Internet Users May Search, Pin, Tweet and Like - But Don’t Know How Their Favorite Sites Turn a Profit

"Internet Users May Search, Pin, Tweet and Like - But Don’t Know How Their Favorite Sites Turn a Profit." The Search Agency, January 9, 2013. 

From the report: "The Search Agency, a global online marketing firm and the largest independent U.S. search marketing agency, today announced wave II results of its 2012 Online User Behavior and Engagement Study, conducted online by Harris Interactive among 2,006 U.S. online adults from August 14-16, 2012. In addition to other findings, the study shows that, while Americans may be tweeting, searching and pinning to their hearts delight, they can’t pinpoint how some of the web’s most popular sites make a dime.

Findings Include:

We Know How to Post, but Not How They Profit
70% of U.S. online adults know how to post on someone’s wall, but only 54% understand how Facebook makes money. Males demonstrated a higher understanding around Facebook’s monetization strategies at 57%, vs. females at 51%.

Men Tweet, Women Pin
More online men know the character length of a tweet (37%) than online women (27%). When it comes to Pinterest, more women know what it means to “pin” something online (48%) than men (42%)." Read more

How Much of the Web Is Archived?

Ainsworth, Scott G., AlSum, Ahmed, SalahEldeen, et al. "How Much of the Web Is Archived?" Unpublished paper available through Cornell University Libraries,  January 6, 2013. 

From the report: "Although the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is the largest and most well-known web archive, there have been a number of public web archives that have emerged in the last several years. With varying resources, audiences and collection development policies, these archives have varying levels of overlap with each other. While individual archives can be measured in terms of number of URIs, number of copies per URI, and intersection with other archives, to date there has been no answer to the question - "How much of the Web is archived?" We study the question by approximating the Web using sample URIs from DMOZ, Delicious, Bitly, and search engine indexes; and, counting the number of copies of the sample URIs exist in various public web archives. Each sample set provides its own bias. The results from our sample sets indicate that range from 35%-90% of the Web has at least one archived copy, 17%-49% has between 2-5 copies, 1%-8% has 6-10 copies, and 8%-63% has more than 10 copies in public web archives. The number of URI copies varies as a function of time, but no more than 31.3% of URIs are archived more than once per month." Read more

Why the UN’s Push to Control the Internet Isn’t Over

Mullin, Joe. "Why the UN’s Push to Control the Internet Isn’t Over." Ars Technica, January 9, 2013.

From the article: "That was seen as a success for the US and its allies, but anyone celebrating the outcome might be doing so too soon.

In fact, several of the companies that sided with the US only ended up in that position because of an overreach on the part of Iran, according to one speaker at a Thursday CES panel. Ambassador David Gross, who was the US representative to the ITU for several years, said that Iran decided to "meddle in a well-cooked document," adding an unusual "human rights" proposal that suggested a human right to access telecommunications networks.

The twist is that this was a situation in which the "human rights" were granted to a government, not to actual humans. The real goal was to strike a blow against sanctions." Read more 

ONC Delves into Patients' Privacy Concerns

Conn, Joseph. "ONC Delves into Patients' Privacy Concerns." Modern Healthcare, January 9, 2013.

From the article: "In considering whether to participate in a health information exchange, patients want to know whether their clinical information will be shared with their insurance company and whether their more sensitive information, in addition to routine patient information, will be included.

They also want to know whether, once they have opted into a health information exchange, they can ever opt back out.

These were the findings of a survey of patients at four healthcare organizations in western New York state who participated in the eConsent Trial Project sponsored by HHS' Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology." Read more

The Optimist’s Timeline

Gates, Bill. "The Optimist’s Timeline." Project Syndicate, December 27, 2012.   

From the article: "Even so, there is one area of technology and global development where reality has tempered my optimism: the idea that cellphones would revolutionize life in developing countries. A decade ago, many people believed that the proliferation of mobile devices in Africa would mean a short leap to digital empowerment. It didn’t. Digital empowerment is a long and ongoing process, and the mere existence of cellular technology does not immediately change how poor people meet their basic needs.

