Twitter appears to cover more information on Latin America and Eastern Europe, while mainstream media covers Africa, South Asia, and East Asia more thoroughly.

The most influential users, based on Klout score, concentrate in Malaysia, Indonesia, France, Spain, the U.K., the U.S. and Venezuela. The least influential, meaning those whose content is least likely to spread around the Web, reside in Eastern Europe, the Middle East (especially Turkey), India, and Southeast Asia.

Want to see more Twitter visualizations? The company crunches its own data and posts visualizations on its Flickr page.

A eleição eletrônica brasileira, sucesso de [certa] crítica e [muito] público aqui, não é exatamente uma unanimidade entre os especialistas. em abril passado, num fórum nacional de segurança em urnas eletrônicas no instituto de ciências matemáticas e de computação da USP/são carlos, concluiu-se mais uma vez que  as urnas eletrônicas brasileiras são menos seguras do que se anuncia. o fórum publicou um memorando de apoio à lei 12.034/2009 que, se cumprida, levaria à mudança nas urnas na eleição de 2014, possibilitando a conferência do registro do voto pelo eleitor e fiscais [este é o princípio da publicidade do processo eleitoral] e tornando o processo de votação independente do software, o que não é o caso nas urnas nacionais.

o brasil é o único que ainda usa urnas eletrônicas de primeira geração, que foram testadas e abandonadas por [entre outros ] índia, argentina, paraguai, venezuela, equador, méxico, rússia… e por aí vai. leia o memorando de são carlos aqui.

a lei 12.034/2009 não está valendo na íntegra porque seu artigo 5º foi suspenso em 2011, por decisão cautelar do STF na ação direta de inconstitucionalidade 4543, que parece ter sido gerada dentro do próprio TSE.

a suspensão do art. 5º da lei 12.034/2009 suspendeu, claro, seu § 5º, onde se dava ao TSE a permissão para identificar o eleitor através de dados biométricos desde que o sistema de identificação não tivesse conexão com a urna eletrônica [o que, parece, não será o caso em 2014]. isso tem um efeito colateral, por causa de um outro art. 5º, de outra lei, a 7.444/85: conversamos com amílcar brunazo filho, especialista em eleições eletrônicas, que  nos contou o seguinte [ipsis litteris, negritos do blog]:

“O processamento eletrônico de dados do alistamento eleitoral é regulado tão somente pela lei 7.444/85, que diz explicitamente que:

Art. 5º…

§ 1º O Escrivão, o funcionário ou o Preparador, recebendo o formulário e os documentos, datará o requerimento e determinará que o alistando nele aponha sua assinatura, ou, se não souber assinar, a impressão digital de seu polegar direito, atestando, a seguir, terem sido a assinatura ou a impressão digital lançadas na sua presença.

….

§ 4o Para o alistamento na forma deste artigo, é dispensada a apresentação de fotografia do alistando.

Ou seja, a lei somente permite ao administrador eleitoral exigir a impressão digital do polegar direito se o eleitor não souber assinar.
Ademais, o eleitor é dispensado de fornecer sua fotografia.”

e amílcar diz mais:

“Como se não bastasse, a administração do cadastro eleitoral eletrônico deveria ser de uso exclusivo do administrador eleitoral:

Lei 7.444/85:

Art. 9o O Tribunal Superior Eleitoral baixará as instruções necessárias à execução desta Lei, especialmente, para definir:

I – a administração e a utilização dos cadastros eleitorais em computador, exclusivamente, pela Justiça Eleitoral;

Portanto, é totalmente ilegal o compartilhamento dos dados biométricos dos eleitores que o TSE recolhe com qualquer outro órgão governamental (como Ministério da Justiça ou Polícia Federal), como ele vem fazendo.” 

amílcar brunazo filho conclui dizendo que…

“Assim, a coleta das impressões digitais dos 10 dedos e da fotografia em alta definição tem sido exigidas pelo TSE sem nenhum respaldo legal, a não ser uma casuística interpretação da lei feita pelos próprios administradores do TSE, que também vestem a toga de juízes do STF.

Não há absolutamente nada –ou seja, nenhuma lei- que torne obrigatório o eleitor só exercer seu direito ao voto se fornecer dados biométricos completos ao TSE, e a lei que existe impede o TSE de fornecer esses dados à PF ou ao MJ.

Em resumo, o TSE pode fazer um recadastramento eleitoral obrigatório, mas não poderia exigir os dados biométricos que tem exigido e nem poderia impedir de votar quem não fornecer o que não é obrigatório por lei.”

resumo da ópera? o recadastramento “biométrico”, parece não ter fundamento legal, pois o artigo da lei que autorizaria tal procedimento, e mesmo assim sob certas condições, está suspenso desde 2011… e sem qualquer prazo para ser reavaliado, pelo visto.

e daí?… o eleitor pode ser obrigado a se recadastrar, isso é certo e está rolando. ao chegar para tal, cumprirá um rito que não lhe poderia ser exigido, pois não há nada que o obrigue. sem se recadastrar, lhe será dito que não poderá votar, mas cadê a lei que diz isso? está suspensa, justamente na parte que diz isso. e aí?… alguém vai fazer alguma coisa para  julgar a ADI de vez? se a ADI cair, muda a urna eletrônica e teremos uma votação mais confiável. se não, fica como está e o recadastramento é ilegal. e a eleição, tão insegura como todas as anteriores. se quiser mais detalhes, leia este, este e este links. e lute por uma eleição mais segura, também.

My Pebble watch arrived a week ago. It’s a programmable wristwatch that talks to your Android phone or iPhone. When it arrived, I was a little disappointed. I’m happier with it now.

I didn’t make it into the Kickstarter in time, but I was in the first wave of buyers after that. Pebble has done an outstanding job of blogging about the process by which it has gone from concept to shipping product, and I’ve generally liked the choices they’ve made. Ever since my Casio AE-20, I’ve wanted a digital representation of analog hands. Plus I very much like the idea of being able to download watch faces that are open source and designed by, well, anyone. Plus, there can be and will be apps.

But I was disappointed because it’s ugly. It’s too big on my wrist. Not exactly sleek. Plus, I hate the band it ships with: resin (or some other type of plastic), plain, and irritating to my skin. (Of course this is a personal reaction. It’s a blog, people!) But I replaced the band with a blue leather band — I got the black version of the watch — and I think it looks much better, In fact, now I like the way it looks.

Also, I began by downloading a set of fake analog faces, and I like them ok, but I’ve started using a default face that spells out the time in words. It’s a little harder to parse than a set of hands, and it doesn’t have the date on it, but if Project Runway has taught me anything, it is that one must make sacrifices for fashion. (PLus now I found a variant with the date on it.)

There are not a lot of apps yet, an I haven’t even found a stopwatch/countdown timer that I like. But I will. Also, I was surprised that after I’d downloaded about six watch faces, it told me that it was out of memory. (To delete a face, you use the Pebble app on your smart phone.)

So, I haven’t gotten to the basics yet. It’s got a readable display that’s more like e-paper than the usual LCD; it’s fine in bright light and the night light works well. A charged battery is supposed to last a week, and mine has so far. You need a special cable to charge it; it plugs into any normal USB charger on the wall side, but the watch side holds itself to the watch via the magic of magnetism. I know Pebble considered using a normal USB socket, but then it wouldn’t be waterproof, so it seems like a reasonable trade-off, although I’m pretty sure I’ve already lost the cable. I hope they sell them by the dozen.

The watch sync’ed incredibly easily via Bluetooth with my Android phone. By default it sends the text of emails and SMS texts to your watch. Since it buzzes every time, and since I get maybe 150 emails a day, I turned off the email syncing. But since I get very few texts, and they’re almost always from my family, I’ve left that notification on. It buzzes your wrist, and you can use the watch buttons to scroll through the message. You can’t compose text on your watch.

It also comes ready to pause or skip forward or backward your phone’s music. I’ve found this useful while listening to podcasts; a click of a watch button and I can hear the bus driver telling me us to duck. (The ol’ 66 is a pretty tough bus route.)

This is definitely a 1.0 release. It’s fully functional, and with a new band it looks pretty snappy. If I were you, I’d wait for the next release, by which time it may have some strong competition. It’s also a little expensive at $150. Still, I like the watch, I like the integration with Android, and I like the company’s transparency. It’s bringing me pleasure.

Herdict data collected from China just prior to the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests demonstrated significant and widespread increases in filtering.  June 4th marked the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, a day many Chinese activists sarcastically call “Internet Maintenance Day,” given history of government attempts to hide only information about the protests.  According to Herdict data collected with Greatfire.org, more than four hundred sites which were reported accessible during April 3 – May 3 were subsequently blocked during the May 4 – June 4 period. At least four of these sites that switched from accessible to inaccessible just before the anniversary were gateways to virtual private networks, which are an important tool for circumvention.

Among the other blocked sites were three U.S.-based advocacy groups, including Human Rights Watch, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as Change.org. Also blocked during the period leading up to the anniversary were sites important to programmers, including the open source development and distribution community SourceFourge and Python.org.tw, a site for Taiwanese Python programming language enthusiasts.  It isn’t immediately clear why these programming sites were blocked, but it may represent an effort to prevent discussion and development around circumvention tools.

Several country-specific Google sites (google.co.in, google.com.au, google.de) went from accessible to inaccessible in the period leading up to the anniversary. However, Google’s transparency report did not reflect those disruptions.

The majority of this data comes from Greatfire.org, an organization which monitors blocked websites in China. Greatfire and Herdict participate in a data exchange in which user reports submitted to Herdict on blocked sites in China are fed into Greatfire.org‘s database. Conversely, Greatfire shares their data with Herdict.

 

 

Recently, I ate at the somewhat famous London vegetarian restaurant Indian Veg Bhelpoori House in Islington (often referred to simply as “Indian Veg”).

I couldn’t help but imagine that the restaurant had hired Emanuel Bronner as their interior decorator.

I’ve just finished leading two days of workshops at University of Stuttgart as part of my fellowship at the Internazionales Zentrum für Kultur- und Technikforschung. (No, I taught in English.) This was for me a wonderful experience. First of all, the students were engaged, smart, talked from diverse standpoints, and fun. Second, it reminded me how to teach. I had so much trouble trying to structure sessions, feeling totally unsure how one does so. But the eight 1.5 hour sessions reminded me why I loved teaching.

For my own memory, here are the sessions (and if any of you were there and took notes, I’d love to see them):

Friday

#1 Cyberutopianism, technodeterminism, and Internet exceptionalism defined, with JP Barlow’s Declaration of the Independent of Cyberspace as an example. Class introductions.

#2 Information Age to Age of Connected. Why Ted Nelson’s Xanadu did not succeed the way the Web did. Rough technical architecture of the Net and (perhaps) its embedded political values. Hyperlinks.

#3 Digital order. Everything is miscellaneous? From information Retrieval to search engines. Schema-based databases to tagging.

#4 Networked knowledge. What knowledge looks like once it’s been freed of paper. Four challenges to networked knowledge (with many more added by the students.)

On Saturday we talked about topics that the students decided were interesting:

#1 Mobile net. Is Facebook making us more or less social? Why do we fill up every interstice by using Facebook on mobiles? What does this say about us and the notion of the self?

#2 Downloading. Do you download music illegally? What is your justification? How might artists respond? Why is the term “intellectual property” so loaded?

#3 Education. What makes a great in-person course? What makes for a miserable one? Oddly, many of the characteristics of miserable classes are also characteristics of MOOCs. What might we do about that? How much of this is caused by the fact that MOOCs are construed as courses in the traditional sense?

#4 Internet culture. Is there such a thing? If there are many, is any particular one to be privileged? How does the Net look to a culture that is dedicated to warding off what it says as corrupting influences? End with LolCatBible and the astounding TheJohnnyCashProject

Thank you, students. This experience meant a great deal to me.

The Berkman Buzz is selected weekly from the posts of Berkman Center people and projects. To subscribe, click here. Alison Head talks with Howie Schneider about news literacy Alison Head talks with Howie Schneider, the former editor of Newsday and the founding dean of Stony Brook University's Journalism School, about teaching the nation's first college course in news literacy to today's undergraduates: "Many of our students enter our news literacy class, for example, falsely believing that if a story or website scores high on a search algorithm, it is reliable," Schneider says, "and certainly there are those who now fervently believe that if the 'wisdom of the crowd' collectively rules something to be accurate or true, then it must be true, but a midst this confusion and ambiguity, a growing number of self-interested information hucksters, propagandists, and partisans of all stripes have rushed in to peddle their wares to a vulnerable audience." From Alison Head's latest interview for Project Information Literacy, "Howie Schneider: Navigating the Rising Tide of News" About Alison | About Project Information Literacy Great piece on Twitter, the fight for users' rights, and the role of brilliant individuals like @amac http://t.co/TjKD1oV4xB @berkmancenter >—Urs Gasser (@ugasser) Kit Walsh explains the problem with 3D printing patent applications I’m Kit Walsh, an attorney at the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. We have been working with the Electronic Frontier Foundation to help prevent overly broad patents from issuing on 3D printing technologies. We use a new procedure that allows members of the public to submit examples of relevant prior publications so that patent examiners can better determine whether applicants are asking for an intellectual monopoly that is broader than they deserve under law. From Kit Walsh's post, "Insider Insight — Fighting the 3D Printing Patent Applications" About Kit | @neurokit Julius Genachowski and Jonathan Zittrain propose a new ad hoc emergency network As the Boston Marathon bombings unfolded, thousands of anxious people in the region pulled out their mobile phones to connect with friends and family—and found that calls couldn’t be placed or received. Rumors that officials had shut down these mobile networks for security reasons weren’t true. The system was simply overloaded at a time when people needed it most. Similar problems are likely to arise in the aftermath of other attacks or natural disasters such as earthquakes, when networks are overwhelmed by an instantaneous, acute need for large numbers of people to communicate at once. Our day-to-day communications networks aren’t always geared to scale up in emergencies. At these times, some citizens and companies need help, and others are eager to help—and all need to communicate. With some emerging technologies and a little advance coordination, we can harness our civic instinct to come together in times of crisis to keep data flowing. From Julius Genachowski and Jonathan Zittrain's post for the MIT Technology Review, "Former FCC Chairman: Let’s Test an Emergency Ad Hoc Network in Boston" About Jonathan | @zittrain Social media winter's coming. Are you ready? A break down of social media blockades from biggest Houses in the realm http://t.co/YYECWp8lMA —Internet Monitor (@thenetmonitor) Herdict partners with ASL 19 to track Iranian Internet censorship On June 14, 2013, Iran is going to hold their presidential elections, an event we are watching very carefully. During the previous election in 2009, the government cracked down even further on the already limited online freedoms. This included briefly shutting down the Internet as a whole. In the intervening years, Iran has taken their censorship to new levels of sophistication, quietly building a Halal Internet. And is already limiting access to foreign sites in advance of the elections. From Ryan Budish's blog post for Herdict, "Tracking Iranian Censorship with ASL 19" About Herdict | @herdict Berkman project explores student privacy in the cloud In April 2013, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society in collaboration with Microsoft convened an exploratory workshop on “Student Privacy in the Cloud Computing Ecosystem,” which marked the launch of a broader research initiative on this topic. The Berkman student privacy project seeks to surface, identify, and evaluate central privacy issues and opportunities that may emerge when educational institutions consider moving to "the cloud." “The cloud” refers to computer-related services and software provided over the Internet and other networks. From Alicia Solow-Niederman's post for Technology | Academics | Policy, "Berkman Initiative Explores Privacy Issues as Educational Institutions Move to the Cloud" About the Student Privacy Initiative New York Times Profiles Global Voices Cuba Contributor According to the New York Times’ The Lede blog, Global Voices Cuba contributor Elaine Díaz “may be the most important Cuban dissident you’ve never heard of.” Elaine, currently on a visit to the US, is profiled in a June 11 post titled “Cuban Blogger Who Reveres Castro Pushes for Reform.” From Georgia Popplewell's blog post for Global Voices, "New York Times Profiles Global Voices Cuba Contributor" About Global Voices Online | @globalvoices

This Buzz was compiled by Rebekah Heacock. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here.

The New York Times today has a story byMotoko Rich on a study of classroom technology usage conducted by Ulrich Boser of the Center for American Progress. One of the headline findings has to do with the different ways technology is used by students from different backgrounds. The study's findings come from survey data of fourth and eighth graders who answer questions about their classroom experiences while taking the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the so-called "nation's report card." From today's story:

The analysis of the N.A.E.P. data found that 34 percent of eighth graders who took the math exams in 2011 used computers to "drill on math facts" while less than a quarter worked with spreadsheets or geometric figures on the computer. Only 17 percent used statistical programs.

The federal survey data showed striking differences among racial groups and income levels. More than half of the black students who took the eighth-grade math exam in 2011 said they used computers to work on math drills, while only 30 percent of white students said they did.

Similarly, 41 percent of students eligible for free and reduced lunches said they used computers for math drills, compared with 29 percent of students whose families earn too much for them to qualify for the lunches.

Remarkably, virtually the exact same study, was conducted by Harold Wenglinsky of the Educational Testing Services Policy Information Center in 1998, with strikingly similar findings. Boser looked at background surveys from the 2009 and 2011 NAEP tests, and Wenglinsky looked at the 1996 NAEP background surveys. To get us in the mood, here's the 1996 Powerbook and a 2011 MacBook Pro.

In 1996, 34% of eighth graders who took the math exams used computers for drill and practice, while 27% used simulations or applications.(Wenglinsky and Boser report this "simulation/application" category slightly differently; Wenglinsky bins up a couple of categories. I think their findings are basically the same. I also think nearly all of this is available to be picked apart in the NAEP Data Explorer.

In 1996, 52% of black students who took the eighth-grade math test said they used computers for drill and practice, while only 30% of white students said the same. Similarly, 34% of students eligible for free or reduced lunches used the computers for drill and practice, compared with 31% of students from families that earn too much for them to qualify.

Here's the data in tabular form. Note the caveats.

Fifteen years apart. Different computers. Maybe different software (though the number of students still dying from dysentery on the Oregon Trail every year continues to surprise me). Same patterns of usage. Persistent inequality.

Those trying to argue that technology investments will assuredly lead to dramatic change in classroom practice and student learning in the years ahead have some explaining to do. Those of us trying to help teachers and schools leverage technology to dramatically change classroom practice have our work cut out for us.

For regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @bjfr and for my publications, C.V., and online portfolio, visit EdTechResearcher.

- Justin Reich

In May 2013, Facebook announced that it had 1.1 billion users, 665 million of which were active on the site each day. The three major global social networks (Facebook, Google+, and Twitter) have all experienced huge growth in the last few years. According to the GlobalWebIndex, of the global Internet population approximately 51% use Facebook on a monthly basis, 25% use Google+, and 21% use Twitter. Despite the rapid growth of these social networks, many users have become dissatisfied with their business models, political practices, constantly changing posting policies, and undemocratic forms of governance. Aside from the concerns over PRISM, Facebook has recently drawn attention for its blocking pictures of breastfeeding mothers or the company’s handling of rape joke memes spreading through their network. Activists and political dissidents in particular have found these social media sites stifling and sometimes dangerous, but often find themselves with few alternatives to spread their messages online.

