Friday, February 15, 2013
Thursday, February 14, 2013
First Steps to Open Gov- Getting Your Ducts in a Row
From the article: "Modern versions of open government only work if the basic
input, connectivity, can be taken for granted. We need electricity to light our
homes and offices, and we need cheap, abundant communications capacity to
make open government function. The near-term payoff will be dramatically lower
bills paid by local governments; long-term, you'll be empowering every member
of your community and your local economy. And isn't that what governments are
supposed to do?" Read more
Twitter: A Live Megaphone for Lobbying Groups, Companies
From the article: "On television, President Obama spent a commercial-free hour
delivering his State of the Union speech. But on Twitter,
the nation’s biggest lobbying groups and corporations found a megaphone to
place ad money and promote their views." Read more
The Public Domain: Surveillance in Everyday Life
From the report: "People create profiles on social network sites and Twitter
accounts against the background of an audience.
This paper argues that closely examining content created by others and looking at one’s
own content through other people’s eyes, a common part of social media use, should be framed as social surveillance. While
social surveillance is distinguished from traditional surveillance along three axes (power, hierarchy, and reciprocity), its effects
and behavior modification is common to traditional surveillance. Drawing on ethnographic studies of United States populations, I
look at social surveillance, how it is practiced, and its impact on people who engage in it. I use Foucault’s concept of capillaries of power to
demonstrate that social surveillance assumes the power differentials evident in everyday interactions rather than
the hierarchical power relationships assumed in much of the surveillance literature. Social media involves a collapse of social
contexts and social roles, complicating boundary work but facilitating social surveillance. Individuals strategically
reveal, disclose and conceal personal information to create connections with others and tend social boundaries. These processes are normal
parts of day-to-day life in communities that are highly connected through social media." Read more
Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Online Privacy and Security is a Shared Responsibility: Government, Industry and You
Planes do crash on very rare occasions but not nearly as often as cars. And when driving, there are things you can do to increase your safety, whereas when flying, there’s not much you can do to protect yourself but we do rely on the airline industry and government regulators to do all they can to protect us.
Likewise, when we’re online, there are things we can control and things we can’t." Read more
Follow the Surplus: How U.S. Consumers Value Online Media
From the report: "U.S. consumers realize large and growing value from online
media. In fact, they now derive more value from online media—net of the
associated costs—than they receive from offline media, according to new
research by The Boston Consulting Group. We call this measure of value
“consumer surplus” and, for online media, it amounts on average to
approximately $970 per U.S. connected consumer, or online user, per year—or
about 2.5 percent of the average annual income in the U.S. The comparable
consumer surplus for offline media is approximately $900." Read more
Obama Orders Voluntary Security Standards for Critical Industries’ Computer Networks
From the article: "Citing the growing threat from cyberattacks, President Obama
on Tuesday announced that he had signed an executive order that
calls for the creation of voluntary standards to boost the security of computer
networks in critical industries such as those that keep trains from colliding
and drinking water clean…. The order does not create regulations or
authorities. Rather, it directs the Commerce Department to work with industry
and federal agencies to craft a framework of standards within a year. The
standards would apply only to sectors regulated by federal agencies, such as
banking and electric power. “This is not designed to be a one-size-fits-all
approach,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity
to discuss an order before Obama announced it." Read more
Sovereignty and Liberty in the Internet Era
From the report: "The global revolution in communications technologies and services is
fracturing the historic relationship between the media and the state. That
relationship, born in the early print era, was first framed by the territorial
authority of sovereigns and later found new legitimacy in the rise of popular
sovereignty, thus becoming a definitive feature of the modern liberal
democratic state. For centuries, states have sought to impose their territorial
boundaries on the flow of information and ideas. This however has required ever
increasing inventiveness and cost as new communications technologies have both
empowered and threatened the security, authority and legitimacy of the state.
In the internet era, the state’s capacity to
control its public information sphere is now being tested to exhaustion." Read more
The First Amendment is an Information Policy
From the report: "This essay,
based on the 20th annual Hugo Black lecture at Wesleyan University, argues that
we should think about individual liberties of freedom of speech, press, and
assembly not in isolation, but in the larger context of policies for the spread
and growth of knowledge and information.