But now, after years of investments, digital empowerment is underway, owing to a confluence of factors, including growing network coverage, more capable devices, and an expanding catalogue of applications. As more people obtain access to better and cheaper digital technology, an inflection point is eventually reached, at which the benefits of providing digitally services like banking and health care clearly outweigh the costs. Companies are then willing to make the investments required to build new systems, and customers are able to accept the transition costs of adopting new behaviors." Read more

Defining Homeland Security: Analysis and Congressional Considerations

Reese, Shawn. "Defining Homeland Security: Analysis and  Congressional Considerations." Congressional Research Service, January 8, 2013. 

From the report: "Varied homeland security definitions and missions may impede the development of a coherent national homeland security strategy, and may hamper the effectiveness of congressional oversight. Definitions and missions are part of strategy development. Policymakers develop strategy by identifying national interests, prioritizing goals to achieve those national interests, and arraying instruments of national power to achieve the national interests. Developing an effective homeland security strategy, however, may be complicated if the key concept of homeland security is not defined and its missions are not aligned and synchronized among different federal entities with homeland security responsibilities." Read more

What It Will Take To Achieve The As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology

Kellerman, Arthur L. and Spencer S. Jones. "What It Will Take To Achieve The As-Yet-Unfulfilled Promises Of Health Information Technology." Health Affairs 32 (2013): 62-68. 

From the article: "A team of RAND Corporation researchers projected in 2005 that rapid adoption of health information technology (IT) could save the United States more than $81 billion annually. Seven years later the empirical data on the technology’s impact on health care efficiency and safety are mixed, and annual health care expenditures in the United States have grown by $800 billion. In our view, the disappointing performance of health IT to date can be largely attributed to several factors: sluggish adoption of health IT systems, coupled with the choice of systems that are neither interoperable nor easy to use; and the failure of health care providers and institutions to reengineer care processes to reap the full benefits of health IT. We believe that the original promise of health IT can be met if the systems are redesigned to address these flaws by creating more-standardized systems that are easier to use, are truly interoperable, and afford patients more access to and control over their health data. Providers must do their part by reengineering care processes to take full advantage of efficiencies offered by health IT, in the context of redesigned payment models that favor value over volume." Read more 

Digital Health Funding Rose 45 Percent in 2012

Huessner, Ki Mae. "Digital Health Funding Rose 45 Percent in 2012." GigaOm, January 7, 2013. 

From the article: "According to health tech accelerator Rock Health, investors poured $1.4 billion into digital health companies last year, which is up 45 percent from 2011. The major areas of interest include healthcare purchasing tools for consumers, personal health tracking, Electronic Medical records and hospital administration." Read more

Towards Distributed Citizen Participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods

Bruns, Axel. "Towards Distributed Citizen Participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods." Journal of e-Democracy and Open Government 4 (2012): 142-159.  

From the report: "This paper examines the rapid and ad hoc development and interactions of participative citizen communities during acute events, using the examples of the 2011 floods in Queensland, Australia, and the global controversy surrounding Wikileaks and its spokesman, Julian Assange. The self-organising community responses to such events which can be observed in these cases bypass or leapfrog, at least temporarily, most organisational or administrative hurdles which may otherwise frustrate the establishment of online communities; they fast-track the processes of community development and structuration. By understanding them as a form of rapid prototyping, e-democracy initiatives can draw important lessons from observing the community activities around such acute events." Read more

The Future of Crowd Work

Kittur, Aniket, Nickerson, Jeffrey V. Bernstein, Michael S., et al. "The Future of Crowd Work." Paper to be presented at the 16th ACM Conference on Computer Supported cooperative Work 2013, Forthcoming.

From the report: "Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation." Read more

Their Apps Track You. Will Congress Track Them?

Singer, Natasha. "Their Apps Track You. Will Congress Track Them?" The New York Times, January 5, 2013.  

From the article: "But now legislators, regulators, advocacy groups and marketers are squaring off over newer technology: smartphones and mobile apps that can continuously record and share people’s precise movements. At issue is whether consumers are unwittingly acquiescing to pervasive tracking just for the sake of having mobile amenities like calendar, game or weather apps…. The bill, approved last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, would also require mobile services to disclose the names of the advertising networks or other third parties with which they share consumers’ locations.