As a result, several interesting social media alternatives have recently been created to address these concerns and protect both privacy and dissent online. While many social network projects have launched over the past few years, few alternatives remain in active development. Below is a curated list of the best current alternatives for people with moderate computers skills concerned with privacy, control of their information, and networking outside the control of governments or corporations.

Diaspora: This nonprofit, user-owned, social network consists of a group of independently owned “pods” that interoperate to form the network. Since its launch in 2010 by four students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Diaspora has been one of the most popular alternative social media sites. As of June 2013, Diaspora reports it has 405,551 registered accounts (which includes users on the main pod and connected people from other pods) and 2,270,599 estimated users on the most popular pod (estimated because that information is not public) participating in this distributed social network. Diaspora allows for pseudonyms, ensures users own their content, and because the network is distributed by other users who install the freeware and setup web servers, the network cannot easily be disrupted or its users surveilled.

App.net: In July 2012, this platform evolved beyond being a place for developers to showcase new apps and became a full-fledged social network. The design of App.net is fairly similar to Twitter, but with one big difference. Instead of selling user data to advertisers, the site requires users and developers to pay subscription fees for premium accounts ($5 monthly, $36 yearly, or $100 a year for developers). There are no ads on App.net, but more importantly for social activists and people concerned with controlling their data, App.net will only share information with third party vendors the service needs to work (like payment processors for accounts) and law enforcement (if proper legal channels are observed). When a user deletes something from App.net, the company makes sure it’s gone from their servers within two weeks. It’s not a completely private social network, but it’s close.

Tent.io: This Twitter-like (but not Twitter-clone) alternative offers many of the same advantages App.net boasts, but rests on an entirely different method for distributing information. Tent is an open Internet protocol, like email or TCP/IP, that can be used to run a Tent server (via Tent.is) or connect several social networks together. Tent.is offers users the ability to run their own server, lets them share anything, and is designed to help users migrate from other social medias. Tent can also be run as a Tor hidden service, which can allow activists to communicate without being traced, and because Tent is decentralized, it cannot be blocked the same way Twitter has been in several countries. Tent also touts itself as a better alternative even to email since users can change their address and the followers come with them. Tent also argues it fosters innovation since applications can be developed for Tent without needing to ask for permission from the protocol’s owners. The Tent protocol can be used with Tent.is or be used independently to grow other networks. Tent is a bit more technical than the other alternatives featured here, but its flexibility and expandability mean it’s likely to continue developing.

GlassBoard: Featuring a very simple and comprehensive privacy policy, GlassBoard is probably the easiest to use of the alternative social networks featured here. GlassBoard’s innovation in social networking is to make money by charging a small user fee rather than sell information to advertisers. Perhaps because they know many people have indicated they would not pay for access to a social network, even if it meant more control over their information, GlassBoard does offer a free account with some limitations, and premium accounts with more storage or access to APIs. GlassBoard also offers iPhone and Android apps, all user data is encrypted on GlassBoard’s servers, and they won’t sell your personal information for targeting ads. GlassBoard does not have privacy settings. Instead, everything a user does on the service is private and can only be seen by people they approve. While GlassBoard primarily focuses on providing businesses with a private communications network, anyone willing to have some storage limitations or pay a bit for a premium account can enjoy a very simple, secure, and mobile social network.

Identi.ca: Identi.ca is another micro-blogging service similar to Twitter, but offers many features Twitter does not such as XMPP support and the ability to freely export personal and “friend” data. Identi.ca enjoyed early success when more than 8,000 people registered for the service within the first 24 hours of its public launch in July 2008. For those concerned with controlling their information, Identi.ca will publish all posts under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license by default, but paying customers have to option to choose a different license. In June 2013, Identi.ca began migrating to the pump.io software platform in order to offer more features, and its development is likely to continue. Setting up the free and open source software on a server requires a bit more technical skill than most of the other alternatives presented here, and joining might be delayed until the migration to pump.io finishes, but this open source social network is worth watching.

For those not ready to completely abandon Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ there are still a few options for managing how user data is used. Two good browswer add-ons for determining exactly where your data is going are Collusion for Mozilla Firefox and PrivacyScore for Google Chrome.  To keep Facebook, Google, and Twitter from tracking you (and to speed up your browser), the Disconnect extension works well with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Finally, to opt out of other advertising that tracks users, the Network Advertising Initiative’s website will show who is tracking a user’s browser and how to disable it.

Tech companies need to re-think their business of collecting so much data in the first place. This should be a wake-up call

One of the many petitions circulating on the Internet in the wake of leaks about the US government's massive surveillance programs is aimed at major Internet and technology companies. It calls on them to push Congress to investigate and stop the abuses.

This is, of course, a good idea. It may even help, now that some members of Congress are having misgivings about the programs they've worked so hard not to understand. Had companies like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Apple and Yahoo done this in the first place – and had they been as ardent to protect privacy as they are to collect data on their users – the spying programs might not have metastasized to such a degree.

This could be a turning point for the tech industry. The biggest companies providing cloud-based Internet services, and some smaller ones as well, are under pressure amid increasing public unease about the government's insistence that privacy is all but a dead letter against the threat of terrorism.

They have a chance to regain trust. To do so they will need to rethink a lot of their methods – not least their adoption of systems, based in large part on monetizing their own data-mining, that are inherently insecure in the face of orders from people who command armies, and may be insecure in more general ways.

Let's be clear on one thing: the industry has, at the very least, been forced to cooperate with secret disclosure requests that include orders not to speak publicly about what's going on. It remains possible, their wholesale denials aside, that some or all of these companies have been not just cooperating but actively collaborating with the surveillance state.

We can't know for sure. By design, the system is opaque.

This helps explain why several of these companies have implored the government to make the National Security Agency letter data orders more transparent. They realize that their credibility has taken a serious jolt, and that they are in the position of trying to prove a negative, something that is more difficult when they're told, under threat of prosecution, that they can't talk about it beyond the most vague and meaningless statements.

The tech companies would be more convincing if their industry hadn't been so complicit in the development of the surveillance state in the first place. Silicon Valley and its global analogs made it possible, and have made vast amounts of money in the process as government suppliers. They've been arms dealers not just to American spies but to the world's most repressive governments as well.

Moreover, even the Internet-related tech companies that haven't actively helped the dictators and spies have been creating large businesses based on collecting, massaging and making money off of the data their users and customers provide in their day-to-day use of the services. And even if the companies themselves haven't been abusing their ownership of these giant data collections, they have by definition left themselves and their customers vulnerable to government overreach.

I do not put all of the companies mentioned above in exactly the same category, by the way. While I don't trust Google absolutely, I trust it more than, say, Facebook when it comes to these issues, based on long observation of both. (What should worry you, no matter who you trust today, is the possibility that the next generation of corporate leaders will have different policies.)

It is difficult, moreover, to take their denials of complicity fully to heart. Consider the Yahoo statement about the Prism program. Nothing is going on that should worry us, the company insists. Then look at a line-by-line analysis of the statement by the American Civil Liberties Union's Christopher Soghoian, who makes clear on his personal blog that "Yahoo has not in fact denied receiving court orders … for massive amounts of communications data."

Statements and letters to Congress won't solve their problem, even if Congress by some miracle changed the law to restrict the overweening data gathering and by a greater miracle President Obama – an ardent surveillance-statist leader, contrary to his campaign promises – were to sign it. (The biggest miracle of all would be compliance with such a law by the government.)

The tech companies need to rethink the way they do business entirely. They need to stop collecting so much data in the first place. Then they need to create systems that protect users' data even from people inside the companies, and be absolutely clear about the situations when they can't promise this.

For the rest of us, it's time to look for services and products that provide us with more security. The trajectory of surveillance, government and corporate, suggests we should assume we are being recorded at all times on unencrypted networks, for example. We need to adopt encryption and other countermeasures much more widely. I'll discuss there in upcoming columns.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping the tech companies will grab this opportunity. They can't prove a negative, but they can take positive actions to regain – or gain for the first time – our trust. Will they?

With Swedes: Closet VRM activists?, T.Rob gives us a typically deep VRM post, exploring new territory, or old territory in a new way. The context (and the subject of an interesting thread on the ProjectVRM list) is the news behind headline of a Simon Davies post: Sweden’s data protection Authority bans Google cloud services over privacy concerns. Sez T.Rob,

So the big problem with privacy, VRM tools and the cloud isn’t that the technology needs to be invented, but rather that the current IT culture assumes the vendor has rights rather thanprivileges to harvest and exploit your data and that you must opt out rather than opt in.  If you start with an assumed right to the data, then of course the apps that get built ignore existing privacy enhancing technology.

T.Rob raises some creative existing solutions to password problems — solutions that have thus far been outside of VRM conversations. A concern I have, within VRM conversations, is framing solutions in terms and contexts of the existing marketing system, which is getting more and more complicated by the day. For a better look at that, see this post from January, and Don Marti’s first comment there, which points to this post here.

Having spent most of the last month outside the U.S., what I gather is that privacy is just as big a deal elsewhere — just a somewhat different deal. Here privacy is seen in terms of prophylaxis — and sometimes not-very-good prophylaxis. (Do Not Track, for example, is like hanging garlic on the door of your browser to ward off vampires.) In Canada and Europe it’s seen as an essential attribute of civilized life: one that must be designed into software, services and infrastructure. Leading influences on this approach are Ann Cavoukian, the Information and Privacy Commissioner for Ontario, and her office’s Privacy By Design initiative.

In fact we’ve had privacy by design for a long time in the physical world. Clothing, for example, is a privacy system. We use it to cover our “privates,” among other things. But, while we’ve had civilization for thousands of years, we’ve had the Net for only a couple decades or so. We have a long way to go. But we’ll get where we’re going faster if we’re not re-inventing the same wheels.

And I think we’ll get there better if we ground what we do in a clear understanding of what privacy is, and why it needs to guide the stuff we create and improve.

The Washington Post reported that most Americans don't care that much about recent surveillance disclosures. Perhaps this is because there is bipartisan agreement among Congressional leaders that everything being done is kosher and necessary, and because the president has also weighed in reassuring the public that nobody is eavesdropping on their phone calls. Perhaps it is because it is hard to get worried about anything you don't notice and whose effects you can't see. Perhaps it's because we are now too distant in history from European surveillance states; the fall of the Soviet Union was a long time ago from the perspective of a college student, and Nazi German is the stuff of old movies. (Do they even read 1984 in schools any more?) There is North Korea of course, but people think of that place as so remote and isolated as to be almost a joke (unless they have Korean relatives). As danah boyd has observed (meandering thoughts on the NSA scandal), activists care, but activists are the ones most likely to commit speech and thought crimes.

It seems not to be taken for granted by most Americans that whether the surveillance is unconstitutional is not a matter for consensus decision, since it involves infringement of the Fourth Amendment. As the Washington Post reports, "while it might be fine for your neighbors to let the government inspect their personal lives, it’s not okay for your neighbors to say it’s fine for officials to inspect you. 'The whole purpose of the Bill of Rights was to protect the minority from the will of the majority,' [Professor Lori Andrews] says."

The Washington Post and the Guardian may have muddied the waters by going to press too incautiously with reporting based only on the infamous PowerPoint presentation and on Edward Snowden's interview. The first version of the Post's reporting was walked back in significant respects with very little notice. Declan McCullagh, a respected digital-affairs reporter, has concluded that there is no evidence that the NSA has direct access to Internet service provider servers, as the Guardian and the Post declared and as Facebook and Google denied. Maybe those PowerPoint slides were the work of an overzealous marketing flak. If the newspapers that had the scoop got it wrong, it becomes easier for the public to be reassured that there is nothing creepy or improper going on.

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.

Analysts can look at the domestic calling data only if there is a reason to suspect it is “actually related to Al Qaeda or to Iran,” she said, adding: “The vast majority of the records in the database are never accessed and are deleted after a period of five years. To look at or use the content of a call, a court warrant must be obtained.”

I thought it was only metadata, the phone numbers calling and called and the date and time and length of the calls, that were being logged.  Not the content of the calls.

It is hard not to wonder. It is easy to log all the metadata for all domestic phone calls and we now know it is being done. It would be easy and cheap to record all the phone calls being made in the U.S. If the government is not doing it, it's not because they haven't thought of it, and it's not because it would not be useful to do it. It can only because there are legal barriers, and with recent revelations about uses of the PATRIOT Act that have surprised even the bill's primary author, it is hard to be sure where the limits of existing laws actually are.

I was recently asked to offer some suggestions about what I thought were the most important policy and non-policy recommendations that I have for education reform. I think of "policy" as things that federal or state officials can do: laws that can be passed or money that can be spent. I offered three of these recommendations earlier this week. These "non-policy" suggestions are things that are beyond regulations, technical support, or direct funding. Here are two ways we ought to change the way we talk about education, so that we change the way we think about education.

Change the Frame (1): From Delivery to Design

Borrowing from the work of George Lakoff, how people linguistically (metaphorically and analogically) frame a topic has a powerful impact on how people define and understand the topic. If you define "tax cuts" as "tax relief," then you get people to associate taxes with "pain". The discourse of teaching and learning is dominated by metaphors of delivery. You deliver a lecture. You give a test. That kid picks it up pretty quickly. That kid doesn't get it.

As long as great teaching is defined as an act of delivery, it will be misunderstood, poorly conducted, and undervalued. We will treat teachers as interchangeably as UPS drivers. We will misunderstand the power of technology in education, with a misguided emphasis on scaling delivery rather than empowering student performance. Borrowing from Larry Cuban's recent book, we will misinterpret schooling as a complicated enterprise when it is really a complex enterprise, more akin to the flight of a butterfly than the flight of a bullet.

Teachers design spaces and experiences that rearrange the neurons in young people's brains for pro-social purposes. That work is nuanced, intellectually demanding, creative, and joyful. Redefining the language of teaching around design rather than around delivery would bring greater respect to the profession and greater humility to policymaking.

In my pre-service teacher training at MIT, the most important thing I do is convince students that the design and facilitation of learning spaces is an incredibly complex, rich enterprise, worthy of their considerable intellectual talents.

Change the Frame (2): From the Right to Equitable Schooling to the Right to Equitable Ecologies of Learning 

I'm convinced by the arguments of Mimi Ito and her various colleagues associated with MacArthur's Connected Learning movement that in the future, learning will take place from cradle to grave--in schools, online, in museums, libraries, makerspaces, and all kinds of other "third spaces" for learning that we have yet to imagine. Young people need access not just to schools but to ecologies of learning that envelop students in learning opportunities.

The affluent are already extremely good at creating these connected learning environments around their children. To support the learning of my two year old daughter, we have her enrolled in home day care and a structure child care center; we have memberships to the Audubon Society Nature Reserves, Action Discovery Museum, Minuteman Public Library Network, Boston Children's Museum, New England Aquarium, Harvard Museums, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the pool at our Arlington Boys and Girls Club; she's been to special events at Harvard, our local elementary school, regional craft collaboratives, and nearby hackerspaces. In those rare moments where we are unable to provide structured or unstructured experiences superintended by her family or childcare professionals--mostly car rides--she watches high quality PBS programming or plays with apps vetted by Common Sense Media's learning guidelines (mostly Endless Alphabet). One day, my daughter will go to a pretty good elementary school.

Right now the citizens and civic leaders in my town, state, and nation believe that our society has a social contract where all children should be able to go to a pretty good elementary school. Even if we fail to live up to that contract, we believe it to be a worthy aim. We don't believe that the social contract requires that all children have an equitable right to all of the other opportunities that my daughter enjoys. We won't get policies that balance the extraordinary investments that the affluent make for their children if we do not expand the social contract such that all children have not only the right to equitable schooling but the right to equitable ecologies of learning. (Ignite talk where I make this argument) 

For regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @bjfr and for my publications, C.V., and online portfolio, visit EdTechResearcher

- Justin Reich

Berkman Events Newsletter Template

Upcoming Events / Digital Media June 13th, 2013

berkman luncheon series Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now Tuesday, June 18, 12:30pm ET, Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Classroom 1015. This event will be webcast live. The always-on, simultaneous society in which we have found ourselves has altered our relationship to culture, media, news, politics, economics, and power. We are living in a digital temporal landscape, but instead of exploiting its asynchronous biases, we are misguidedly attempting to extend the time-is-money agenda of the Industrial Age into the current era. The result is a disorienting and dehumanizing mess, where the zombie apocalypse is more comforting to imagine than more of the same. It needn't be this way. Winner of the Media Ecology Association's first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author, teacher, and documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. He is technology and media commentator for CNN, digital literacy advocate for Codecademy.com and has taught and lectured around the world about media, technology, culture and economics. RSVP Required. more information on our website> book launch REWIRE: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection Tuesday, June 25, 6:00pm ET, Harvard Law School, Wasserstein Hall, Milstein East Rooms. Reception to follow. We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads us to assume that as the number of people online grows, it inevitably leads to a smaller, more cosmopolitan world. We’ll understand more, we think. We’ll know more. We’ll engage more and share more with people from other cultures. In reality, it is easier to ship bottles of water from Fiji to Atlanta than it is to get news from Tokyo to New York. In Rewire, media scholar and activist Ethan Zuckerman explains why the technological ability to communicate with someone does not inevitably lead to increased human connection. At the most basic level, our human tendency to “flock together” means that most of our interactions, online or off, are with a small set of people with whom we have much in common. In examining this fundamental tendency, Zuckerman draws on his own work as well as the latest research in psychology and sociology to consider technology’s role in disconnecting ourselves from the rest of the world. For those who seek a wider picture—a picture now critical for survival in an age of global economic crises and pandemics—Zuckerman highlights the challenges, and the headway already made, in truly connecting people across cultures. From voracious xenophiles eager to explore other countries to bridge figures who are able to connect one culture to another, people are at the center of his vision for a true kind of cosmopolitanism. And it is people who will shape a new approach to existing technologies, and perhaps invent some new ones, that embrace translation, cross-cultural inspiration, and the search for new, serendipitous experiences. Rich with Zuckerman’s personal experience and wisdom, Rewire offers a map of the social, technical, and policy innovations needed to more tightly connect the world. Featured respondents will include Judith Donath (Berkman Center Fellow), Ann Marie Lipinski (curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard), and David Weinberger (Co-Director of the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab). Ethan Zuckerman, Director of the Center for Civic Media, is cofounder of the citizen media community of Global Voices. RSVP Required. more information on our website> video/audio Laura Amico on Jazz and Journalism: Reporting with Improvisation Improvisation theories, drawn mostly from jazz, have increasingly been applied to entrepreneurship, new product development, and other fields, but rarely, if ever, to journalism. Yet journalism is an industry built on improvisation, from the actions of reporters out in the field, to the deadline work of editors and page designers. More than that, it is an industry that needs a new framework in order to survive. Laura Amico -- a Nieman-Berkman fellow in journalism innovation and founder of Homicide Watch -- presents her preliminary ideas on improvisation theory and jazz in news development, arguing for a journalism framework that builds new culture out of improvisation. video/audio on our website>

Other Events of Note Local, national, international, and online events that may be of interest to the Berkman community: 6/16-18: ODR2013 (Montreal) 6/21: Data Day 2013: Democratizing Data to Drive Community Change (Northeastern University) 6/24: Web Innovators Group 38 (WebInno38) (Cambridge, MA) 6/26: Learning From Citizens' Calls: Using the Boston Mayor's Hotline (Emerson College) 8/7-11: Wikimania 2013 (Hong Kong) 9/16-18: Open Knowledge Conference (Geneva)

You are receiving this email because you subscribed to the Berkman Center's Weekly Events Newsletter. Sign up to receive this newsletter if this email was forwarded to you. To manage your subscription preferences, please click here. Connect & get involved: Jobs, internships, and more 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.