Although we normally think about the First Amendment as an individual right, we should also see it as an integral part of a knowledge and information policy for a democratic state. That is because the practical ability to speak rests on an infrastructure of free expression that involves a wide range of institutions, statutory frameworks, programs, technologies and practices.
Using the examples of democratic protests in the Middle East and the controversy over WikiLeaks, the essay explains how free speech values are implicated in knowledge and information policies, in the design of digital networks and in the maintenance of infrastructure.
Around the world today, the fight over free speech is a fight over knowledge and information policy, and, in particular, how the infrastructure that makes free speech possible will be designed and implemented. Although the First Amendment is a crucial information policy for democracy, it is only one information policy among many. It needs the assistance of an infrastructure of free expression to make good on its promises. We must design democratic values into the infrastructure of free expression if we want an infrastructure that protects democracy." Read more
Although we normally think about the First Amendment as an individual right, we should also see it as an integral part of a knowledge and information policy for a democratic state. That is because the practical ability to speak rests on an infrastructure of free expression that involves a wide range of institutions, statutory frameworks, programs, technologies and practices.
Using the examples of democratic protests in the Middle East and the controversy over WikiLeaks, the essay explains how free speech values are implicated in knowledge and information policies, in the design of digital networks and in the maintenance of infrastructure.
Around the world today, the fight over free speech is a fight over knowledge and information policy, and, in particular, how the infrastructure that makes free speech possible will be designed and implemented. Although the First Amendment is a crucial information policy for democracy, it is only one information policy among many. It needs the assistance of an infrastructure of free expression to make good on its promises. We must design democratic values into the infrastructure of free expression if we want an infrastructure that protects democracy." Read more
Patient Portal Explosion Has Major Health Care Implications
AHRQ Report Summarizes Health IT Grant Initiative's Efforts
The report highlights key findings from the experiences of 16 projects awarded in 2007, which aimed to investigate approaches for using health IT to enhance patient-centered care and ambulatory care. The four main areas of interest in the analysis were: patient self-management, providing access to medical information, patient-clinician communication and shared decision making." Read more
The Rise and Decline of the Intellectual Property Powers
From the report: "In
the past decade, China has experienced many impressive economic and
technological developments. Intriguingly, the narrative about piracy and
counterfeiting there is rarely linked to the narrative about the China's
technological rise. To provide a more comprehensive picture, this article
brings together these two different narratives to explore what their
combination would mean for the United States and its intellectual property
industries.
Delivered as the keynote luncheon address at the Symposium on "Applications of Intellectual Property Law in China," this article begins with the good news that China is at the cusp of crossing over from a pirating nation to a country respectful of intellectual property rights. It draws on the historical developments of intellectual property protection in the United States and other once-developing countries.
The article then delivers the bad news that, even though China will finally experience improvements in the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights when it hits the proverbial crossover point, such improvements will bring some disappointments and unintended consequences.
In light of both the good and bad news, the article offers suggestions on three types of policy changes that could help prepare U.S. industries for the identified challenges. It specifically discusses changes at the domestic, bilateral and multilateral levels. Noting the challenges of making prognostications, this article concludes by suggesting that the United States may still have some time and wiggle room to decide its course of action for the near future." Read more
Monday, February 11, 2013
A Declaration of the Interdependence of Cyberspace
From the article: "On the anniversary of John Perry Barlow's issuing 'A Declaration
of the Independence of Cyberspace,' a response and alternate call to action. Seventeen
years ago today, on February 8, 1996, John Perry Barlow sent out his manifesto
"A Declaration of the Independenceof Cyberspace," a statement of the core belief of many
cyber-libertarians that governments should have no authority on the Internet.
That belief may seem quaint to many of us today, when the separation between
the real and the virtual is growing ever fuzzier. And yet the Declaration
remains a fairly accurate representation of the views of many of the
anti-government voices on the Internet." Read more
U.S. Said To Be Target of Massive Cyber-Espionage Campaign
The National Intelligence Estimate identifies China as the country most aggressively seeking to penetrate the computer systems of American businesses and institutions to gain access to data that could be used for economic gain." Read more
Dr. Watson Will See You Now: IBM Offers Supercomputer Watson Apps in Cancer, Health Insurance
Both applications take advantage of the speed, huge database and language skill the computer demonstrated in defeating the best human “Jeopardy!” players on television two years ago.