….Yet many marketers say they need to know consumers’ precise locations so they can show relevant mobile ads or coupons at the very moment a person is in or near a store. Informing such users about each and every ad network or analytics company that tracks their locations could hinder that hyperlocal marketing, they say, because it could require a new consent notice to appear every time someone opened an app." Read more 

Copying Common in Electronic Medical Records

Stokes, Trevor. "Copying Common in Electronic Medical Records." Reuters. January 4, 2013.

From the article: "Most doctors copy and paste old, potentially out-of-date information into patients' electronic records, according to a new study looking at a shortcut that some experts fear could lead to miscommunication and medical errors…Using plagiarism-detection software, the researchers analyzed five months' worth of progress notes for 135 patients.

They found that 82 percent of residents' notes and 74 percent of attending physicians' notes included 20 percent or more copied and pasted material from the patients' records." Read more

See also 

Thornton, J. Daryl, Schold, Jesse D., Venkateshaiah, Lokesh and Bradley Lander. "Prevalence of Copied Information by Attendings and Residents in Critical Care Progress Notes." Critical Care Medicine, December 20, 2012. 

The Web’s New Monopolists

Fox, Justin. "The Web’s New Monopolists." The Atlantic, January/February 2013. 

From the article: "Ask Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of the social network Twitter and the mobile-payment start-up Square, what his two companies have in common, and he has a quick answer: “They’re both utilities.” Mark Zuckerberg might agree: he spent years trying to convince people that Facebook is not a social network but a “social utility.”

It’s an intriguing choice of words for such of-the-moment entrepreneurs. Utilities tend to be boring, slow-growing beasts. They also—and this is the more important point—tend to be monopolies that are either regulated heavily by governments or owned outright by them.

Indeed, once they get beyond a certain size, technology companies do become wary of the word. Google has been called a utility by lots of people, but you won’t hear the company’s executives using the term (at least, I couldn’t find any examples). And Zuckerberg, when asked in 2010 whether, as a utility, Facebook ought to be regulated, said he hadn’t meant the word that way at all: “Something that’s cool can fade. But something that’s useful won’t. That’s what I meant by utility.” Read more

Internet Domain Names: Background and Policy Issues

Kruger, Lennard G. "Internet Domain Names: Background and Policy Issues." Congressional Research service, January 3, 2013.  

From the report: "The Internet is often described as a “network of networks” because it is not a single physical entity but, in fact, hundreds of thousands of interconnected networks linking hundreds of millions of computers around the world. Computers connected to the Internet are identified by a unique Internet Protocol (IP) number that designates their specific location, thereby making it possible to send and receive messages and to access information from computers anywhere on the Internet. Domain names were created to provide users with a simple location name, rather than requiring them to use a long list of numbers." Read more

ICT for Development: Solutions Seeking Problems?

Chaudhuri, Anindya. "ICT for Development: Solutions Seeking Problems?" Journal of Information Technology 27 (2012): 326-338. 

From the report: "This paper investigates information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) projects from around the world. It finds that computer and Internet promotion schemes usually fail despite active support, but mobile penetration in even the poorest countries is deepening organically. It argues that mobiles have emotional appeal because talking is a universal psycho-sociological propensity while the other two are principally utilitarian technologies that have to generate returns on investment. The search for killer apps is likely to be fruitless because technological adoption is conditional upon need and absorptive capacity. The paper raises questions about the continuing support for ICT4D among proponents." Read more

Architecting the Future of Social Media

Wood, Lindsay Taylor. "Architecting the Future of Social Media." Social Media Week, January 2, 2013.

From the article: "An information war has erupted around the world. The battle lines are drawn between those governments that regard the free flow of information, and the ability to access it, as a matter of fundamental human rights, and those that regard official control of information as a fundamental sovereign prerogative. The contest is being waged institutionally in organizations like the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and daily in countries like Syria." Read more

Does Peer Production Represent a Radical Break with Capitalism?

Bauwens, Michel. "Does Peer Production Represent a Radical Break with Capitalism?" P2P Foundation, January 3, 2013. 