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.

In clashes between Saudi citizens and the state over ideology and technology, Twitter has become a highly contested space. Internet monitoring and censorship in the Kingdom is not new though. According to a 2009 report from the Open Net Initiative, “Saudi Arabia filters sites related to opposition political groups, human rights issues, and religious content deemed offensive to Muslims.” Freedom House published a report in 2012 putting Internet penetration in Saudi’s population of 29 million at 49%. It also stated that 51% of Saudis are active Twitter users, one of the highest usage rates in the world. In recent months, religious and political leaders as well as everyday Twitter users have taken to the ethereal skies of Twitter to express their views on how and by whom the social networking site should be used.

It is easy to adopt ornithological metaphors when talking about Twitter, and we can extend talk of birds in a particular way within the Arab Gulf context, where falconry  is a big deal. The sport has ancient roots and great cultural significance. Falcons are magnificent birds of prey, revered and respected in the region for their adaptability, speed, and hunting prowess. The birds, also called raptors, scan the desert sands for prey and swoop in for the kill with pinpoint accuracy. In the Arab Gulf, the falcon is elegance, beauty, and skill with wings.

The same regal attributes may or may not apply, however, to the little blue birds that soar in the Twittersphere. Saudi authorities, acting like government bird dogs, have been on the hunt for Twitter users lately.

In early May, Saudi religious police issued warnings that the social networking site was “a path to hell.”  Sheikh Abdul Latif Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh said Muslims who use Twitter have “lost this world and [their] afterlife.” Despite this warning, Saudis—including religious leaders—continue to use the platform. Just weeks after al-Sheikh’s pronouncement, Abdullah Mohammed al-Dawood, an ultraconservative cleric with an active Twitter following, used Twitter to post his views on women going to work in Saudi Arabia. His tweet encouraged men to “harass” women working in public places, so they would return to their homes. Public outrage in response to al-Dawood’s comment was swift and decidedly critical. Graphic suggestions about what punishment he deserved, including castration, circulated in local social media—including Twitter, where the hashtag “#arm_female_cashiers” was used in reaction to al-Dawood’s call to “#harass_female_cashiers”—and spread globally via major news sources.

Despite threats to body and soul, Saudi citizens, journalists and activists continue to retweet rather than retreat. In fact, according to a recent poll about people’s attitudes toward information sharing on the Internet, Saudis are among the most willing to share “everything.” This is not exactly divine revelation to progressive Saudi thinkers and leaders such as Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who addressed Saudi Telecommunications directly from his Twitter account: trying to block social media platforms is a “losing war.”

 

Today is Matter Demo Day!  See below for the official press release.

The first class of 6 startups is graduating from our four-month accelerator program in San Francisco. This is a major milestone for Matter, and for each of the teams it is an important ritual of startup life – pitching in front of a room full of investors and media.

PRX is a founding partner of Matter, with Knight Foundation and KQED as the cornerstone investors in our first fund.

Since we launched Matter last December I’ve been bouncing between Cambridge and San Francisco to work with managing partner Corey Ford and director of operations Jigar Mehta to help guide this remarkable class of entrepreneurs to this moment.

It’s an outstanding group of people, all passionate about their products, their teams, and the shared mission to change media for good.

Today we are also opening the applications for Matter Two – our next accelerator class starting in October.  Please help us spread the word to find extraordinary mission-driven entrepreneurs with a vision for a more informed, connected, and empowered society. We’ll be hosting info sessions over the next several weeks in Boston, New York, Washington DC and Chicago.

Matter is a community and we are always expanding our network of mentors, advisors, partners and sponsors. Join us!

Jake Shapiro

CEO, PRX Inc.
Partner, Matter.

 

 

For information, interviews, photos contact:
Patrick Kowalczyk, patrick@pkpr.com
Jason Gordon, jason@pkpr.com
PKPR, 212.627.8098 (o), 917.699.6260 (m)

Download photos here: http://imgur.com/a/lVEZs#1 

MATTER, NEW STARTUP ACCELERATOR FOR MEDIA VENTURES,

SHOWCASES INAUGURAL CLASS AT FIRST-EVER DEMO DAY

Matter kicks off call for applications for its second class; deadline is July 28^th

San Francisco, CA (June 13, 2013) – At the first demo day hosted by Matter, the media startup accelerator backed by KQED, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and PRX, six media startups today made their case for capital and highlighted how their ventures can help build a more informed, connected, and empowered society.

Fusing public media values with the methods and mindsets of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Matter invests in entrepreneurs who show high potential to create media ventures that have a meaningful, positive impact on society while pursuing a sustainable, scalable, profitable business model.

For the six teams that comprise Matter’s first class, today’s presentation to a select group of investors, media executives, and mentors marked the culmination of an intense four-month program. Participants were provided with a $50,000 investment and working space in Matter’s co-working facility in San Francisco’s tech-friendly SoMa neighborhood. Each team participated in a bootcamp focused on building scalable media ventures with a human-centered, prototype-driven design process, as well as a regular series of design reviews, speaker sessions, and mentoring meetings with entrepreneurs, investors, and media executives.

The six startups that presented at Matter’s first demo day address the many ways audiences consume media (reading, listening, watching, interacting) while also empowering audiences to participate and create media in their own ways. The ventures, which include participatory platforms, mobile applications, B2B media services, and content production engines, are:

• ChannelMeter is a professional grade analytics platform for publishers and brands focused on maximizing and engaging audiences in online video.
• InkFold is a reading list compiled automatically from your gmail that turns your friends into a reading club.
• Mixation is a network of online TV stations that anyone can create.
• OpenWatch is an investigative network for creating a just society through radical transparency.
• SpokenLayer SpokenLayer unmutes the written web. We partner with publishers to turn articles into audio read by real people..
• Zeega is revolutionizing interactive storytelling for a future beyond blogs, enabling anyone to express themselves by easily combining media from the cloud.

“I couldn’t be more proud of what these six ventures have accomplished in the last four months,” said Matter Managing Partner Corey Ford. “The goal was to have them continuously test and iterate on their venture to make it more and more relevant to their audiences and more and more viable for investors while maintaining their focus on building a more informed, connected, and empowered society. They’ve done just that.”

“Matter itself is a start-up, and today marks a major milestone in our mission to change media for good,” said Jake Shapiro, Matter Partner and CEO of PRX. “This remarkable group of entrepreneurs now forms the nucleus of Matter’s expanding community of mentors, partners, and investors.”

“KQED invested in Matter to connect public media to the Silicon Valley innovation ecosystem and attract new ideas, technologies, and creative entrepreneurs with ventures that intersect with our mission of media for the public good,” said KQED President John Boland. “All six of the start-ups participating in this first Matter demo day fit that description, and their interactions with KQED staff have been mutually beneficial. Matter is off to a great start.”

“Matter is using entrepreneurial approaches to drive innovation in public media,” said Michael Maness, Knight Foundation Vice President of Journalism and Media Innovation. “By supporting the first-ever Matter demo day, we are providing start-ups with the opportunities they need to build their ideas and contribute to a more informed society.”

Applications for Matter’s second class, which will begin in October 2013, are being accepted today through July 28, 2013.

Any media startups with multi-disciplinary teams who have early-stage prototypes,an apply.  Information sessions for potential applicants will be held in five cities over the next month: San Francisco (June 19, July 9), Boston (June 25), New York City (June 26), Washington, D.C. (June 27), and Los Angeles (July 10). For the first time, Matter will be accepting applications using AngelList. For information, application guidelines, and the schedule for Matter information sessions, go to www.matter.vc.

About Matter

Fusing public media values with Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Matter is a start-up accelerator supporting media entrepreneurs building a more informed, connected, and empowered society. Backed by KQED, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and PRX, .  Matter invest in entrepreneurs who show high potential to create media ventures that make a meaningful, positive impact on society while pursuing a sustainable, scalable, profitable business model. For more information visit http://matter.vc/press/.

About KQED

KQED serves the people of Northern California with a public-supported alternative to commercial media. Home to the most listened-to public radio station in the nation, one of the highest rated public television services, and a leader in interactive technology, KQED takes people of all ages on journeys of exploration—exposing them to new people, places and ideas. www.kqed.org

About the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
Knight Foundation supports transformational ideas that promote quality journalism, advance media innovation, engage communities and foster the arts. We believe that democracy thrives when people and communities are informed and engaged. For more information, please visit knightfoundation.org.

About PRX
PRX is an award-winning public media company, harnessing innovative technology to bring significant stories to millions of people. PRX operates public radio’s largest distribution marketplace, offering thousands of audio stories for broadcast and digital use, including signature PRX programs like The Moth Radio Hour. PRX mobile apps for public media include This American Life, KCRW Music Mine and Public Radio Player. For more information, please visit www.prx.org/about-us/press.

 

 

 

Both Facebook and Apple have announced the use of tags. Yay!

Tags have continued to percolate through the ecosystem after their most auspicious introduction in Delicious.com. (Note the phrase “most auspicious”; tags have always been with us.) It’s great to see them increase both because they are a great way to get use out of the craziness while preserving it in its original form for others, and because there is great value in scaling tags, as Flickr has shown.

So, yay for tags. And yay for the crazy.

Swiss author and entrepreneur Rolf Dobelli recently published a provocative essay titled “News is Bad for You” in The Guardian. The essay describes news – particularly fast-breaking, rapidly updated news – as an addictive drug, inhibiting our thinking, damaging our bodies and wasting our time. Dobelli is so concerned with the negative effects of news that he’s cut himself off from consuming news for the past four years and urges that you do the same.

His arguments attracted angry responses within The Guardian‘s newsroom. Madeleine Bunting writes, “As Dobelli described his four-year news purdah to a group of Guardian journalists last week, there was a sharp intake of collective breath, nervous laughter and complete astonishment. How could someone suggest such a thing to a journalist?”

I had a different reaction to Dobelli’s provocation. I found it pretty persuasive. I shared the article with students in a class I teach called “News and Participatory Media”, and asked the students for their reactions. Many found Dobelli’s case compelling, especially those students who were mid-career journalists. Much of what frustrated them about their profession was bluntly identified in Dobelli’s piece: too often, news is a set of disconnected snippets that promises to inform and empower, but merely entertains, distracts and ultimately misleads.

While Dobelli offers a persuasive set of problems, his proposed solution – stop reading news – strikes me as unhelpful and selfish. You personally may benefit from the time you reclaim in kicking the news habit, but there is likely a societal cost in encouraging people to opt out of consuming the news. A democratic form of government presumes an informed populace that can select appropriate representatives and identify issues that merit public debate. As Bunting notes in her response, a happy, docile and ill-informed citizenry is the precursor to a Huxleian vision of totalitarianism.

Dobelli might accept the accusations of selfishness. His essay is adapted from his new book, “The Art of Thinking Clearly”, which is an odd example of a self-help book. Deeply inspired by Naseem Taleb’s work linking cognitive science and economics, Dobelli outlines 99 cognitive shortcomings, errors and fallacies in an attempt either to steer us towards smarter decisionmaking or, more likely, to bludgeon us into a realization that human beings are pretty lousy at making rational decisions. By the end of the book, Dobelli admits that he rarely considers all these errors and fallacies in making decisions and simply goes with his gut – however, he wants us to have these tools handy for the really important decisions. Those decisions, his examples suggest, generally have to do with making investments as wisely as Warren Buffet or getting good deals on expensive cars. His is not a book about civics – it’s a book about maximizing your personal gains.

If we take Dobelli’s criticism seriously but reject his proposed solution, one next step is to look for ways to address the shortcomings of contemporary journalism. If we don’t like the sort of repetitive, click-seeking, shallow journalism that Pablo Boczkowski identifies in his book “News at Work“, we need to find ways to support “slow news” that focuses on investigation and contextualization of breaking news. If we are dismayed by how both new and old media got many details of the Boston Marathon bombing and the manhunt for the bombers wrong, we need either to slow newsrooms down, or to build better tools to help both newsrooms and readers cross-check and verify breaking news reports.

I can (and frequently do) point to people and projects focused on solving the problems Dobelli poses , but I’m left with two of his challenges that I can’t ignore or solve. They are related points: “News is irrelevant” and “News makes us passive.” These intertwined problems strike me as uncomfortably hard to address.

Dobelli asks, “Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business.” Most stories, he argues, “are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can’t act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic.”

I can quibble with these generalizations. A news story may convince us to vote to oust a politician, to donate money to a relief effort or work on a cause locally or globally. But I take his overall point seriously: if news isn’t helping us make decisions or take actions, why would we pay attention to it, or bother paying for it?

There’s another way to interpret Dobelli’s complaint, not as an indictment of news, but of the limited tools we have for civic engagement. When we read a horrifying story like the explosion of a fertilizer factory in West, Texas, what options do we have as outraged citizens? We could raise funds to help affected families rebuild their homes and bury their dead, but that hardly addresses the core issues of America’s half-assed and underfunded approach to regulating workplace safety. We can promise ourselves that we’ll vote out the politicians responsible, but we probably can’t – Texas prides itself on being one of America’s least regulated states – and there are very few pro-regulation voices like that of Elizabeth Warren on either side of the political aisle these days. Surely there’s an action we can take that falls somewhere between making a donation to victim’s families and mounting a campaign to overhaul America’s approach to business regulation?

If we believe news is important to a democracy, we need mechanisms by which news turns its readers towards engagement and action. If hearing about the shoddy safety practices in West, Texas doesn’t lead to some sort of change, then Dobelli is right: the news is irrelevant and likely to render us passive.

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This February, the Knight Foundation gave a $985,000 grant to TED, organizers of a popular and highly visible series of conferences that feature “ideas worth sharing”. The purpose of the grant was to let TED take a close look at whether TED talks were inspiring people to take action, and to help link TED talks more closely to action. The grant attracted some criticism from commentators who wondered whether it made sense to fund TED to study its own effectiveness, but not much conversation about the idea of linking TED’s content with participation.

(Disclosure: I have long associations with both Knight and TED, and Knight is the primary fiscal sponsor of my research center.)

The day before the announcement of the grant, I attended a brainstorming session hosted by Knight and TED. June Cohen, TED’s executive producer for media, asked the attendees: When TED.com relaunches later this year, what if some talks included a set of actions a viewer could take if he or she found a talk compelling?

TED plans to invite a subset of their speakers to connect actions with their talks, likely starting with talks from this February’s conference. Speakers would be asked to suggest three actions a viewer could take. TED would work with speakers to craft the suggestions, but they would ultimately be the speaker’s suggestions, not TED’s, to ensure independence between the speaker and TED. As for which actions might make sense to promote, how to structure those actions for maximum effectiveness, and how to measure that impact? These remain open questions.

The questions TED is asking itself are related to the questions Dobelli asks about the news. Some of the ideas that TED sees as “ideas worth spreading” are ideas that could lead to transformative change if implemented at scale. By giving attention to scientists who are engineering bacteria to produce ethanol, or scholars who want to rebuild schools with a renewed focus on creativity, TED promotes ideas as solutions they believe can solve longstanding problems.

But it’s also possible that these ideas are distractions, pat solutions to complex problems, offered more as entertainment than as a meaningful path towards change. We might judge the utility of TED’s ideas by whether they empower us to take action and make change, or whether they leave us sitting on the sidelines, either through hope that smart technologists will solve our problems or despair about the scale of the problems we face. As with news, we might evaluate TED’s talks, in part, on whether they empower us, as members of the audience, to make change in the world, or whether they leave us as passive observers.

Some of these ideas might become actual solutions through the influential and powerful people who attend the TED conference and decide to support the ideas they find compelling. With an audience that routinely includes Google’s founders and some of Silicon Valley’s wealthiest venture capitalists, a scientist with a novel fuel source might give a great talk and find backing to commercialize her work. (There’s a long history of collaboration between TED presenters and attendees – see Google’s purchase of Hans Rosling’s remarkable Gapminder visualization tool.)

But another path towards solution is through reaching TED’s global audience online. Popular TED talks are seen by millions of viewers, many of whom react to talk wondering what they can do as individuals to bring about change.Through linking inspiration to action, TED has the potential to mobilize millions to take action around the causes TED features. And TED may strengthen its brand as a space for new ideas and inspiration, because viewers who can find a path to action are more likely to feel empowered and less likely to be frustrated by high-minded ideas that don’t and won’t come to life.

So I was surprised to hear June raising the issue of editorial integrity: the concern that TED might sacrifice some sort of neutrality in promoting one course of action over another. After all, TED has already made a major editorial judgment in selecting some speakers and not others. Because appearing on the TED stage is a major boost to a speaker’s visibility, far more people want to speak at TED than are able to, and TED’s curators have enormous gatekeeping power, both in deciding who gets on stage and who is kept off.

June argued that there’s a distinction between featuring compelling and innovative ideas and proposing specific paths of action to bring those ideas to fruition. TED could make an editorial judgment about whether a speaker had an idea worth spreading, she felt, but wasn’t in a good position to propose steps a viewer of a TED video could take to bring that vision to life.

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TED is not a newspaper, but questions of connecting information with inspiration and activation are being raised in newsrooms around the world. Should organizations dedicated to the spread of news, ideas, and analysis limit themselves to sharing information with their audiences, or should they help the people they reach engage and take action?

This question points out a conflict between two values many journalists hold. Journalists are often taught that their job is to inform their readers, but not to promote a particular course of action. To do so would be to commit “advocacy journalism”, the promotion of an agenda masquerading as the sharing of facts. At the same time, many journalists enter the profession with a hope that their actions will lead to change in the world. Inspired by investigative journalists, muckrakers, and those who’ve championed whistleblowers, their hope is to uncover and expose malfeasance and see the corrupt ousted and punished.