Armonk-based IBM said Watson has improved its performance by 240 percent since the “Jeopardy!” win." Read more
Power-Curve Society
Bollier, David. "Power-Curve Society." The Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program, 2013.
From the report: "Power-Curve Society,
written by David Bollier, examines how technological
innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact
resulting from these changes. It addresses the growing concern about the
technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth
disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy. It also
examines cutting-edge innovations in personal data ecosystems that could
potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment. Power-Curve
Society is the Report of the Twenty-First Annual Roundtable on InformationTechnology, a dialogue convened by the Communications and
Society Program." Read more
EU to Order Banks, Energy Firms to Report Cyber Attacks
Almost 15,000 transport companies, 8,000 banks, 4,000 energy firms, and 15,000 hospitals will have to report cyber attacks if the proposals are approved by EU governments and the European Parliament." Read more
Solving Big-Data Bottleneck
From the report: "In a study that represents a potential cultural shift in how
basic science research can be conducted, researchers from Harvard Medical
School, Harvard Business School and London Business School have demonstrated
that a crowdsourcing platform pioneered in the commercial sector can solve a
complex biological problem more quickly than conventional approaches—and at a
fraction of the cost." Read more
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Coming and Going on Facebook
From the article: "Two-thirds of
online American adults (67%) are Facebook users, making Facebook the dominant
social networking site in this country. And new findings from the Pew Research
Center’s Internet & American Life Project indicate there is considerable
fluidity in the Facebook user population:
- 61% of current Facebook users say
that at one time or another in the past they have voluntarily taken a
break from using Facebook for a period of several weeks or more.
- 20% of the online adults who do not
currently use Facebook say they once used the site but no longer do so.
- 8% of online adults who do not currently use Facebook are interested in becoming Facebook users in the future." Read more
Health IT, Feedback Can Raise Quality of Care
Hall, Susan D. "Health IT, Feedback Can Raise Quality of Care." Fierce Health IT, February 6, 2013.
From the article: "Providing feedback loops, as recommended by the Institute of Medicine, was a
core recommendation in the pre-rulemaking report of the Measure Applications
Partnership (MAP).
The public-private partnership, convened by the National Quality Forum to make recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, called feedback the best way to determine whether measurement is being used in the way it was intended.
"Ideally, the exchange of information through feedback loops is systematic, standardized, real-time, two-way, occurs among all levels of the system, and takes best advantage of information technology," the report states." Read more
See also
"MAP Pre-Rulemaking Report: 2013 Recommendations on Measures Under Consideration by HHS." National Quality Forum, February 2013.
Millard, Mike. "MAP Weighs in on Performance Measures." Government Health IT, February 5, 2013.
"NQF-Convened Group Provides Recommendations on Measures for Federal Healthcare Programs." Nationla Quality Forum, February 4, 2013.
The public-private partnership, convened by the National Quality Forum to make recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, called feedback the best way to determine whether measurement is being used in the way it was intended.
"Ideally, the exchange of information through feedback loops is systematic, standardized, real-time, two-way, occurs among all levels of the system, and takes best advantage of information technology," the report states." Read more
See also
"MAP Pre-Rulemaking Report: 2013 Recommendations on Measures Under Consideration by HHS." National Quality Forum, February 2013.
Millard, Mike. "MAP Weighs in on Performance Measures." Government Health IT, February 5, 2013.
"NQF-Convened Group Provides Recommendations on Measures for Federal Healthcare Programs." Nationla Quality Forum, February 4, 2013.
Crowdsourcing Grows Up as Online Workers Unite
From the article: "Crowdsourcing might be big business now but it has never
been fair. The pay is terrible, there is zero regulation and no recourse for
workers if things go wrong. But crowdsourcing's Wild West days of exploitation
could soon be over. Moves to make employers more accountable and give crowd
workers more benefits are helping shift the balance in favour of the employees." Read more
CHIME Presses ONC on Patient Safety
CHIME said it agreed with ONC that, “the accurate and efficient matching of patients to their health information is critical to ensuring patient safety,” and it urged a more focused effort to address patient data matching, saying that, “despite years of development, no clear strategy has emerged to accurately and consistently match patient data.” Read more
Ovum: Big Data Collection Collides with Privacy Concerns
From the article: "Ovum, in a recent survey of about 11,000 people across 11
countries, found that 68 percent said they would use a do-not-track feature if
it was easily available on a search engine. Just 14 percent of respondents said
they believe Internet companies are honest about their use of personal data." Read more
FCC to Congress: U.N.'s ITU Internet Plans 'Must Be Stopped'
The FCC Commissioner ominously warned Congress that what happened at WCIT-12 "ended the era of an international consensus to keep inter-governmental hands off of the Internet in dramatic fashion." Read more
Tags, Blogs, Tweets: Social Media as Science Tool?
