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
Showing posts with label point of view. Show all posts
Showing posts with label point of view. Show all posts
Thursday, February 14, 2013
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
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
Patient Portal Explosion Has Major Health Care Implications
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
Thursday, February 7, 2013
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
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
Monday, February 4, 2013
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
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Power and the Internet
From the article: "All disruptive technologies upset traditional power
balances, and the Internet is no exception. The standard story is that it
empowers the powerless, but that's only half the story. The Internet empowers
everyone. Powerful institutions might be slow to make use of that new power,
but since they are powerful, they can use it more effectively. Governments and
corporations have woken up to the fact that not only can they use the Internet,
they can control it for their interests. Unless we start deliberately debating
the future we want to live in, and information technology in enabling that
world, we will end up with an Internet that benefits existing power structures
and not society in general." Read more
U.S. Kids Need Computer-Science Education
By 2018, there will be nearly three times as many job openings requiring computer science knowledge than qualified applicants. This goes well beyond just becoming a professional programmer -- learning computer science can teach problem solving skills, new ways of breaking down complex scenarios, and a means to build something tangible in our software-driven age." Read more
Who Owns, Controls Social Media Activity?
From the article: "Now that the use
of social media is part of the TV newsroom norm, the industry is wrestling with
the next wave of issues associated with the medium — hashing out matters ranging
from who owns on-air personalities’ Facebook accounts to delineating between
professional and personal tweets.
Individuals on
all sides of the equation, from station group owners to newsroom staffers, are
pushing to add more structure to the use of social media both on and off the
job, primarily so the practice doesn’t come back to bite them, industry
watchers say.
The lack of
industry wide standards regulating social media practices also is starting to
create unexpected problems, particularly for anchors and reporters who, to some
degree, are winging it." Read more
Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Protecting Online Freedom as the Internet Turns 30
It’s during anniversaries like these that we have a chance to take stock of this remarkable network and the people who make it what it is.
As the Internet enters its middle years, we users can no longer take it for granted. It’s more than a cloud. It’s people, technology and physical infrastructure. As with any infrastructure, the Internet needs protection and maintenance to survive; otherwise the wires and signals that send digital communications will cease to function. The online community also needs protections — to prevent our ideas from being blocked, our identities from being hijacked and our wallets from being picked." Read more
What Google's Transparency Report Doesn't Tell Us
The company's latest report, released on Wednesday, shows that the U.S. government again led other nations in submitting the most requests for user data with Google. In the second half of 2012, the U.S. put in 8,438 requests for Internet user data, up 6% from the 7,979 requests it placed in the first six months of the year.
Between 2011 and 2012, U.S. data requests from Google increased by more than 30%....
Google's transparency reports do not include requests for user data made by the government under the U.S. Patriot Act, the Foreign Intelligence SurveillanceAmendment Act or through the use of National Security Letters (NSLs). Most of the requests made via these statutes are tied to national security issues and often compel providers to disclose far more data than ECPA subpoenas and court orders permit." Read more
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Big Data and Cloud Computing Empower Smart Machines to Do Human Work, Take Human Jobs
From the article: "From giant corporations to university libraries to start-up
businesses, employers are using rapidly improving technology to do tasks that
humans used to do. That means millions of workers are caught in a competition
they can’t win against machines that keep getting more powerful, cheaper and easier
to use." Read more
Airbnb And The Unstoppable Rise Of The Share Economy
From the article: "The “gig economy,” the plethora of microjobs fueled by
online marketplaces offering and filling an array of paid errands and office
chores, has been well-documented, and sites like TaskRabbit, Execand Amazon’s Mechanical Turk continue
to grow apace. What Larson finds himself in, however, is something
lesser-noticed and potentially far more disruptive–a share economy , where
asset owners use digital clearinghouses to capitalize the unused capacity of
things they already have, and consumers rent from their peers rather than rent
or buy from a company." Read more