These values aren’t in conflict so long as you accept a particular theory of change: give people information they need to see what’s wrong in the world, and they will take action to right wrongs. When this works, the results can be profound. When the Boston Globe, building on work done by the Boston Phoenix, exposed Cardinal Bernard Law’s attempts to protect and reassign pedophile priests, it led to Law’s resignation, charges brought against over 100 priests and a crisis in the Catholic church that may help spare future parishioners from clergy sexual abuse.

But addressing the “information deficit” doesn’t always lead to change. Much thoughtful analysis of climate change has been published, but we are still far from widespread, aggressive action to slow carbon emissions, and we’ve globally passed the 350 parts per million threshold scientists have long warned is a maximum safe level for atmospheric carbon dioxide. Hard as it has been for the Catholic Church to wrestle with sexual predators in the clergy, it’s been far harder for the US, India and China to come to a common understanding of a balance between development, growth and emissions.

Reading about Arctic ice collapse is informative, but hard to translate into a course of action. As warming accelerates, swapping your SUV for a hybrid remains a fine idea, but seems unlikely to prevent trapped methane from escaping from melting permafrost. These stories may inspire some readers to become climate researchers or activists, but it’s likely that for many they reinforce a sense of powerlessness and disengagement. If reading a story makes you more informed about a problem, but less likely to act in response to that problem, is that a net positive or negative?

There’s a trap in the other direction, of course. Fox News heavily promoted Tea Party rallies as a way viewers could get involved with campaigns to reform tax policy. They were accused of both artificially creating a political movement, and of sacrificing any claims they might make towards journalistic neutrality. It’s undeniably possible to find yourself prioritizing ideology over objective reporting, and in doing so, sacrifice informing people broadly and fairly on the road to becoming a more effective advocate.

There is a small set of journalistic organizations looking for a middle ground, a way of connecting journalism to engagement in a way that avoids sacrificing reporting for advocacy. In that sense, they may be fellow travelers to June and TED, as they look for ways to advocate for ideas, but seek specific solutions more broadly.

David Bornstein has been writing a series of columns called “Fixes” for a New York Times blog, profiling people and organizations with novel solutions to challenging problems. Bornstein calls this work “solutions journalism”, suggesting that the next step for journalists after exposing a social problem is to feature sound reporting on different approaches to problem-solving.

Other projects try to connect stories directly to actions an interested reader might take. Shoutabout, a start-up news portal, invites readers themselves to share actions a reader can take and information sources where readers can learn more. A Washington Post story about marriage equality is paired with an invitation to donate to the Human Rights Campaign as well as a link to read a set of contextual background stories.

Because readers themselves submit the links to learning and action materials, ShoutAbout offers news publishers a way to invite participation without crossing the advocacy line. The platform works for the right as well as for the left: a news story about Ted Nugent’s brother writing an Op-Ed in support of background checks offers readers a link to donate to the NRA as well as a link to contact their elected officials in support of background check legislation.

Participant Media’s Take Part site combines news stories with petitions and pledges readers can sign, and an “impact dashboard” that tracks the campaigns they’ve joined. By tracking engagement through the dashboard, Take Part encourages readers to think of themselves taking part not just in a single campaign, but as a part of their online lives.

Do these efforts cross a line between reporting and advocacy? A new report from award-winning non-profit newsroom ProPublica offers suggestions for how we might think about the question. A whitepaper commissioned by the Gates Foundation and prepared by ProPublica examined how the newsroom measures the impact of their work. Before discussing impact, the ProPublica authors examine the question of whether journalists should be seeking impact from their work. They conclude that they should, and offer a distinction between journalism and advocacy. Journalism, they argue, begins with questions and progresses to answers, while “Advocacy begins with answers, with the facts already assumed to be established.” As a result, “when a problem is identified by reporting, and when a solution is revealed as well… it is appropriate for journalists to call attention to the problem and the remedy until the remedy is put in place.”

ProPublica understands that they will be accused of “crusading journalism”, but argues that it’s okay to crusade if journalists are led to propose solutions they have found in course of their investigations, rather than through preconceptions or partisanship. This seems like good advice for anyone working for social change: before taking on the task of advocating for a particular solution, do the work to determine whether this is the best solution you can find, or simply the one you’ve heard the most about. But ProPublica rejects the idea that a journalist’s responsibility is to document a problem and hope that readers find an appropriate solution.

What does this mean for TED and the idea of linking paths of engagement to TED talks? TED is already exercising editorial judgment over what constitutes “ideas worth spreading” and who benefits from the attention associated with appearing on the TED stage and website. Much as a newspaper engages in a form of advocacy by reporting a story on the front page rather than burying it deep inside a paper (or excluding it entirely), TED is already engaged in promoting some ideas at the expense of others, amplifying some, though not all, ideas presented on TED stages on the TED.com website.

(The controversy over Nick Hanauer’s talk at TED, a 3-minute talk about income inequality as part of the 2012 Long Beach conference, centered on TED’s decision not to feature the talk on the TED.com site. Hanauer went to the press, and some supporters of Hanauer argued the failure to post the talk was a form of censorship. Chris Anderson, TED’s curator, argues that it’s more analogous to sending an op-ed to the New York Times and having them decline to publish it, as TED and TEDx events generate thousands of talks a year, and only one is featured on the site per day.)

David Bornstein might suggest that TED feature speakers that offer compelling solutions to our most pressing problems. ProPublica might encourage TED’s curators to thoroughly examine complex problems and promote solutions and speakers that emerge from the research. But it is unclear whether TED should offer a platform for a speaker to propose ways audience members can help to solve problems, or whether TED should be engaged in designing or refining those solutions. While TED is comfortable auditioning speakers and selecting the best talks, endorsing plans of action feels uncomfortably like political activism to some, or simply dangerous, in that TED isn’t able to evaluate whether the actions proposed are appropriate or helpful.

The problem is this: great TED speeches are inspiring, but they don’t always include a call to action. Sir Ken Robinson’s talk on schools and creativity is perhaps the most watched talk the organization has ever published. It’s an engaging and funny exploration of different forms of intelligence and the poor job our schools do accommodating these different ways of learning. There are very few concrete, actionable takeaways from the talk – Sir Ken’s work in the talk is to persuade us the importance of creativity in education and inspire us to work on bringing creativity into education.

It’s possible Sir Ken has three concrete next steps he’d like the 15 million people who’ve viewed his talk to take. But that’s not necessarily the case. Had TED asked me for three actions I wanted viewers to take in reaction to my (much less popular) TED talk, I would have asked them to join the Global Voices mailing list, then desperately fumbled for two more ideas. Much as speakers need – and receive – coaching on their stagecraft and their slides, it’s likely many of them need help figuring out what they’d like an audience to help them do.

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In a talk I gave at the 2013 Digital Media and Learning Conference, I suggested that one way to consider civic engagement was in terms of engagements that are “thin” or “thick”. Thin engagement requires little thought on your part: you can sign a petition, take a pledge, give a contribution. Campaigns that use thin engagement are often launched by organizers who have chosen a solution to a problem, and see the challenge as lining up support behind their solution. Thin activism relies on scale for impact – actions are easy to undertake in the hopes that thousands will take part and that their collective small actions will lead to significant impact. Some of my students at Center for Civic Media recently made the case that 2 million Facebook users changing their profile pictures to a variant of the Human Rights Campaign’s red and pink equality symbol was a form of engagement that was thin but effective, demonstrating how many friends and allies gay people had.

By contrast, thick engagement is designed to call on a broader range of inputs from participants, including their creativity, strategic sensibilities, and ability to make media, research, deliberate or find solutions. Campaigners know there’s a problem they want to solve, but ask what you think they should do to address it. Thick engagement can be very difficult to scale, as it involves deliberation and debate between people who may disagree on the appropriate course of action, but it’s often very satisfying and engaging for those who participate in it, as they feel valued for their ideas and connections, not just for their nominal participation or donation. Critically, they see themselves as partners in bringing an idea to life, more deeply engaged than if they’d merely written a check or signed a petition.

TED has some experience asking its community for thick forms of engagement. From 2005 through 2009, TED awarded $100,000 and a wish to “change the world” to three individuals. In 2010, they narrowed the prize to one winner, and in 2013, raised the prize to $1 million. The money aside, TED has argued that the real value of the prize is that members of the TED community – the people who attend the TED conferences and the staff of the organization – work with prize winners to bring wishes to life. Street artist JR, winner of the 2011 TED prize, worked with members of TED’s community to post people’s portraits on buildings and walls around the world. In Tunisia, after Ben Ali’s government fell, JR worked with Tunisian activists he met through TED to cover the dictator’s pictures with photos of ordinary Tunisians, just one of the projects in over 100 countries involving 120,000 posters.

It’s likely that the experience of taking photographs, picking evocative sites – like Tunisia’s ministry of information – and wheatpasting these posters into place is an engaging and thick form of participation in JR’s project. It’s likely that people in the TED community helped with the printing and distribution of the posters as well, which surely involved its own sort of complex and engaging problemsolving. But it takes real thought and care – and, in this case, JR’s artistic vision – to design projects that tens of thousands of people can take engage with in such a rich way. Many of the projects with which Shoutabout and Take Part invite readers to engage demand no more than an online signature or donation. It’s not hard to understand why some of these campaigns are dismissed as “slacktivism”.

For journalists who want to connect their readers to meaningful engagement, or TED speakers who want to use their 18 minutes in the spotlight to start building a movement, identifying and designing opportunities for engagement is likely to be a new art form. Most journalists can’t start new organizations to implement solutions they’ve helped identify – at best, they can point readers to exemplary organizations they’ve reported on, as Bornstein does. Those organizations are then faced with a pleasant conundrum: can they harness the attention they receive beyond asking for money? When Larry Lessig’s compelling new TED talk drives viewers to his Rootstrikers anti-corruption project, will they be content to sign and share petitions, or can Rootstrikers help them become active, creative and engaged parts of Lessig’s movement?

Advocacy organizations use the idea of a “ladder of engagement” to design projects new recruits can undertake. After putting a bumper sticker on a car, a voter is asked to put up a lawn sign, then staff a phone bank, then canvas door to door, and so on. Not all volunteers make it up the ladder, but those that do are experienced and dedicated and, ideally, are invited to help develop the strategy of the campaign. I’ve suggested that to encourage thick engagement that has impact, we need to help people deepen their understanding of an issue as they climb a ladder of engagement.

ShoutAbout’s model, which expands a story into opportunities to learn as well as to act, is a step in the right direction. But an organization like TED could do a great deal more. Working with a compelling speaker like Lessig and with the Rootstrikers organization, TED might help design a set of opportunities for engagement that allow people with different interest and skill levels to get involved in different ways. They might also help people drawn to the issue of corruption by Lessig’s talk find a range of information on the topic so readers can explore whether the solutions Larry proposes are the ones they want to advocate for. Ultimately, TED might find itself hosting discussions not just about supporting Lessig and Rootstrikers, but in developing other complementary – or competitive – strategies to the engagements originally suggested.

There’s another possibility, which is that by focusing on thin forms of engagement, TED may alienate its core constituency, the community members who’ve been willing to make in-depth commitments to try to bring projects to life. Advocacy organizations work to turn thinly-engaged participants into thickly-engaged movement leaders. Moving in the other direction, expanding out from a core of engaged participants to be more inclusive may alienate those people who are already involved. (TED has already wrestled with this challenge in moving from a small, exclusive conference to becoming a global media brand with talks watched by millions.) At the very least, moving from facilitating cooperation between a small group of highly empowered individuals to a larger popular movement is likely to be a challenging process (and could alter the end results in ways positive or negative).

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Is TED willing to get engaged in helping design new engagements, or providing space for viewers to debate and design new forms of involvement? Are news publications? In either case, the most challenging aspect of linking compelling content to engagement is measuring impact.

ProPublica’s white paper offers both caution and hope for measuring the impact of investigative and explanatory reporting. Measures of impact need to go beyond counting stories written or pageviews received. If millions of people read a story but can do nothing, there will be less impact that a story where few read it, but one is in position to effect a change. As a result, ProPublica tracks how many people read its stories and how many publications they appear in, but they also maintain a tracking report that follows actions influenced by a story, opportunities to influence change and changes that have resulted.

In the case of a ProPublica story like Dollars for Docs, an exposé of doctors who accept large fees from drug companies for consulting and public speaking, it’s easy to understand these actions, opportunities and changes – ProPublica can track policy changes at hospitals and medical schools that restrict doctors’ ability to accept outside consulting fees. But it’s much harder to know how to track the success or failure of a project like JR’s, where the exciting outcomes may be in the joy or empowerment of seeing the faces of contemporary and historical Lakota figures against the backdrop of the Great Plains, or the faces of ordinary Haitians on the walls of a rebuilding Port au Prince.

Focus closely on measuring the impact of engagement tied to a story or a talk, and you’re likely to prefer engagements tightly tied to straightforward theories of change: we can fight corruption by getting politicians to commit to refusing money from lobbyists, and we can track our progress by seeing who’s taken the pledge and whether they honor it. If a handful of politicians took this pledge before Lessig’s talk and an accompanying TED campaign urging viewers to call their Congresspeople, and dozens took the pledge afterwards, TED might well claim impact from an engagement they helped design.

But we want metrics that are capable of recognizing the impacts of a project like JR’s Inside Out. And if we hope readers and viewers will suggest their own forms of engagement and build their own movements, we need not to track a single tactic, like calls to Congresspeople, but a whole set of metrics that track whether corruption is changing and whether our efforts are having an impact. If we don’t find ways to consider these impacts, it’s possible that an effort like TED and Knight’s could run the risk of launching dozens of Kony 2012s a year: high profile movements that gain lots of attention, but have a difficult time demonstrating their impact.

At the meeting hosted by TED and Knight, I told a story about giving my TED talk in 2010. TED speakers receive a wonderfully over-the-top stone tabled emblazoned with the “TED Commandments”. One orders speakers to “Prepare for impact”. What it should say is “Prepare for attention”.

Being able to reach a large audience, on the TED stage or through a newspaper, offers no guarantee that words will have an impact. Linking that attention to meaningful action is difficult to accomplish. Dobelli’s warning is a simple one: protect your attention, as it is a scarce commodity. But unless we invest our attention into ideas and events that matter, we miss the opportunity to make change at a scale larger than that of our own lives.

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My colleague Sasha Costanza Chock offered five productive ways people outraged by revelations about the NSA’s PRISM program might respond, an excellent example of linking news to action.

     

When I last lived in Seattle, nearly a decade ago, I hosted the “Debian Seattle Social” email list. When I left the city, the mailing list eventually fell victim to bitrot.

When Allison Randall asked me about the list a couple months ago, I decided that moving back to Seattle was a good excuse to work with Allison and some others to revive the community. Toward that end, I’ve put up a little website and created a new mailing list. It’s hosted on Alioth this time which will be reliable than me. Since it has been years, we have not moved over the old subscriber list so you’ll have to sign up again if you were on it before.

If you’re a Debian developer or user and you’d like to hear about infrequent Debian social gatherings in the Seattle area, you should sign up on the list!

metaLAB(at)Harvard is hosting the second digitalSTS workshop at the Arnold Arboretum on June 27-28. We will explore the potential of the “data narrative” as a hybrid genre for the expression of Science, Technology and Society (STS) scholarship. The design of data narratives is a new-media practice that merges distinct cultural forms for organizing knowledge: the database and the narrative. Narratives are linear, sequential, and animated by actors; databases, by contrast, are non-linear, random-access, and driven by algorithms. Data narratives operate in-between, threading visualized data through verbal exposition to produce hybrid timelines, maps, models, animations, and interactive texts. In this context, design can be thought of as the synthetic work of layering disparate ways of knowing. Indeed, as hybrids that leverage both database and narrative structures, data narratives bring the epistemic worlds of science and the humanities together in new configurations useful for telling grounded stories in a form likely to have impact both in scholarly discourse and in broader audiences beyond academe. We see the Arboretum as an ideal context to explore such use of design for STS scholarship and the public understanding of science.

As expressed at its founding in 1872 by director Charles Sprague Sargent, the Arboretum would be many places in one: a research station, a horticultural grounds, a forestry lab. It would also serve as an educational establishment uniquely positioned for what he suggestively called “object teaching.” The woody plants, systematically organized and delicately cultivated, would convey natural history in the flesh, in a splendid setting accessible by urban audiences, lying at the ready for use by diverse experts and plant lovers.

Since the late nineteenth century, of course, these desiderata have been reorganized by a shifting set of norms, practices, and social configurations—not only in plant science and ecology, but in landscape design, higher education, and the city itself. This dynamic interposition of qualities and forces—ecological, social, aesthetic, and pedagogical—has left its traces in the forms of interaction between the institution, the university, and the city; in the reception of the arboretum by varied audiences; and in the very disposition of plants and other living things in the landscape. In data narratives, we see an opportunity to reflect, interpret, and critique these shifting arrangements, and to reinvent Sargent’s concept of “object teaching” for a networked world.

Team Leaders:
Matthew Battles and Kyle Parry, Harvard University
Carl DiSalvo, Georgia Institute of Technology
Kelly Dobson, Rhode Island School of Design
Hanna Rose Shell, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Daniela Rosner, University of Washington
Sara Wylie, Northeastern University

Organizers:
Yanni Loukissas, Harvard University
Laura Forlano, Illinois Institute of Technology
David Ribes, Georgetown University
Janet Vertesi, Princeton University

Sponsors:
The Arnold Arboretum
The Consortium for the Science of Sociotechnical Systems
in collaboration with the National Science Foundation Digital Societies and Technologies Research Coordination Network
Microsoft Research

When I was a child, something happened to friends of our family that changed how I thought about water safety forever.

The mother took her 3-year-old daughter to the beach near their house. She sat on the sand while her daughter played nearby—and somehow, inexplicably and tragically, she fell asleep. When she woke up, her daughter had drowned.

Tragedies like these happen to other people, we often think. It wouldn’t happen to us. Especially something like drowning, because that seems so simple to prevent. Go to places with lifeguards. Make sure your children can swim. Keep an ear out for shouting or splashing. Glance at the water regularly.

The problem is, none of that’s enough.

I should say that I love the water. I grew up on the north shore of Long Island and spent much of my childhood in or near water. I still spend a lot of time in or near water, as do my children—none of us can imagine anything different. But as much as I love water, I also respect and fear it.

It’s a sunny day. You and your daughter had a bad night—she kept waking up with an earache—and you are both exhausted and cranky. After lunch, you decide to take her to the beach for a few minutes. It’s spring, too cool for swimming, there won’t be other kids to play with, but she loves it there. It will cheer you both up.

Two summers ago, in a public pool south of Boston with plenty of lifeguards, a woman slid to the bottom of the pool and drowned. There were people all around her, but the water was so murky that nobody saw her. That may seem like an extreme case, but actually, people drown with lifeguards present all the time. It’s easy for lifeguards to be distracted by other swimmers, by conversation or by the myriad of things that can distract anyone.