Ogden, Lesley Evans. "Tags, Blogs, Tweets: Social Media as Science Tool?" BioScience 63 (2013): 148.
From the article: "Is social media changing the way we do science—even
speeding it up? Preliminary data, and a growing number of cases, suggest that
the answer is yes.
One now-famous example of its growing ubiquity is the
social media storm that followed the publication of a NASA-funded paper in the
journal Science, on 2 December 2010 (doi:10.1126/science.1197258). The
authors of the paper claimed to have discovered a bacterium that could
substitute arsenic in place of phosphate as a key nutrient necessary to support
life.
Rosie Redfield, zoology professor at the University of
British Columbia (UBC), wasn’t buying it, and said so on her blog. Ironically,
this was a communication platform that UBC graduate students chose to parody,
along with Redfield, at their Christmas party. Asking the fake Redfield,
“What’s a blog?” the reply was, “it’s a publication that nobody reads, not even
reviewers.” Their mockery was to be quickly proved wrong." Read more
Generational Differences in Content Generation in Social Media: The Roles of the Gratifications Sought and of Narcissism
From the report: "This study examines the roles of the gratifications sought
and of narcissism in content generation in social media and explores the
generational differences in motivations and in narcissistic personalities when
predicting the usage of Facebook, blogs, and forums. Data were gathered from a
probability sample of 596 social media users through a telephone survey in
2010. Factor analysis results showed that content generation using social media
was satisfying five socio-psychological needs: showing affection, venting
negative feelings, gaining recognition, getting entertainment, and fulfilling
cognitive needs. In particular, people who used social media to meet their
social needs and their need for affection tended to use Facebook and blogs. In
contrast, when users wanted to air out discontent, they often turned to forums.
Results also showed that exhibitionists seemed to use social media to show
affection, express their negative feelings, and achieve recognition. The study
found no generational differences in using Facebook and blogs as a means to
satisfy social needs or the need for affection. However, differences in
patterns of social media usage were found among Baby Boomers with different
narcissistic personalities. The paper includes a discussion of the study’s
limitations and suggestions for future research." Read more
What the Intelligence Community Is Doing With Big Data
From the article: "It’s trying. Armed with billions of tweets, Google (GOOG)
searches, Facebook (FB)
posts, and other publicly available social-media and online data, the Office of
the Director of National Intelligence is sponsoring research projects involving
14 universities in the United States, Europe, and Israel with the goal of
using advanced analytics to predict significant societal events." Read more
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
How the Internet Reinforces Inequality in the Real World
This old idea of paper maps as power brokers offers a good analogy for how we might think today about the increasingly complex maps of digital information on the physical world that exist in the "geoweb." This is where Wikipedia pages and online restaurant reviews and geocoded tweets live, all theoretically floating atop the actual cities and neighborhoods they describe." Read more
The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It
Gelernter, David. "The End of the Web, Search, and Computer as We Know It." Wired, February 1, 2013.
From the article: "People ask what the next web will be like, but there won’t be a
next web.
The space-based web we currently have will gradually be replaced by a
time-based worldstream. It’s already happening, and it all began with the lifestream,
a phenomenon that I (with Eric Freeman) predicted in the 1990s and shared in the pages of Wired
almost exactly 16 years ago.
This lifestream — a heterogeneous, content-searchable, real-time messaging stream — arrived in the form of blog posts and RSS feeds, Twitter and other chatstreams, and Facebook walls and timelines. Its structure represented a shift beyond the “flatland known as the desktop” (where our interfaces ignored the temporal dimension) towards streams, which flow and can therefore serve as a concrete representation of time.