You brought a chair to the beach, and you sit down in it with your daughter nearby. Together, you build a sandcastle. She gets up and walks toward the water, looking for seashells. Remember, you tell her, don’t go near the water. She comes back, sits and puts seashells on the castle. The sun is so warm on your face; you lean back in the chair, closing your eyes as you listen to the surf and to the sound of your daughter playing next to you. This was such a good idea, you think.

Once I got caught in a rip current, or something like it. I suddenly found myself further out than I expected, and it was hard to swim back in. Luckily, I was not only a good swimmer, but I knew what to do: swim parallel to shore until I could swim back in. But not everyone is so lucky—and good swimmers get tired, hit their heads or get tossed by waves and lose their bearings.

What many people don’t realize, too, is that drowning can be very silent. When a drowning person makes it to the surface, they don’t scream or flail—they take the biggest breath they can before they drop below the surface, and it may be less than a minute before they don’t come up again (to learn more, check out the great post, Drowning Doesn’t Look Like Drowning by Mario Vittone).

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), most young children who drown in pools were last seen inside the house, had been out of sight less than five minutes and were in the care of one or both parents at the time.

You open your eyes. You feel odd. Could you possibly have fallen asleep? No—you couldn’t have done that. You wouldn’t have done that. You look next to you—your daughter isn’t there. Panic rises in your throat as you jump to your feet and look frantically around you, screaming your daughter’s name. You run to the water—and see her, a few feet out, under the water, motionless.

This could happen to anyone. Including you.

Here’s what the CDC says you should do to prevent drowning:

• Learn life-saving skills. Everyone should learn to swim. Grownups (and older teens) should learn CPR.
• Fence it off.  Pools should have fences that go completely around them, separating them from house or play areas, and have self-latching and self-locking gates.
• Use life jackets. The CDC suggests that children wear life jackets near any natural body of water, like a lake or ocean. They can help weaker swimmers in pools, too.
• Be on the lookout. When kids are in or near water (including the bathtub), an adult should be supervising them. Like staring at them. Not reading a book or sunbathing or otherwise multitasking. Staring at them.

 

 

I have spent the last few days interviewing people in Istanbul’s Gezi Park protests as well as hanging out in the park, observing, chatting informally with everyone ranging from journalists to visitors to the park and occasionally getting massively tear gassed. My lungs continue to burn as I type this morning.

For context, let me first explain that most everything you have been seen on TV has been from the Taksim square where the most of the clashes are occurring between the police and few protesters. Those are, for the most part, groups that were  not necessarily part of the Gezi Park protests, but have moved to the area as things developed. Hence, you are getting the wrong impression from TV feeds focused solely on Taksim Square. That is not the Gezi Park protest I have been observing. [Here's an article from the BBC explaining what it looks like now and what the plans are] [The park itself is often quite crowded and has become a complete tent city, with thousands to tens of thousands people in it at any one point, and hundreds of thousands during the weekend.]

Here’s an aerial view of the area.

The park on the right is now a tent city, and that’s where the protest is taking place. It all started when the government announced it was going to tear down this area and build a replica of an Ottoman army barracks with a shopping mall potentially integrated into it. It’s one of the few remaining green areas in the popular Taksim neighborhood. The small group of initial protesters were attacked 5am in the morning, their tents burnt down, and trees started being uprooted. The news spread via social media, especially Twitter and Facebook, as well as SMS and phone calls, and people started congregating in the area in response. After massive clashes for about a day or so, the police withdrew and the area grew into a large tent city and a protest. (The police and the clashes returned yesterday). For most of my time there, it was a festival like space: loud and boisterous, with occasional breaks for tear gas.

This is what the inside of the park lookseed like before the police attack last night:

There are libraries (since destroyed by the police), food center, restrooms, theater, and lots of formal and informal activities within the park. It’s a lively, peaceful and colorful space. Here’s the library before:

Well, here’s what the library looked like after the police entered the park on June 11th:

During yesterday’s clashes, there were indeed a few people who threw  ”Molotov cocktails” at the police in the square –which you may have seen on TV because that is the kind of visual that television stations like to put on a loop– but in my observations, the Gezi park protesters are very alien to that kind of behavior. In fact, during those very clashes they tried to form a human chain around the park and stop such violence from happening. They made calls via their megaphones for it to stop. I have walked most every inch of the park and spoke to a wide range of people. The protesters I spoke with expressed strong commitment to non-violence.

Here’s the human chain attempt to stop the clashes between police and the Molotov throwers (who were about six people) and to protect the park. The chain was dispersed with gas and water canons:

In fact, even the slightest scuffle is in the park calmed down immediately.  I observed this first-hand when a visiting youngster, about 14 or 15, tried to pick a fight with an older man claiming that he had looked at his girlfriend the wrong way. Dozens of people immediately intervened, calmed the youngster, took him away, helped his girlfriend, asked her if she was okay, and generally made sure it was all calm again. “Not here, no fighting, not here” is heard as soon as any tensions arise. People are very proactive. This is not a let-and-let-live space in those regards (though it is in many others).

There is also a campaign within the park, with many signs, asking people not to consume alcohol –yes, I know it’s ironic as government’s attempts to legislate lifestyle issues such as alcohol consumption are part of people’s grievances. However, people I talk to say that it’s very important that they keep the park clean, well-behaved, cooperative and non-violent. Signs everywhere say that “nothing is for sale in the park.” Food, masks, medical and other supplies, clothes, etc. are distributed free of charge. (There is also a burgeoning “street peddler” ring in the perimeter areas of the park, selling helmets, masks and, happily for me, fresh “simit”–Turkish sesame bagels.)

After talking to the park protesters for days here is a very quick compilation of the main complaints and reasons people say brought them to the park:

1- Protesters say that they are worried about Erdogan’s growing authoritarian style of governance. “He thinks we don’t count.” “He never listens to anyone else.” “Why are they trying to pass laws about how I live? What’s it to him?”

Erdogan’s AKP party won the last election (its third) and is admittedly popular with many sectors of society, including some who are now in the Park have voted for him. It has accomplished many good things for the country through a program of reform and development. Any comparisons with Mubarak and pre-Tahrir 2011 Egypt are misplaced and ignorant. The country is polarized; it is not ruled by an unelected autocrat who has alienated everyone.

However, due to the electoral system which punishes small parties (with a 10% barrier for entrance to the parliament) and a spectacularly incompetent opposition, AKP has almost two-thirds of the deputies in the parliament with about 50% of the vote. Due to this set up, they can pass almost any law they want. People said to me “he rules like he has 90%.”

So, that seems to be the heart of the issue. People have a variety of grievances, but concentrate mostly about overreach and “majoritarian authoritarianism.”

For example, Erdogan recently announced that they would be building a third bridge over the Bosphorus strait. Many people felt that the plan was not discussed at all with the public and concerns about environmental impact ignored. Then, he announced that they had decided the bridge would be named “Yavuz Sultan Selim”–an Ottoman king (“padisah”) famous for a massacre of Alevi (Turkey’s alawites) populations. Unsurprisingly, Alevis who compromise a significant portion of the Turkish population were gravely offended. In the predominantly “GAzi” (not Gezi) neighborhood, people have been marching every night since the Taksim protests began. Last night, they blocked the main TEM highway for a while before voluntarily dispersing.

 

I asked someone from the Gazi neighborhood (GAzi neighborhood is not GEzi park.) why they were so angry and why there were protests there every night. “Wasn’t there anyone else in all of Turkey’s history to honor with the name of that bridge?” the person said. “Doesn’t he have a single Alevi friend to ask? Why can’t they ever ask someone about anything before announcing their decision?”

During the protests, Erdogan called the protesters “riff-raff” (capulcu) which has now been adopted by the protesters–they jokingly call themselves the riff-raff party. They are offended but also decided that they will call just respond with humor. Such dismissive language, undoubtedly, helps polarize the situation. “Why can’t he let us even have one little park?” was a common refrain among the people I interviewed. “Why must everything be his way?”

2- A very common and widespread complaint is about censorship in traditional. It is, indeed, much worse than I had thought. I had already blogged about how the CNN Turkey was showing penguin documentaries while the initial major clashes were ongoing, and while CNN International had a live feed to the clashes.

In the square, I chatted with journalists and people who told me they were journalists but joining the protests after their shift ended. They told me, some in tears, that they are not free. They said that the stories they file are shelved. One told me of being told “why don’t you rewrite this column” after writing a sharp critique of Erdogan’s stance during Arab Spring versus his stance now towards the protests.

I watched last night as the governor of Istanbul was “interviewed” on television on CNN Turkey (it’s not the worst or only awful one, but it’s notable.) There were ongoing clashes all day, in the middle of the biggest city in Turkey. The governor had said in the morning that the park would not be attacked. I was in the park all day and was tear gassed on and off all day–this was thoroughly documented. (I left when things got much worse and I couldn’t breathe, or obviously do interviews anymore. I’m there to interview, not to be tear gassed beyond rhyme or reason).

Instead of asking him tough questions, or even things that could be considered any kind of questions, the “interviewer” lobbed phrases that were so non-questions that “softball” would be a compliment. The “interview” ended with the “interviewer” asking the governor that perhaps they should end by having him repeat his call to parents. Oh, yes, the governor said. That’s a good note: “Parents should tell their children not to be in the park anymore. It’s not safe.” That is what passes for an interview.

Also, the few channels who were broadcasting the protests live were JUST hit by large fines by Turkey’s regulatory agency, RTÜK, for “inciting people to violence.” The level of control over the public sphere via media is worse that I had thought, and I was already worried. The journalists I spoke with said to me that it’s not just intimidation by government–many media publishers are also large conglomerates and want to keep good relations with the government for their business interests.

Unsurprisingly, social media, especially Twitter and Facebook have emerged as key protest and information conduits. Turkey also has no equivalent to “Al Jazeera” which played a major role during the Arab Spring. Most protesters I talked with said that this just wouldn’t be possible without especially Twitter and Facebook. Most people heard of what was going on in the park during the initial police attack (when the protest was small, the police moved in, burned the tents and started cutting down the trees) via Twitter and Facebook and showed up to try to protect the park. They couldn’t have heard it on mass media because it was broadcasting anything but the news. Penguins have become a mock symbol of the protest.

3- The police actions are a common cause of complaint among the protesters. The use of tear gas is quick and massive. This is not the first protest that has been subjected to massive tear gas. In fact, it seems to have become a modus operandi and main style of policing of demonstrations. Yesterday, while I was in the park, tear gas volleys regularly landed in the park. My interview recordings are interrupted by “gas breaks”: a bang, coughing. I watched people convulse and throw up from tear gas. I witnessed tear gas being thrown into the park when it was very crowded, creating a dangerous situation as people tried to run away and risked trampling. The park is experienced, though. As people panicked, lots of seemingly experienced protesters, started yelling for people to calm down, opening exits, helping people.

One of the key demands of the protests is freedom as assembly and freedom from this kind of police intervention.

Also, protesters were hit with tear gas canister–what had also happened in Egypt and killed many people. I personally saw a young man bleeding from the head on a stretcher being rushed to the “field hospital” area–which also got attacked with tear gas later. After him, another man came sobbing through the area. “They are aiming the canisters at our head. Aren’t they human? Aren’t we human?” he sobbed.

Here’s a picture I took of person in stretcher–he was bleeding from his head, not captured in the photo:

Here are some pictures during the day when the tear gas was lobbed inside the park. I don’t have a picture for some of the worst clashes when the park was basically engulfed in massive amounts of gas partly because it was a difficult situation and also partly because some of the worst happened after I left. These pictures are from June 11th, when the governor said the park would not be attacked.

I did not take this picture but it shows you how it can get:

This one I took–one of the many tear gas volleys fired into the park while I was there on June 11th.

I personally think tear gas should be regulated internationally and be used only in truly and rarely dangerous situations. We need an arms control treaty on tear gas. Not only is it not non-lethal, it has become a way to deny freedom of assembly. I understand that there are some situations that the police do need to use non-lethal force. The situation, however, seems out of hand–instead of a high bar for use of this substance, it has become something that is just lobbed. Some of this also has been documented in my twitter feed (I can be found as @zeynep).

I know that now I am going to be criticized heavily by some people in Turkey. Let me end with some clarifications. I have friends who are and remain strong AKP supporters and they, too, are mostly aghast at what has been happening. I’ve always tried to explain that the government has popular support and remains popular; however in a polarized country.

Rumors of Internet shut-down are false. In fact, throughout the protests, I have been able to tweet, with pictures, from the park (some mobile operators brought extra repeater trucks to the area). I lost Internet only once–during the worst clashes– and I later learned that one of the repeater trucks was on fire, likely contributing to the problem as well as tens of thousands of people desperately trying to call out. However, I witnessed the ridiculous levels of media censorship first hand and I heard some stories directly from journalists.

Some people asked my why I don’t go interview AKP supporters and their use of social media? In fact, I’d be happy to, at some point. I study social movements and social media so it is natural for me to interview protesters. The notion that AKP supporters do not use social media is false. The idea that AKP is just behind the times with such technologies is also false. The prime minister did indeed call Twitter a menace (or curse) to society, but all his top lieutenants are on social media and very active. So are, as far as I can tell, large portions of AKP’s own public. AKP is a tech-savvy party full of competent people. There is simply no comparison to Mubarak’s inept misunderstanding of the new media ecology.

And that’s it for now. I am now going to go back to the battered, tired Gezi Park and continue doing interviews for as long as I can. I shouldn’t have to interview with a helmet, though, in fear of tear gas canister landing on my head. The governor keeps promising that the park won’t be attacked. Here’s me interviewing yesterday in the park, and here’s hoping to less tear gas.

 Note: Hastily written, sorry for typos and lack of more links. To be corrected later.

I'm partnering with some colleagues at EdTechTeacher and Tina Barseghian at KQED Mindshift to write a series of articles about tablets in education. My EdTechTeacher colleagues have developed a pedagogical model for tablet use that tries to help students along a journey from consumption to curation, creation and connection. It's a framework for thinking about how we can use tablets not just as screens for reading and viewing, but as portable, flexible multimedia creation tools.

The framing for the articles is the idea of "Someday/Monday" in professional development. In conversation, Tina and I realized that we shared a dilemma. When working with teachers about technology, we want them to stretch themselves, to imagine ways that new technologies enable new approaches to teaching and new kinds of learning experiences for students. But those major changes can be intimidating. They can take a summer or a year to reimagine and develop; sometimes they can't happen until someday down the line. So we also want to give teachers something for Monday, ideas and strategies that they can implement right away in the classroom.

In the piece, I borrow an idea from Howard Gardner:

"We're no longer going to have a single canon where a central authority will be able to decide what's great and what's not....Everybody can make his or her judgments about beauty, and it doesn't impinge on anybody else." To develop our own canons, to learn to appreciate beauty, [Gardner] recommends maintaining portfolios or journals of art, music, writings, and experiences in order to better appreciate the distinctions among them - to make sense of which pieces are most beautiful.

That's the vision for what teachers might build someday. I then offer a few suggestions of tools and apps that are Monday ready. The rest of the article is over at KQED MindShift. Enjoy!

For regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @bjfr and for my publications, C.V., and online portfolio, visit EdTechResearcher.

- Justin Reich

Ahead of last week’s anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Chinese government engaged in what has now become an expected annual crackdown on Internet freedom. This year, however, the government adopted more advanced and subtle means of censorship. Rather than blocking all search results for sensitive terms, websites such as Weibo are instead displaying carefully curated results that have little to do with the 1989 protests.

Although Chinese censorship is ever-more sophisticated, Internet users in China are finding creative ways to express themselves and commemorate the tragedy. Memes – spontaneous, humorous, grass-roots-style online satirical works – are a significant feature of the Chinese Internet, ranging from 2009’s Grass Mud Horse to memes involving sunflower seeds and self-portraits of people wearing sunglasses, both inspired by arrested Chinese dissidents. These memes take the form of photos, videos, animations, and texts that defy and ridicule Chinese authorities.

This year, Chinese Internet users created multiple variations of an iconic photograph from the 1989 protests, incorporating images ranging from yellow ducks to Legos. These images began to circulate through social media in China days before the June 4^th anniversary as a way to bypass censorship, and gained momentum largely for their humor and brevity.

The famous photograph – known as “Tank Man” – of the 1989 protest has long been banned in Chinese cyberspace. The photo, featuring a man blocking a series of tanks during the Tiananmen Square protest on June 4, 1989, directly points to the dictatorship of Chinese government and has startled people worldwide.

Days before this year’s Tiananmen Square Anniversary, someone wittily replaced the four tanks in the original photograph with giant yellow ducks. The meme is based on a 54-foot-tall duck sculpture, created by a Dutch artist, that currently floats in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor.

The “tank man” picture is also photoshopped into a Lego man facing down three green Lego tanks. By embedding these images in posts instead of using banned keywords, Internet users can often escape automatic deletion.

Another picture showing a cow in front of a line of bulldozers is also getting past Weibo’s censors. While Weibo has blocked the words “big yellow duck” in response to the memes, the word “cow” appears to be uncensored.

While censors continue to add new words to the blocklist, Internet users continue to create new images, making it impossible for the government to shut down conversation about the Tiananmen Square protests entirely.

Improvisation theories, drawn mostly from jazz, have increasingly been applied to entrepreneurship, new product development, and other fields, but rarely, if ever, to journalism. Yet journalism is an industry built on improvisation, from the actions of reporters out in the field, to the deadline work of editors and page designers. More than that, it is [...]

annfriedman:

New golden age! Looks just like the old golden age. 

I was interviewed for this story. Dying to know whether any of my quotes made it into the magazine.

Also, LOLZ.

megangreenwell:

It’s a new golden age of magazines because white bros.

coverjunkie:

PORT (UK)

All you mag lovers… 
take a look at this line-up of Editor In Chiefs, all ace:
GQ’s Jim Nelson 
Wired’s Scott Dadich 
Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter
New York Times Mag Hugo Lindgren
Bloomberg Businessweeks’s Josh Tyrangiel
New York’s Adam Moss

“The importance of Print Media”
Yeah that time again… new PORT Magazine 

While internet censorship in China has long been pervasive, the days leading up to and marking the Tiananmen Square protests mark a tradition of heightened censorship practices throughout the country. As the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests approached earlier this month, one China-based Redditor described a convenient, do-it-yourself circumvention tool built on a Raspberry Pi.  This tool represents a development in the ongoing cat and mouse game between China’s internet censors and the users seeking convenient ways to burrow through it.

The use of virtual private networks (VPN) is a daily reality for users attempting to access blocked sites in China – ensuring an encrypted connection and a secure path to overseas servers.  While there is no shortage of available VPNs to tunnel under the firewall, the process of finding, downloading and configuring a new VPN whenever on a new device or public computer can prove arduous. The set-up that Redditor JaiPasInternet describes allows users to connect automatically to a designated VPN across devices rather than the typical reconfiguration necessitated when switching between multiple platforms.  Following the Redditor’s instructions, the single-board computer created to promote computer science education can be configured to help users circumvent China’s Great Firewall. The DIY circumvention strategy involves a Raspberry Pi which automatically connects to a virtual private network through the open-source software application OpenVPN. Configured to connect to the internet via ethernet, that connection is shared with a wireless dongle equipped with hostapd software running in the background. In this scenario, the Raspberry Pi is set up to work like a WiFi hotspot, just like you would encounter in an airport or coffeeshop – it can share that internet connection with other devices. The primary difference here is the point of action for connecting to the virtual private network. Instead of that connection being based off a laptop or iPad, connecting to a pre-designated VPN takes place on a portable computer the size of a credit card, which devices can tap into.

While the Raspberry Pi method described above may save time for users, it is by no means a silver bullet for skirting the firewall entirely. The single-board computer still requires a VPN to connect to, a circumvention technique which China censors have allegedly cracked down on in recent months. Reports released late last year indicate a crackdown on some of the commercial VPN services. The alleged fortification of the Firewall prompted major VPN companies operating inside the country to issue apologies and publish workarounds for users to access their accounts. However at least one major, U.S-based VPN company was unable to offer definitive solutions on helping all users skirt the problem, offering some suggestions and advising their customers to “become familiar with the modification process and experiment on your own.” Responding to allegations from the VPN companies, Fang Binxing, known as the “Father” of the Firewall denied any knowledge that of upgrades meant to stymie VPN services. However, he noted the three overseas VPN companies were unregistered, and therefore operating illegally within the country.

Two of our favorite podcasts, the Slate Political Gabfest and the Slate Culture Gabfest are being packaged into a radio-friendly version for WNYC, and now they will be broadcast on PRX Remix. We are very excited to have them on board! It’s a simple idea, get three smart people together talking about politics or pop culture and record the result. Stay tuned to PRX Remix for Gabfest Radio and I highly recommend you subscribe to the podcast.

Here’s the latest episode on PRX

Here are the full versions from the podcasts

I can’t believe I got to do this: I gave the inaugural Friday Night Talk at Max Temkin’s studio space in Chicago last week. The title of the talk was “Big Breaks and Breakthroughs.” In it, I shared revelations and surprises from my past two years of mentoring, including: the importance of noticing, the power of open invitations, the perils of being held to unspoken expectations, and what it means to do the hard work of finding new voices.

Now that the talk is up, I hope you’ll take a look!

At a time when citizens increasingly call for government transparency, the Connecticut legislature recently passed a bill to withhold graphic information depicting homicides from the public in response to records from last December's devastation at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Though secret discussions drafting this bill reportedly date back to at least early April, the bill did not become public knowledge until an email was leaked to the Hartford Courant on May 21, 2013. The initial draft of what became Senate Bill 1149 offered wide protection specifically for families of victims of the December 14 shootings, preventing disclosure of public photographs, videos, 911 audio recordings, death certificates, and more.

Since then, there has been a whirlwind of activity in Connecticut. After a Fox reporter brought to the attention of Newtown families a blog post by Michael Moore suggesting the gruesome photos should be released, parents of children lost in the terrible shooting banded together to write a petition to "keep Sandy Hook crime scene information private." The petition, which received over 100,000 signatures in a matter of days, aimed to "urge the Connecticut legislature to pass a law that would keep sensitive information, including photos and audio, about this tragic day private and out of the hands of people who'd like to misuse it for political gain." As this petition was clearly concerned about exploitation by Moore and others, Moore later clarified his position, emphasizing that the photos should not be released without the parents' permission. Rather, he spoke about the potential significance of these photos if used voluntarily to resolve the gun control debate, in the same manner that Emmet Till's mother releasing a photo of her son killed by the KKK influenced the Civil Rights movement. 

Like the petitioners, members of the Connecticut legislature responded with overwhelming support for SB 1149. Working into the early hours of June 4, the last day of the legislative session, the state Senate and House approved the bill 33-2 and 130-2, respectively. The bill as approved exempts photographs, film, video, digital or other images depicting a homicide victim from being part of the public record "to the extent that such record could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of the victim or the victim's surviving family members." The bill particularly protects child victims, exempting from disclosure the names of victims and witnesses under 18 years old. It would also limit disclosure of audio records of emergency and other law enforcement calls as public records, such that portions describing the homicide victim's condition would not have to be released, though this provision will be reevaluated by a 17-member task force by May 2014.

Though more limited in scope than the original draft with respect of the types of materials that may not be disclosed, this final bill addresses all homicides committed in the state, not only the massacre in Newtown. It was signed by Governor Dannel Malloy within twelve hours of the legislature's vote and took effect immediately.

From the beginning, this topic has raised concerns with respect to Connecticut's Freedom of Information Act and government transparency. In addition to being drafted in secrecy, the bill was not subjected to the traditional public hearing process. All four representatives who voted against SB 1149 raised these democratic concerns, challenging the process and scope of this FOI exemption. This blogger agrees that in its rush to appropriately protect the grieving families of Newtown before the session ended, Connecticut's legislature went too far in promoting privacy over public access to records, namely with respect to the broad extension of the bill to all homicides and limitations on releasing 911 calls.

Though influenced primarily by the plight of those in Newtown, SB 1149 makes no distinction based on the gravity or brutality of the homicide, or any other factor that may relate to the strength of the privacy interest. Instead, it restricts access to traditionally public records for all homicides in the state, reaching far beyond the massacre at Sandy Hook. As the Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane said with respect to photographs depicting injuries to victims and recordings of their distress, "it seems to me that the intrusion of the privacy of the individuals outweighs any public interest in seeing these." Pressure to expand the bill as Kane desired came primarily from advocates of the legislature's Black and Puerto Rican Caucus. They criticized the fairness of differentiating between the protection owed to Newtown families and that due the families of homicide victims in urban areas, where homicides occur more frequently.

This fairness and equality based argument raises valid concerns about how the legislature is drawing the line between protected and unprotected records:  If limited to the shootings at Sandy Hook, then in the future, what level of severity would make visual records of a killing "worthy" of exemption from disclosure? But an all-inclusive exemption like the one Connecticut passed goes too far in restricting the public's access to important public records. It restricts public access to information so long as a minimal privacy interest is established, regardless of the strength of the interest in disclosure. While restricting the release of photos of the young children who lost their lives this past December is based in a strong privacy interest that far outweighs the public or governmental interest, the same cannot be said for every homicide that has occurred or will occur in the state. The potential lasting consequences of this substantial exemption from the FOIA should not be overlooked or minimized in the face of today's tragedy. 

SB1149 is also problematic in that it extends to recordings of emergency calls. While there is some precedent for restricting access to gruesome photos and video after a tragedy, this is far more limited with respect to audio recordings. Recordings have been made available to the public after many of our nation's tragic shootings, including the recordings from the first responders to Aurora, 911 calls and surveillance video footage from Columbine, as well as 911 calls from the Hartford Distributors and Trayvon Martin shootings. While a compromise was reached in permitting the general release of these recordings, the bill includes a provision that prevents disclosure of audio segments describing the victim's condition. Although there is a stronger interest in limiting access to the full descriptions of the child victims at Sandy Hook, weighing in favor of nondisclosure in that limited circumstance, emergency response recordings should be released in their entirety in the majority of homicide cases.

This aspect of the law in particular may have grave consequences for the future of the state's transparency. Records of emergency calls traditionally become public records and are used by the media and ordinary citizens alike to evaluate law enforcement and their response to emergencies. The condition of the victim is an essential element of evaluating law enforcement response.  As the president of the Society of Professional Journalists, Sonny Albarado, noted, "If you hide away documents from the public, then the public has no way of knowing whether police . . . have done their jobs correctly." In other words, these calls serve as an essential check on government. As a nation which strives for an informed and engaged citizenry, making otherwise public records unavailable is rarely a good thing and should be done with more public discussion and caution than recently afforded by Connecticut's legislature.

Connecticut's bill demonstrates a frightening trend away from access and transparency. Colleen Murphy, the executive director of the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission has observed a gradual change in "toward more people asking questions about why should the public have access to information instead of why shouldn't they." Now, it has never been easy to balance privacy rights with the freedom of information, and this is undoubtedly more difficult in today's digital age where materials uploaded to the Internet exist forever. Still, our commitment to self-regulation, progress, and the First Amendment, weighs in favor of disclosure. Exceptions should be limited to circumstances, like the Newtown shooting, where the privacy interest strongly outweighs the public's interest in accessing information. As the Connecticut Council on Freedom of Information wrote in a letter to Governor Malloy, "History has demonstrated repeatedly that governments must favor disclosure. Only an informed society can make informed judgments on issues of great moment."

Kristin Bergman is an intern at the Digital Media Law Project and a rising 3L at William & Mary Law School. A Connecticut native, she feels deeply for those families in Newtown and hopes their losses will not be exploited at the cost of their further sufferring. Still, as a strong supporter of transparency, she is fearful of the precedent set by SB 1149.

(Photo of the Connecticut State Capitol courtesy of Flickr user michellerlee pursuant to a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.)

I have been waiting to comment on the recently disclosed NSA surveillance programs until more facts came out, since what various parties were saying in the first days after the story broke seemed so irreconcilable. And the reports touch on so many issues covered in Blown to Bits it is hard to know where to begin. We know more now, and though some of puzzles remain, at least some of the questions have started to firm up.

How Does PRISM Work? We don't really know. What is "collected," where? The PRISM slides (the ones that have been released -- only a few of them) clearly state that the "collection" includes both "surveillance" and "stored comms." But stored where? Facebook and Google, two of the companies listed as part of the program, both are clear in their denials. Both Larry Page (Google) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) deny giving the government "direct access" to their servers. (Some have suggested that this phrase needs definition; what about indirect access? But to be fair, arguably we all have indirect access to their servers.) Both also state that their companies respond only to specific requests, which are scrutinized individually and challenged if overly broad. Alex Stamos suggests that (especially given the low -- $20 million per year -- price tag for the program touted in the slides) PRISM may be just a code name for a view into data gathered through a variety of mechanisms. That is not the way Edward Snowden, the self-identified leaker, makes it sound. It seems to me that it is more likely that Snowden is exaggerating, and that the individual who made the cute graphics on the Powerpoint slides did not fully understand the system, than that Page and Zuckerberg would be flat-out lying when the truth might easily come out in another way.

Add to this the subtlety that in the DoD, "collecting" data does not mean what you might think. As the EFF explains,

Normally, one would think that a communication that has been intercepted and stored in a government database as “collected.” But the government’s definition of what it means to “collect” intelligence information is quite different than its plain meaning.

Under Department of Defense regulations, information is considered to be “collected” only after it has been “received for use by an employee of a DoD intelligence component,” and “data acquired by electronic means is ‘collected’ only when it has been processed into intelligible form.” 

In other words, the NSA can intercept and store communications in its data base, then have an algorithm search them for key words and analyze the meta data without ever considering the communications “collected.”

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper did not help matters when he point-blank denied any massive data collection in his Congressional testimony:

Sen. Wyden: "Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?" Mr. Clapper: "No, sir." 

And then, when challenged after recent disclosures, offered a restatement:

"What I said was, the NSA does not voyeuristically pore through U.S. citizens' e-mails. I stand by that." 

Well, that is not what he said. Taking all the semantical gymnastics into account, I would conclude that the NSA is sifting automatically through lots of email and other content searching for for specific targets. It is what Phil Zimmermann, way back during the Crypto Wars, called "driftnet fishing": scoop everything up, and throw back what you don't want. Isn't that a violation of the Fourth Amendment rights of the rest of the fish?

I think what is going on here is that people think there is a big difference between a computer reading their email and a human being reading it. There isn't.

Questionable defenses. Perhaps the inconsistency can be reconciled by dicing the language yet more finely or by understanding better how the system actually works. But for some, there is no problem in any case. The Fourth Amendment, like the other enumerated rights, is not absolute. PRISM's collecting and sieving just represent a necessary compromise. Of course, because the program has been secret, its constitutionality has never been challenged. The courts like to be reassured that when the government infringes a civil right, the infringement is as limited as possible. The ACLU is hard at work preparing a challenge; maybe we will find out.

But others don't even care about the constitutionality. If PRISM prevents even a single terrorist attack -- and claims have been made that it did exactly that -- they don't mind the infringement of their privacy.

There are two problems with this line of logic, beyond the basic fact that the crime-stopping prowess of PRISM is disputed. One is that civil rights are not subject to popular consensus or majority rule. It may well be that most people don't like the Fifth Amendment; doesn't matter. We all get protection against self-incrimination even if most people don't want it for themselves or anyone else. Same goes with protection against unreasonable searches.

On top of that, I wonder why people feel so comfortable with email searching. Let's take an analogy. Suppose the government had the keys to all our abodes, and we knew it had mounted an anti-terrorism program called SPHERE. Under SPHERE, the police could go into our houses and apartments when no one was home and just look around, without disturbing anything. In fact, it turns out the program has been in place for years, preventing crimes, and none of us knew it existed until some high school dropout turned CIA operative spilled the beans and sought refuge in Hong Kong. How many of us would really say, great -- I have done nothing wrong so I have nothing to worry about?

How did Snowden get away with it? After the Bradley Manning Wikileaks fiasco, I should have thought that the government would deploy some extra software on the computers that had access to Top Secret information. It would know, or learn, the printing and file handling habits of everyone authorized to use these machines, and especially the low staff who have the most limited track records. When the software detected an unusual pattern of downloading or printing, it would ring a bell on the supervisor's desk, who would walk over and check on what the staffer was doing. I would hate this, but I'm not working with top secret information; if you have access to that kind of data you expect to be monitored. Why hasn't such software been deployed?

Enough for tonight -- more thoughts later, perhaps.

I’m leaving tomorrow night for a few days in Germany as a fellow at the University of Stuttgart’s International Center for Research on Culture and Technology. I’ll be giving a two-day workshop with about 35 students, which I am both very excited about and totally at sea about. Except for teaching a course with John Palfrey, who is an awesomely awesome teacher, I haven’t taught since 1986. I was good at the time, but I forget the basics about structuring sessions.

Anyway, enough of that particular anxiety. I’m also giving a public lecture on Thursday at the city library (Stadtbibliothek am Mailänder Platz). It’ll be in English, thank Gott! My topic is “What the Web Uncovers,” which is a purposeful Heidegger reference. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to write this, and finally on Sunday completed a draft. It undoubtedly will change significantly, but here’s what I plan on saying at the beginning:

In 1954, Heidegger published “The Question about Technology” (Die Frage nach der Technik). I re-read it recently, and discovered why people hold Heidegger’s writing in such disdain (aside from the Nazi thing, of course). Wow! But there are some ideas in it that I think are really helpful.

Heidegger says that technology reveals the world to us in particular ways. For example, a dam across a river, which is one of his central examples, reveals the natural world as Bestand, which gets translated into English as “standing reserve” or “resource”: power waiting to be harnessed by humans. His point I think is profound: Technology should be understood not only in terms of what it does, but in terms of what it reveals about the world and what the world means to us. That is in fact the question I want to ask: What does the world that the Web uncovers look like? What does the Web reveal?

This approach holds the promise of letting us talk about technology from beyond the merely technical position. But it also happens to throw itself into an old controversy that has recently re-arisen. It sounds as if Heidegger is presenting a form of technodeterminism — the belief that technology determines our reaction to it, that technology shapes us. Against technodeterminism it is argued quite sensibly that a tool is not even a tool until humans come along and decide to use it for something. So, a screwdriver can be used to drive screws, but it could also be used to bang on a drum or to open and stir a can of paint. So, how could a screw driver have an effect on us, much less shape us, if we’re the ones who are shaping it?

Heidegger doesn’t fall prey to technodeterminism because one of his bedrock ideas is that things don’t have meaning outside of the full context of relationships that constitute the entire world — a world into which we are thrown. So, technology doesn’t determine us, since it takes an entire world to determine technology, us, and everything else. Further, in “Die Frage nach der Technik,” he explains the various historical ways technology has affected us by referring to a mysterious history of Being that gives us that historical context. But I don’t want to talk about that, mainly because insofar as I understand it, I find it deeply flawed. Even so I think we want to be able to talk about the effect of technology, granting that it’s not technology itself taken in isolation, but rather the fact that we do indeed come to technology out of a situation that is historical, cultural, social, and even individual.

So, how does the Web reveal the world? What does the world look like in the Age of the Web? (And that means: what does it look like to us educated Westerners with sufficient leisure time to consider such things, etc.) Here are the subject headings of the talk until I rewrite it as I inevitably do: chaotic, unmasterable, messy, interest-based, unsettling, and turning us to a shared world about which we disagree. This is very unlike the way the world looks in the prior age of technology, the age about which Heidegger was writing. Yet, I find at the heart of the Web-revealed world the stubborn fact that the world is revealed through human care: we are creatures that care about our existence, about others, and about our world. Care (Sorge) is at the heart of early Heidegger’s analysis.

ANDREW GOLIS: Joining The Atlantic: golis: I’m excited to announce that next month I’ll be joining...

Every April, I try to wade through mounds of paperwork to file my taxes. Like most Americans, I’m trying to follow the law and pay all of the taxes that I owe without getting screwed in the process. I try and make sure that every donation I made is backed by proof, every deduction is backed by logic and documentation that I’ll be able to make sense of three to seven years later. Because, like many Americans, I completely and utterly dread the idea of being audited. Not because I’ve done anything wrong, but the exact opposite. I know that I’m filing my taxes to the best of my ability and yet, I also know that if I became a target of interest from the IRS, they’d inevitably find some checkbox I forgot to check or some subtle miscalculation that I didn’t see. And so what makes an audit intimidating and scary is not because I have something to hide but because proving oneself to be innocent takes time, money, effort, and emotional grit.

Sadly, I’m getting to experience this right now as Massachusetts refuses to believe that I moved to New York mid-last-year. It’s mindblowing how hard it is to summon up the paperwork that “proves” to them that I’m telling the truth. When it was discovered that Verizon (and presumably other carriers) was giving metadata to government officials, my first thought was: wouldn’t it be nice if the government would use that metadata to actually confirm that I was in NYC not Massachusetts. But that’s the funny thing about how data is used by our current government. It’s used to create suspicion, not to confirm innocence.

The frameworks of “innocent until proven guilty” and “guilty beyond a reasonable doubt” are really really important to civil liberties, even if they mean that some criminals get away. These frameworks put the burden on the powerful entity to prove that someone has done something wrong. Because it’s actually pretty easy to generate suspicion, even when someone is wholly innocent. And still, even with this protection, innocent people are sentenced to jail and even given the death penalty. Because if someone has a vested interest in you being guilty, it’s often viable to paint that portrait, especially if you have enough data. Just watch as the media pulls up random quotes from social media sites whenever someone hits the news to frame them in a particular light.