It’s a bit like moving from a desktop to a magic diary: Picture a diary whose pages turn automatically, tracking your life moment to moment … Until you touch it, and then, the page-turning stops. The diary becomes a sort of reference book: a complete and searchable guide to your life. Put it down, and the pages start turning again." Read more
A National Action Plan To Support Consumer Engagement Via E-Health
From the article: "Patient-centered care is considered one pillar of a
high-performing, high-quality health care system. It is a key component of many
efforts to transform care and achieve better population health. Expansion of
health information technology and consumer e-health tools—electronic tools and
services such as secure e-mail messaging between patients and providers, or
mobile health apps—have created new opportunities for individuals to
participate actively in monitoring and directing their health and health care.
The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology in the
Department of Health and Human Services leads the strategy to increase
electronic access to health information, support the development of tools that
enable people to take action with that information, and shift attitudes related
to the traditional roles of patients and providers. In this article we review recent
evidence in support of consumer e-health and present the federal strategy to
promote advances in consumer e-health to increase patient engagement, improve
individual health, and achieve broader health care system improvements." Read more
Your Social Networking Credit Score
From the article: "The buzzword tsunami that is “big data"—a handy way of
describing our vastly improved ability to collect and analyze humongous data
sets—has dwarfed “frictionless sharing” and “cloud computing” combined. As
befits Silicon Valley, “big data” is mostly big hype, but there is one
possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans—and
credit histories—to millions of people who currently lack access to them. But
what price, in terms of privacy and free will (not to mention the exorbitant
interest rates), will these new borrowers have to pay?" Read more
Eric Schmidt, in New Book: China Could Contribute to Fracturing the Internet into Pieces
Schmidt and Cohen write that China is the world’s “most sophisticated and prolific” hacker, according to Gara. Their book reads, ”It’s fair to say we’re already living in an age of state-led cyber war, even if most of us aren’t aware of it.” But their predictions for where that might lead the Internet, according to the Journal’s report, include the dark possibility that it could split apart entirely." Read more
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The Philosophy of Data
From the article: "Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some
of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we
rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore
intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using
statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?....
In sum, the data revolution is giving us wonderful ways to
understand the present and the past. Will it transform our ability to predict
and make decisions about the future? We’ll see." Read more
New Technology Helps Doctors Link a Patient’s Location to Illness and Treatment
Othergeomedicine technologies under development include Health Begins, a social networking platform that seeks to make clinicians more aware of socioeconomic factors that can affect health. The site, now in the testing phase, allows doctors, patients and family members to update entries, such as where to apply for affordable housing or how to contact a legal clinic for reporting unhealthy working conditions. The site also has a section that shows the latest research assessing links between social, economic and environmental factors and health." Read more
Privacy Versus Security
From the report: "Legal
scholarship tends to conflate privacy and security. However, security and
privacy can, and should, be treated as distinct concerns. Privacy discourse
involves difficult normative decisions about competing claims to legitimate
access to, use of, and alteration of information. It is about selecting among
different philosophies, and choosing how various rights and entitlements ought
to be ordered. Security implements those choices – it intermediates between
information and privacy selections. This Article argues separating privacy from
security has important practical consequences. Security failings should be
penalized more readily, and more heavily, than privacy ones, because there are
no competing moral claims to resolve, and because security flaws make all
parties worse off. Currently, security flaws are penalized too rarely, and
privacy ones too readily. The Article closes with a set of policy questions
highlighted by the privacy versus security distinction that deserve further
research." Read more
Monday, February 4, 2013
Data Protection Laws, an Ocean Apart
On this side of the Atlantic, Congress has enacted a patchwork quilt of privacy laws that separately limit the use of Americans’ medical records, credit reports, video rental records and so on. On the other side, the European Union has instituted more of a blanket regulatory system; it has a common directive that gives its citizens certain fundamental rights — like the right to obtain copies of records held about them by companies and institutions — that Americans now lack." Read more
Geeks are the New Guardians of Our Civil Liberties
From the article: "A decade-plus of anthropological fieldwork among hackers and
like-minded geeks has led me to the firm conviction that these people are
building one of the most vibrant civil liberties movements we’ve ever seen. It
is a culture committed to freeing information, insisting on privacy, and
fighting censorship, which in turn propels wide-ranging political activity. In
the last year alone, hackers have been behind some of the most powerful
political currents out there." Read more