It’s disturbing to me how often I watch as someone’s likeness is constructed in ways that contorts the image of who they are. This doesn’t require a high-stakes political issue. This is playground stuff. In the world of bullying, I’m astonished at how often schools misinterpret situations and activities to construct narratives of perpetrators and victims. Teens get really frustrated when they’re positioned as perpetrators, especially when they feel as though they’ve done nothing wrong. Once the stakes get higher, all hell breaks loose. In “Sticks and Stones”, Emily Bazelon details how media and legal involvement in bullying cases means that they often spin out of control, such as they did in South Hadley. I’m still bothered by the conviction of Dharun Ravi in the highly publicized death of Tyler Clementi. What happens when people are tarred and feathered as symbols for being imperfect?

Of course, it’s not just one’s own actions that can be used against one’s likeness. Guilt-through-association is a popular American pastime. Remember how the media used Billy Carter to embarrass Jimmy Carter? Of course, it doesn’t take the media or require an election cycle for these connections to be made. Throughout school, my little brother had to bear the brunt of teachers who despised me because I was a rather rebellious students. So when the Boston marathon bombing occurred, it didn’t surprise me that the media went hogwild looking for any connection to the suspects. Over and over again, I watched as the media took friendships and song lyrics out of context to try to cast the suspects as devils. By all accounts, it looks as though the brothers are guilty of what they are accused of, but that doesn’t make their friends and other siblings evil or justify the media’s decision to portray the whole lot in such a negative light.

So where does this get us? People often feel immune from state surveillance because they’ve done nothing wrong. This rhetoric is perpetuated on American TV. And yet the same media who tells them they have nothing to fear will turn on them if they happen to be in close contact with someone who is of interest to – or if they themselves are the subject of – state interest. And it’s not just about now, but it’s about always.

And here’s where the implications are particularly devastating when we think about how inequality, racism, and religious intolerance play out. As a society, we generate suspicion of others who aren’t like us, particularly when we believe that we’re always under threat from some outside force. And so the more that we live in doubt of other people’s innocence, the more that we will self-segregate. And if we’re likely to believe that people who aren’t like us are inherently suspect, we won’t try to bridge those gaps. This creates societal ruptures and undermines any ability to create a meaningful republic. And it reinforces any desire to spy on the “other” in the hopes of finding something that justifies such an approach. But, like I said, it doesn’t take much to make someone appear suspect.

In many ways, the NSA situation that’s unfolding in front of our eyes is raising a question that is critical to the construction of our society. These issues cannot be washed away by declaring personal innocence. A surveillance state will produce more suspect individuals. What’s at stake has to do with how power is employed, by whom, and in what circumstances. It’s about questioning whether or not we still believe in checks and balances to power. And it’s about questioning whether or not we’re OK with continue to move towards a system that presumes entire classes and networks of people as suspect. Regardless of whether or not you’re in one of those classes or networks, are you OK with that being standard fare? Because what is implied in that question is a much uglier one: Is your perception of your safety worth the marginalization of other people who don’t have your privilege?

pangurbanthewhite:

carrierudzinski:

This is really important. We’ve all seen hundreds of Drug PSAs… how many times have we seen this?

Well played. I did a genuine double take.

Great campaign on bystander intervention/rape

I was recently asked for my top three recommendations for policy and "non-policy" strategies for improving education, particularly with an eye towards increasing equity and advancing deeper learning (the development of student competencies like ill-structured problem solving, communication, and new media literacy in the context of academic content learning).

One might expect me to recommend things related to the use of technologies in schools. But what I think of as high-quality, technology-rich education for all students in schools depends upon fundamental changes in our national system of schooling and national ecology of learning. Education technology needs education reform much more than education reform needs education technology. (I stole that line from Barry Fishman; I've never asked him if he stole it from someone else.)

So here are my top three domains that I think state and federal policymakers could address to improve education. (In my next post, I'll share three things that policymakers probably have little control over, but are even more important.) 

Start Before School. Compelling research from Sean Reardon and many others demonstrates that educational inequalities begin long before children begin attending schools. The best way to ensure that systems of K-12 schooling are capable of providing rich, equitable opportunities for learning is to ensure that all children enter kindergarten prepared for school. In his New York Times opinion piece, Reardon advocates several policy initiatives that would advance this goal: universal, paid maternity and paternity leave; nurse-family partnerships for early interventions in resource-poor environments; resources for parental education; universal early childhood education; and greater resources and training for early childhood educators.

These initiatives are all outside my area of expertise. I'm called in my own career to explore the mysteries of adolescents. But every day that I work with schools, and as I raise my own 2 year old daughter, it becomes increasingly clear that those working in early education and parent education are doing, by far, the most important work in our national system of education. Achieving equitable outcomes related to deeper learning depends upon addressing the woeful state of early education and parental support structures in the U.S.  As Reardon writes, we need to rethink "our still-persistent notion that educational problems should be solved by schools alone."

Assess Less Frequently and More Effectively. Testing all students, every year, from 3^rd to 8^th grade, is not an efficient use of resources. We need a much more variegated assessment strategy, where assessments are designed for their intended function, rather than using one annual test to evaluate students, teachers, schools, districts, teacher training universities, and systems, in complete contra-indication of psychometric guidelines. While baseline assessments of computational skills and reading comprehension are well and good, unless we can develop assessments that evaluate the full range of competencies embodied in deeper learning, these deeper competencies will only be developed in students in affluent schools where students can reliably pass these baseline tests.

At key milestones, students should produce rich, portfolio-based performance assessments (leveraging new technologies to address reliability issues from previous efforts) that demonstrate ill-structured problem solving, complex communication, and new media literacy skills in the context of rigorous investigations of carefully-selected academic content. These performances should be supplemented by assessments designed to evaluate teachers, schools, or systems, administered using well-designed sampling methodologies. Better assessment is critical to better policy, curriculum, and pedagogy.

Support Continuous Learning and Innovation

Teachers improve when they work in community to continuously improve their pedagogy and curriculum. This work is especially effective when teacher communities evaluate the quality of their teaching by looking closely at student work and at the teaching practices in their community and in their own classrooms. Developing this capacity--one school at a time, in 15,000 school districts and 130,000 schools--is essential to improving student learning in schools. I have little confidence in any reform strategy that seeks to improve student learning without accounting for the need to work, individually, with each of these 130,000 faculties.

In my own practice, I find that emerging technologies are a particularly useful vehicle for stimulating new thinking among faculty around curriculum and pedagogy. The physical presence of new devices symbolizes the changing demands of the civic sphere and labor market and gives teachers permission to re-examine their practice. Technology is a kind of Trojan Mouse, where you can start a conversation by talking about devices and then shift quickly to addressing fundamental questions of teaching and learning. 

For regular updates, follow me on Twitter at @bjfr and for my publications, C.V., and online portfolio, visit EdTechResearcher.

- Justin Reich

Jordan
Amendments to media and publication laws lead to a swift shuttering of more than 200 websites in Jordan last week. The Press and Publications Department of Jordan claimed responsibility for generating the list of “unlicensed” sites, including Al Jazeera, the site of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan, and Time Out magazine. Criticized as opaque and vague, recent amendments require sites viewable (if not necessarily based) in Jordan to register with the Jordanian government, obtain a license, and actively monitor all content produced on the site in order to actively cooperate with Jordanian law.

Mexico
In what lawmakers defended as an attempt to curb cyberbullying, Internet users in the Mexican state of Nuevo León may now face up to three years incarceration for posting messages or images to social networks that cause “harm, dishonor, discredit to a person, or exposes him or her to contempt.” Defamation is a felon in Nuevo León and the amendment marks an expansion to the stringent laws to apply online. Website operators are also required by law to reveal to authorities the identity of anyone committing an act of defamation. Critics call the legislation opaque and vague, offering undue power to authorities who may wish to quell criticism against public officials.

Turkey
As protests swell in Turkey, Internet users are using virtual private networks (VPNs) in large numbers to skirt suspected government censorship. Last weekend, more than 120,000 mobile users in Turkey downloaded the free VPM Hotspot Shield, according to the manufacturer. The figure marked a ten thousandfold increase in typical daily downloads for the software on Saturday. Sources inside Turkey reported access to social networking sites in the country were throttled over the last weekend while Turkcell, the largest mobile carrier in the country, denied claims it was blocking the sites. Protests continue in Turkey at time of writing, defying an appeal from the prime minister end the unrest.

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

O texto de sexta passada, neste blog, sobre a notícia que o governo dos EUA está possivelmente conduzindo uma operação massiva de captura de informação em servidores web que todos usamos, como faceBook, google, apple e microsoft causou grande impacto, como era de se esperar. também não é de se estranhar que muitos entendam que não têm nada a esconder e por isso pouco importa quem os está bisbilhotando.

o argumento falacioso do não tenho nada a esconder, quase uma acusação aos que defendem privacidade na rede, de estar fazendo alguma coisa imoral ou ilegal, não faz, nunca fez, o menor sentido. você não tem nada a esconder? então porque não deixa o vizinho tirar fotos suas tomando banho ou na cama, com sua mulher, numa daquelas noites quentes, e publicar na internet? imagine o milhar de outras situações que não queremos ver disseminadas, na rede ou qualquer outro meio. de repente, temos tudo a esconder. simples assim.

a privacidade é um dos princípios essenciais da vida e um dos direitos humanos fundamentais. daniel solove, da GWU law school, escreveu um paper precioso [‘I've Got Nothing to Hide’ and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy], onde o argumento "nada a esconder" é desmontado passo a passo. se você quiser saber realmente porque, vá ler, antes de ir lá nos comentários e dizer que sua vida é um livro aberto. o blog não acredita nisso; perca sua ingenuidade, também.

ao escrever o texto na quinta, o blog disse que muito mais se saberia nos próximos meses. neste fim de semana, o guardian, jornal inglês que descobriu a história [pela via da captura de dados de ligações da verizon, operadora americana], vazou mais um pouco do que sabe, um texto sobre boundless informant, a ferramenta que a NSA usa para capturar informação das redes [abertas, só?…] mundiais. pra você saber, só em março passado foram capturados 97 bilhões de itens de informação. o mapa abaixo mostra a temperatura dos países em relação à atenção americana por informação: verde é  baixo risco, vermelho é risco total. estamos no meio.

agora se sabe quem botou a boca no trombone: um carinha de 29 anos, edward snowden, e a um jornal ingles, o guardian, que talvez seja um dos últimos em que se pode confiar entre UK e EUA. interessante é que um americano abra uma caixa de pandora do porte de PRISM a um jornal inglês e não americano. e fazer isso a partir de hong kong e não europa ou brasil, por exemplo, talvez esperando que a china não vá extraditá-lo para os EUA. eu não apostaria um pirulito nisso, até porque os líderes americanos e chineses, agora, são amiguinhos para sempre.

bem… a história não acaba aqui e as consequências vão rolar por anos, décadas. e isso deveria levar a uma reflexão sobre o estado de coisas e o brasil, agora, pra que a gente se prepare para o futuro. foi isso que fez cristina murta [twitter, web] em emeio para o blog, sobre o primeiro texto desta história. com permissão da autora, o material é publicado ipsis litteris abaixo, com a sugestão de uma leitura cuidadosa e consideração das implicações [que são muitas…] para periferias como nós. o comentário é longo, cuidadoso; vá com calma, pra não perder nada.

Em relação ao post, há dois aspectos que eu gostaria de comentar. O primeiro comentário é relativo à questão da privacidade no mundo digital. O pensador Larry Lessig advertiu há alguns anos: em informática, o código é a lei. Em outras palavras, o que pode e o que não pode ser feito é ditado pelas possibilidades ou impossibilidades da computação. Até o momento, a computação tem apenas uma solução para a privacidade, que é a criptografia. Você criptografa toda a sua comunicação digital? Provavelmente não. Nem eu. Não é prático fazer isso.

Eu não posso acessar seu email e vice versa. Essa impossibilidade mútua cria a ilusão de privacidade. Mas os administradores de sistemas podem tudo. Se o superusuário de um sistema (root) pode acessar tudo, então não há privacidade. Ou você confia no root? Eu já vi um root entrar na minha conta com a intimidade de quem entra em sua própria casa. Não podemos esquecer que aplicações de software locais ou remotas usam o espaço em disco (HD) do seu computador, que é de sua propriedade, como se fosse delas. Elas nos espionam usando nossos próprios recursos!

Assim, não é a constituição federal que vai garantir a privacidade e sim o código. A privacidade nos sistemas digitais só será realidade quando for implementada em software. É ingenuidade pensar que haverá privacidade ordenada por lei. Os fluxos computacionais são em volume gigantesco. É muito difícil controlar legalmente o que ocorre na rede. O que pode ser feito em termos computacionais será feito. Precisamos garantir a privacidade via software.

Meu segundo comentário é acerca da propriedade da informação. Como pode ser visto nos comentários do post, muitas pessoas não ligam para o fato de serem espionadas, algumas brincam com esse fato e outras até acham correto. Parece que há um sentimento geral de que elas não tem nada a esconder, nada de interessante a compartilhar. Portanto, podem espiar à vontade. A justificação do terrorismo para a espionagem é de certa maneira inquestionável principalmente porque não há saída, não há opção de ação a não ser espionar a rede. Podemos concordar que as pessoas individualmente não são interessantes (exceto os procurados terroristas) mas não há como negar que o que interessa são as ideias, a informação compartilhada, o agregado dinâmico e fluido das ansiedades e da sabedoria mundial que circula na rede. O conhecimento agregado do mundo todo tem grande valor.

É aí que entra a questão da propriedade dos fluxos e da informação. Quem é dono da informação que circula na rede? O geógrafo brasileiro Milton Santos propôs uma teoria que merece reflexão profunda. Ele diz que a posse efetiva de um espaço é de quem o opera e não de quem o possui formalmente. Segundo o pensador [veja este link], o domínio sobre um território aumenta à medida que empresas e governos operam, gerenciam e provêem a infraestrutura necessária aos fluxos que trafegam nesse território, sejam esses fluxos de pessoas, de bens ou de informação.

Podemos levar esse raciocínio para as redes. Quem opera os serviços digitais? Quem são os donos dos cabos? Onde estão localizados e de quem são os servidores que armazenam as informações? A que legislação estão sujeitos? É no mínimo surpreendente pensar que informações tão domésticas como número do telefone da farmácia da esquina, a receita de feijoada ou informações sobre o maracatu "a cabra alada" estão indexadas e armazenadas em território estrangeiro. As empresas digitais operam em nosso território e coletam nossa informação como se estivessem em seu próprio território. Além disso, nós, como nação, não temos a nossa própria informação. Dependemos dos estrangeiros. Então, quem possui quem? Em última análise, a Web brasileira não é nossa, pois está em grande parte armazenada fisicamente em servidores estrangeiros e indexada por máquinas de busca estrangeiras.

Por que a comunidade de computação não questiona? Possivelmente porque, mesmo sem saber, estão pensando nos termos da teoria da propriedade do professor Milton Santos. A informação não é de quem a produz e sim de quem opera e comanda seus fluxos, de quem a armazena em seus recursos físicos. Para sermos proprietários de nossa Web, teríamos de ter nossos próprios sistemas de armazenamento e nossa máquina de busca.

edward snowden fugiu justamente pra onde a preocupação de cristina foi levada a sério e onde google, faceBook, twitter e outros não arranham nem a superfície da rede [os equivalentes, na china, são baidu, renren e sina weibo]. os chineses, claro, não estão seguros em “seus” sites; o governo de lá  é famoso não só por vigiar todo mundo mas por ir bem à frente e censurar a expressão individual em rede, o que ainda não dá pra imaginar no –segundo snowden e muitos outros- estado policial digital em que os EUA parecem estar se tornando. quem sabe, em breve…

I spent today reading These Days, a new novel by Jack Cheng. Since I backed the book on Kickstarter, I had my heart set on reading the hardcover instead of a digital copy. This meant that every time I felt my thumb twitch, itching to highlight a luminous passage, I had to subdue the impulse; the book was no glassy device. Yet I couldn’t bring myself to scribble in the book, either—I think because only so many hardcovers were made, and this was one of them. Eventually, I settled on taking photos of the parts I loved. There were many.

“There was always something wonderful about a clean new desk, a desk free of coffee rings and loose scraps of paper, free of postcards and dead pens and blister packs of allergy medicine. A clean new desk was like an unformed block of ice, gleaming with possibility, not yet corrupted by the blaring twin suns of distraction and crude habits.”

-

These Days by Jack Cheng

I’m reading These Days today for 24-Hour Bookclub, and this passage jumped out at me—probably because I’m on the verge of starting a new job. The belief that “everything will be perfect from now on” is irrepressible, even when I know from past experience that clean new desks always become real, messy workspaces in spite of themselves.

The Cyberlaw Clinic is pleased to report that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court issued its decision this week in Commonwealth v. Rousseau, a case about whether an individual may challenge a warrant for GPS tracking of a car in which he is a passenger.  We filed an amicus brief (pdf) in the case on behalf of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, arguing that a defendant does have such standing.  The decision mirrors the reasoning advocated in the Clinic’s brief, as the SJC held that a defendant “has standing because he had a reasonable expectation that his movements would not be subjected to extended electronic surveillance by the government through use of GPS monitoring.”  Crucially, this holding means that law enforcement officers in Massachusetts must obtain a warrant prior to prolonged location tracking.

EFF’s blog post about the decision nicely explains the issues before the SJC and describes the posture of the case:

Police obtained a search warrant to install a GPS device on a car owned by a man suspected in a number of arsons throughout the state and tracked him while he drove the car with his friend and frequent passenger, Rousseau, for over 30 days. After being arrested and charged, both the owner and passenger Rousseau sought to challenge the GPS evidence, arguing that due to misrepresentations in the warrant application, the warrant was invalid. The trial court agreed the misrepresentations made the warrant invalid, but upheld the surveillance anyway, finding that neither the driver or the passenger had a reasonable expectation of privacy in their movements and that for the driver, the physical installation of the GPS device didn’t trigger state or federal constitutional scrutiny.

After the trial court’s decision in 2007, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2009 in Commonwealth v. Connolly that the physical installation of a GPS device was a “seizure” under Article 14 of the Massachusetts constitution that required a search warrant. Then in 2012, the U.S. Supreme ruled in United States v. Jones that the physical installation of a GPS device was a “search” under the Fourth Amendment that required a search warrant. These decisions meant the driver had standing to challenge the installation of the GPS device on his car. But what about the passenger, Rousseau? Since he didn’t own the truck, these decisions didn’t determine whether he had a right of privacy in his public movements. That was the issue confronting the Massachusetts high court.

Concurring opinions in the Jones case (written by Justices Alito and Sotomayor on behalf of a total of five justices) noted that people have reasonable expectations of privacy in their public movements, meaning warrants are required before police can engage in prolonged location surveillance.  The SJC’s adoption of that reasoning represents an important step in striking a balance between the government’s interest in investigating crimes and citizens’ privacy interests in an era of increasingly high-tech surveillance tools.

Kit Walsh of the Cyberlaw Clinic worked on the brief along with fall 2012 Clinic students James Ren and Matt McCullough.

I’ll be spending the week after next (June 17-23) in London for the annual meeting of the International Communication Association where I’ll be presenting a paper. This will be my first ICA and I’m looking forward to connecting with many new colleagues in the discipline. If you’re one of them, reading this, and would like to meet up in London, please let me know!

Starting June 24th, I’ll be in Ann Arbor, Michigan for four weeks of the ICPSR summer program in applied statistics at the Institute for Social Research. I have been wanting to sign up for some of their advanced methods classes for years and am planning to take the opportunity this summer before I start at UW. I’ll be living with my friends and fellow Berkman Cooperation Group members Aaron Shaw and Dennis Tennen.

I would love to make connections and meet people in both places so, if you would like to meet up, please get in contact.

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Cold Magic, Lean In, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack, Feynman.

So I read plenty of books that week, but really, all I want to talk about is Lean In. So some tweet reviews while I get to that. 

The Wind’s Twelve Quarters: UkG, short stories, career spanning, spotty in content and quality but occasional gems. Meh.

Cold Magic: Amazon thinks that this is the same caliber as The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. It is not. Disappointing. Mediocre. Sigh.

You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack. Funny cartoons! Weird subject material, odd topics, great humor, fun visuals. Read at the library.

Feynman: A graphic novel that boils down to he had a life and then won the Nobel Prize. An inspiration to us all. Book is not that great.

—-

Okay, so Lean In. Much has been written about this book, and I figured that given that I had recommended a number of the critiques to various people, I should probably actually read the book.

So I read it. And I stand by all the critiquing that I did before, and then some. To summarize a variety of critiques very quickly, Lean In is feminism from the corporate view, not from the intersectional view. It’s just enough feminism to address the problems that Sheryl Sandburg encountered, and no more. If you’re more disadvantaged than she was, you’re not really addressed by this book. And also, the way to fix things is for women to work harder - to lean in, to push themselves more. See the subtitle: Women and the Will to Lead. If women only had the will to lead, this wouldn’t be a problem. Systematic change? Not needed if women just push themselves harder.

The biggest systematic change that Sandburg specifies in the book? Pregnancy parking at Google. No, really - it’s the only one I remember from the book that wasn’t specifically addressed at a problem only Sandburg or another individual woman had. That’s what feminism means, folks! Pregnancy parking!

Some of the book is devoted to advice for young aspiring women professionals. This includes a denouncement of the common advice to seek a mentor and a sponsor - Sandburg points out that this leads to hordes of young women approaching her for mentorship, and not being appreciative when she does mentor them. (Fortunately, she does recognize that the demand for her mentor services come from a stigma against young women working privately with older men, and also from the utter lack of women in upper management.) Sandburg is, of course, entitled to her opinion, but I can’t help but feel that her advice on how to do better on this front, which could be summed up as “be noticed, don’t ask” is a good way for women to be seen and not heard.

One stylistic point: Sandburg often uses anecdotes to illustrate some of her points, and quite frankly, they often illustrate that someone she admires is an asshole. For example, she tells a story about Mark Zuckerberg trying to learn Chinese, and talking to a bunch of Facebook’s Chinese native speaker developers as a way to practice. One of the engineers tries to start talking to him about a problem with her manager - originally in Chinese. He can’t understand. Instead of letting her switch back to English so she can tell her CEO about a problem she is having, he makes her keep speaking Chinese and simplifying. Finally, she says “my boss is bad” or something like that. This anecdote is meant to illustrate the value of being direct. To me, it illustrates that Mark Zuckerberg cares more about learning a language than treating his employees as real people with real concerns.

Overall, I’m appreciative that Sandburg credits feminism, and recognizes that working women today have problems advancing. She also does occasionally recognize her privilege. But still, the flaws in this memoir/advice tome are myriad. Talking about women pushing themselves is not enough, especially when broader systematic issues such as the wage gap, discrimination and the pipeline problem are unaddressed. In fact, it often reads like victim blaming - and that is a a real problem.

As an activist, a geek, and a privacy scholar, I’ve been watching the NSA scandal unfold with a mixture of curiosity, outrage, and skepticism. I don’t feel as though I have enough information yet to make an informed opinion about exactly what the State is doing or how tech companies are involved, let alone the implications of these procedures. But one thing I do know is that most Americans are going to shrug their shoulders and move on while most of my friends are going to rally for increased transparency, governmental oversight, corporate commitments to resist governmental abuse, and efforts to better inform the public. And although I share all of their values and desires, I also feel the need to reflect on why I think that our activism as it is currently constructed is not going to rally the mainstream.

Whenever I asked my British grandfather any ethical question about his military service, I received one consistent reply: “for God and country.” He was a bomber pilot. And as a young activist, I couldn’t understand how he could table any ethics questions that way. So many innocent people died as a byproduct of his efforts to kill off Nazis. I never doubted the value of his service, but didn’t he every wonder about the random people who were killed in the process? No. “For God and country.”

I’m consistently amazed by how many Americans, who distrust the State’s “socialist” agenda, are fully supportive of any effort by the State to protect citizens from “terrorists” and other perceived miscreants. All too often, this is often cloaked in prejudicial language, focused on a narrative of “them” that is marked as other because of race, ethnicity, or religion. Ironically, even though it’s discussed as being about citizens vs. the other, naturalized citizens and children of naturalized citizens often get categorized as the other when their race, ethnicity, or religion is part of the broader feared other.

Embedded in this desire to be protected from the other is people’s belief that the State will never use sweeping power to surveil them or their friends, only the other. Some people recognize that they may end up in the large databases, but they assume they’ll be thrown away because they’re irrelevant. And besides, they’ve done nothing wrong. They have nothing to hide. Christianity often plays a role here, as people feel as though they’re already being watched and judged for their actions. And this is how we get back to “for God and country.”

When people view the State – or its military – as being a source of good to protect the populace from evil, they’re often willing to accept that actions will be taken to enhance security that may result in surveillance. They don’t necessarily see this as a trade-off between civil liberties and security because they don’t think that they’ll feel any restriction on *their* civil liberties. Rather, only people who’ve done something wrong will. And thus anyone who does feel a restriction on civil liberties must be doing something wrong.

On the flipside, I’m always astonished by how normative surveillance is in poverty-stricken communities. Surveillance is common place and many poor people are used to having to fork over tremendous amounts of personal information to get social services. And, in communities defined by practices like “stop and frisk,” the idea of not being watched and targeted is completely alien. So when these groups find out that the State is monitoring mediated interactions, why should they be surprised? Why should they react? From their perspective, it’s just another tool for the State to do what they’ve always been doing, only perhaps without the direct costs to dignity that many of these people face on a regular basis.

So who will be outraged? Who will be shocked? Who will be surprised? Mostly, I expect, my friends. All told, my friends are a highly educated, highly connected, highly privileged lot who are passionate about changing the world through making, educating, research, and activism. By and large, my friends’ only negative interactions with law enforcement are through protesting or other efforts to stand up to The Man. They expect civil liberties to protect them as they push for causes that they believe are just. They know (at least in theory) that the legal process is broken for less privileged people, but they still expect that it’ll work for them. Or they at least believe that they can call on their networks to bail them out, publicize their case, and generally support them to right any wrong. They have a widespread faith in fairness and justice, even when they’re fighting to combat inequality and injustice.

No activist wants to hear about secret abuses of power because it tilts the playing field, rendering challenges to the status quo even more difficult. Even when those very same activists have a healthy paranoia and believe that their foes are secretly abusing power. But “proof” is different. “Proof” is a rallying call, a justification for long-standing and difficult efforts to speak truth to power. “Proof” reinforces one’s beliefs, while also serving as fuel for being angry that more people don’t get angry. But it also blinds people from seeing why others don’t necessarily jump on their bandwagon because of their own values, beliefs, and assumptions.

I’m glad that my friends are energized and determined to fight harder to make a more just world. And I understand why they’re scared and angry by the potential of what’s being revealed. We’re all easy targets to watch because we’re loudspoken and we extensively use technology to coordinate our change-making efforts. And our networks are full of people who are politically suspect. Particularly activists, hackers, and foreign nationals from problematic nations. In many ways, we’re more the targets of the panopticon than so-called terrorists. Because destabilizing our privilege and belief in justice means that we can be controlled by fear. And so while I suspect that my friends will continue to speak of civil liberties and marginalized peoples, I can’t help but wonder if these kinds of revelations have more implications for activists than for anyone else. And if that’s the case, then what?

Update 9 June 2013 @ 5:53PM: Today, Edward Snowden revealed that he is a patriotic American and the NSA whistleblower. This is most likely going to change every aspect of what unfolds, how the American public reacts, and what the long term implications of this story are.  But, at this point, it’s hard to tell exactly where the chips will fall. I am hopeful that this means more people will engage. At the same time, I’m even more afraid for my activist friends. But I don’t yet have the foggiest clue of what the implications of all of this will mean.

Over the past decade, I’ve had the privilege of being involved in several projects that explore the limits of the World Wide Web as a support for live multi-sited performances as well as the potential for network latencies to become expressive features of such real-time performances. Instead of being understood simply as the enemy to be overcome in order to achieve a “live-like effect,” network latencies become a necessary, even desirable feature to be interpreted as a contributing element of each performance.

The question of the expressive potential of network latencies has been on my mind with respect to Ghost and Mallarmovie: two recent experiments with the Zeega platform. Each is a tightly constructed sequence of slide animations deliberately designed both to expressively use network latencies and to push the limits of the medium of the database documentary, layering gifs and stills with such a high degree of density that the play time of individual slides as well as the animations that compose them becomes only loosely programmable. Visual rhythms, playtimes and sequencings come into being as a function of a labile set of factors: the interplay between user inputs, the bandwidth available on the client side, dataflows at the Zeega server, and the highly variable transmission speeds of servers feeding up the source files that are being stitched together in real time. 

So how different is the experience of a given piece each time it is played? Just how variable are the pace, sequence of actuation, and couplings between components? I knew from experience that, under differing network conditions in differing locations, the variations could be considerable, especially if the end user either slowed down or forced the pace. But I wondered about another sort of limit case: how significant might the variations be if a given piece, in this case MALLARMOVIE, were played five times at roughly the same pace on two devices in the same location at different times during a single day?  

Here are five takes. You can have some fun trying to run them simultaneously (i.e. synchronizing play times) even if the durations aren’t identical.

First take:

Second take:

Third take:

Fourth take:

Fifth take:

Though I haven’t timed anything with precision, here are some of the more self-evident variables:

–the opening spiral sometimes loads with the railway track and rolling dice gifs, but does so for only several cycles before stopping; in other cases it remains static or rotates uninterruptedly (as it was intended to do); sometimes it’s the transition to full-screen mode that is associated with it freezing

–the pace of paging gifs (slides 3, 5 and 10) varies slightly from one performance to another; in some cases the gif actuates belatedly, rather than at the moment of the loading of the slide; paging speeds are highly variable, particularly in the case of slides 5 and 10 (this was the effect that I was after)

–as with the case of paging gifs, the play or rotation speeds of various other gifs can be seen to vary from one take to the next; this seems to be the case with the loading icons on slide four, the flickering words (“jamais”) and phrases (“au fond d’un naufrage”) of slide seven, and the weather fronts in slide 15

–the blinking red light in slide 10 rarely repeats itself and emerges as the most sensitive indicator of the real-time stitching process; the advances and lags seems particularly variable in this case, whereas a number of other “heavier” gifs load and play far more predictably. Some of these effects are the results of deliberately manipulated loading sequences, built into the design of individual slides.

That question came to mind when I read Inside Facebook’s Fantastic Plan To Dominate Cisco’s $23 Billion Market, by Julie Bort, in Business Insider. The gist:

To recap: OCP launched two years ago to create “open source” data center hardware. That means hardware vendors like HP, Dell and Cisco don’t control the product designs. Instead, customers like Facebook and Goldman Sachs do.

OCP is the Open Compute Project.* What matters about the project, for our purposes, is that it models a way for a customer to relate to a vendor: taking the lead in the dance, rather than just following.

A question for VRooMers is, Can we as individual customers do the same thing? I’m thinking we can. One way is through personal clouds, including scenarios such as the one Phil Windley describes here. I am sure there are many others. So I’ll leave detailing those up to the rest of you.

*BI, like too many other ad-funded Web publishers, doesn’t link to OCP, but instead to its own page full of stories about OCP. This is unhelpful, selfish and at variance with nature of the Web itself.  More about that here. (BTW, I’m guessing that the choice not to link is BI’s policy and not Julie’s, and would welcome correction on that.)

 

The Straits Times reported that more than 150 websites and blogs in Singapore went black yesterday to protest a new government-imposed licensing requirement that, “casts a chill over the city-state’s robust and free-wheeling online communities,” said Cynthia Wong, Human Rights Watch’s senior Internet researcher, in a statement.

Beginning June 1, the Media Development Authority requires websites that “report regularly on issues relating to Singapore” and attract more than 50,000 unique monthly visitors in Singapore obtain a license and put up an approximately USD$40,000 bond. If the MDA finds “prohibited content,” including that which “undermines racial or religious harmony,” the sites must remove it within 24 hours.

The MDA identified ten mainstream media outlets that must apply for the license, including Yahoo! Singapore, which calls the requirement unsettling. The government said the measure provides consistency with existing media regulations. Siew Kum Hong, a former presidentially appointed member of Parliament, disagreed with the assertion that the law creates parity with traditional forms of media, mentioning that newspapers found to publish prohibited content do not have to collect unsold copies within 24 hours.

The government also said the measure does not apply to blogs, though it does not rule out including blogs in the future. Netizens criticized the measure for its vague language and the lack of public consultation involved in its formation. Bloggers launched a #FreeMyInternet campaign and have scheduled a June 8 protest in Hong Lim Park. As of today more than 4,000 people have signed an online petition demanding the government withdraw the measure.

If you live in Boston, then we already have your weekend plans made for you.

Tomorrow night, Saturday, June 8 at 7 PM (6 PM doors), the Middle East Club in Cambridge presents a night of stories featuring our friend and Moth Podcast host, Dan Kennedy, alongside Ask Me Another’s Ophira Eisenberg, The New Yorker’s Ben Greenman and McSweeney’s editor, Chris Monks.

Come out to Central Square, grab a drink and enjoy a solid evening of stories from these amazing writers and storytellers.

Tickets available here.

[SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't seen the Red Wedding episode of Games of Thrones (season 3, episode 9, "The Rains of Castamere"), don't read this. There is also a very broad thematic spoiler "spoiler" about Mad Men.]

Yeah, quite an episode.

Matthew Weiner has said that this season of Mad Men reflects just how awful the end of the 1960s were. It’s set in the year that he considers to be one of the very worst in American history: riots, assassinations, a pointless, grinding war, even some worrisome parallels with the Sharon Tate murder by the Charles Manson Family. It’s not the usual Summer of Love picture of the 1960s, but I was there and I can tell you that it was a bimodally euphoric and terrifying time.

George R.R. Martin, the author of Game of Thrones, is two years older than I am, and thus was 15 when JFK was killed, and was 20 when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were shot. He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War (as was I, by the way) and has linked his novels to that war’s brutality.

There was a lesson that it was hard not to draw from the relentlessness of the draft and from the political assassinations that punctuated our equilibrium: There is no certainty that stories will be completed the way we imagined they would be, and the way our moral sense told us they must be. Eighteen year olds will go away and will not come back. Hope will be silenced in mid-sentence. This lesson has been the bedrock fact for most of the world throughout most of history, but it came home to American middle class boys and girls with a shock during that decade.

So, when George Martin rubs our noses in the fact that his stories are realistic, I think, yup, 1960s.

I am so proud of myself. Not only did I actually manage to sign up to buy sunglasses for the themed group gift for my son’s first-grade teacher, but I bought them and got them to the room parent (well, OK, my husband helped with that last part). This was a real accomplishment, because I am a terrible school parent.

I only signed up to bring one other thing this year—plates for a party—and then forgot and ended up grabbing whatever I could find at home (half said “Happy Birthday” on them). I haven’t chaperoned a field trip. I’ve never gone to a PTA meeting. I completely missed the notice for the last class presentation. Luckily my husband heard someone talking about it at school drop-off that day and reorganized his schedule so he could go. “All the parents were there,” he said. “Everybody knew about it.”

Not me. I mostly look at the papers that come home in the folder, but some days, well, I don’t. It’s not that I don’t care. I do. I just get distracted and forget.

I felt better when I read Jen Hatmaker’s hilarious blog, “Worst End of School Year Mom Ever.”

We are limping, limping across the finish line, folks. I tapped out somewhere in April and at this point, it is a miracle my kids are still even going to school. I haven’t checked homework folders in three weeks, because, well, I just can’t. Cannot. Can. Not.

I didn’t feel a ton better, though, because she says that she was awesome back in October. I’ve been terrible all year.

In my defense, I haven’t always been a terrible school parent. I was pretty darn amazing with my older children, especially the two oldest (who are 22 and 20 now). I signed up for everything. I was on the elementary school site council (I even chaired the search committee for the principal—twice). I chaperoned field trips. I baked for bake sales. I never missed a school notice. My amazingness wasn’t just limited to school; I sewed costumes and made things like hand-painted hats or towel ponchos for birthday party favors.

These days, I order online from Oriental Trading Company.

In part, I’m worn out. This is the fifth time we’ve done first grade. The luster and urgency are gone. I am old and tired, and, truth be told, a bit bored. I have looked at hundreds of homework papers, practiced math facts and spelling words hundreds of times, and sat for countless hours while my children sounded out words in books (I was glad to see Jen Hatmaker complain about that too), drew pictures for reports or made barely recognizable objects out of modeling clay for dioramas. It becomes a blur after a while.

I think, too, that having gone through the teenage years 2.5 times now, I have a different perspective on the elementary years. Given what’s ahead, I know that pacing myself is a good idea. Liam will make it through elementary school whether I look through his folder every day or not. He will learn to read fluently and figure out multiplication and the life cycle of a mealworm. I’ll go to the parent-teacher conferences and pore over his report card and pay more attention, if needed. But as long as he’s doing OK, I’m not going to worry too much if some tasks go lower on the to-do list.

It’s not that Liam isn’t precious to me; he is incredibly precious. I cry unabashedly at school concerts now; there is something about the sound of children singing that wins and breaks my heart, because I am acutely aware of how quickly they will be grown.

That’s just it: it’s all so fleeting. I think that I hold Liam tighter than I held my older ones when they were in first grade because of what I’ve learned over these years. I treasure his hugs and kisses, and his smile undoes me daily. He is a wonder to me; life is a wonder to me. I spend my time with my family differently now.

So, yeah, chances are I’m going to miss more notices. I’m going to forget to turn in a check. I’m not going to manage to sign up to bring supplies as often as some other mothers, I’m unlikely to do a whole lot of volunteering, and what I send in on Liam’s birthday might be really unimaginative. But I can live with that.  I am busy with other things in this wondrous, precious, fleeting life.