From the article: “While practically and empirically the P2P mode of production is still under the sway of capitalism and to a great extent dependent on it (buying computers and other materials and services from it and using its infrastructure), its logic radically contradicts that of capital. I described briefly above major aspects of P2P that accord to Marx’s understanding of communism. All these aspects contradict the logic of capital. Here I will show how the logic of P2P profoundly contradicts the capitalist division of labour, because division of labour is the key component of any mode of production. Let me emphasize that in P2P we have a distribution of labour and not a division of labour (Weber, 2004). The P2P modes of cooperation and the distribution of products make micro (within separate production units) and macro (among different units) capitalist divisions of labor superfluous.” Read more

Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data

Klarreich, Erica. "Privacy by the Numbers: A New Approach to Safeguarding Data." Scientific American, December 31, 2012. 

From the article: "A mathematical technique called “differential privacy” gives researchers access to vast repositories of personal data while meeting a high standard for privacy protection… A differentially private data release algorithm allows researchers to ask practically any question about a database of sensitive information and provides answers that have been “blurred” so that they reveal virtually nothing about any individual’s data — not even whether the individual was in the database in the first place." Read more

The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse

Taleb, Nassim N. "The Surprising Truth: Technology Is Aging in Reverse." Wired, December 21, 2012.

From the article: "We’re living in a Black Swan world, but what does this mean for the future of technology? My new book Antifragile argues that technologies, ideas, and theories – anything informational or cultural, as opposed to physical – age in reverse.

We may be trained to think that the new is about to overcome the old, but that’s just an optical illusion. Because the failure rate of the new is much, much higher than the failure rate of the old. When you see a young child and an old adult, you can be confident that the younger will likely survive the elder." Read more

Patients with After-Hours Access To Their Providers Show Lower Emergency Room Use

Fleming, Chris. "Patients with After-Hours Access To Their Providers Show Lower Emergency Room Use." Health Affairs, December 12, 2012. 

From the article: "The first study to use a nationally representative sample to describe after-hours care in the US, released today as a Web First by Health Affairs, demonstrates that emergency room usage is significantly lower when patients have access to after-hours services with their primary care provider.

According to the study by Ann O’Malley of the Center for Studying Health System Change, 30.4 percent of patients with after-hours access to their primary care providers reported emergency room use, compared to 37.7 percent of those lacking after-hours access. Another key finding:  patients with access to after-hours care reported a significantly lower rate of unmet medical need: 6.1 percent versus 13.7 percent of those lacking after-hours access." Read more

Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition.

Lohr, Steve. "Sure, Big Data Is Great. But So Is Intuition." The New York Times, December 29, 2012. 

From the article: "I’ve written about whatis now being called Big Data a fair bit over the years, and I think it’s a powerful tool and an unstoppable trend. But a year-end column, I thought, might be a time for reflection, questions and qualms about this technology.

The quest to draw useful insights from business measurements is nothing new. Big Data is a descendant of Frederick Winslow Taylor’s “scientific management” of more than a century ago. Taylor’s instrument of measurement was the stopwatch, timing and monitoring a worker’s every movement. Taylor and his acolytes used these time-and-motion studies to redesign work for maximum efficiency. The excesses of this approach would become satirical grist for Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” The enthusiasm for quantitative methods has waxed and waned ever since." Read more 

Online Social Science: Can the Web Graduate from Digital Petri Dish to Virtual Laboratory?

Greenemeier, Larry. "Online Social Science: Can the Web Graduate from Digital Petri Dish to Virtual Laboratory?" Scientific American, December 6, 2012. 

From the article: "In many ways the Internet is the ultimate virtual laboratory. Social media and news sites tell the casual observer much about our priorities and interests, whether it's the grave prognosis of the U.S.'s ongoing "fiscal cliff" political negotiations or elation over England's royal pregnancy. Social scientists believe that, beyond such superficial revelations, the Internet can also be a tool for conducting expansive, yet inexpensive research experiments at unprecedented speed." Read more

On Digital Privacy, Congress’ Offer Is This: Nothing

Sanchez, Julian. "On Digital Privacy, Congress’ Offer Is This: Nothing." Cato Institute, January 2, 2013. 

From the article: "It had the makings of a shockingly reasonable legislative bargain: Two outdated federal privacy statutes would be reformed together, removing some unnecessarily stringent restrictions on sharing video records while finally imposing a clear warrant requirement for government searches of e-mail and other private files stored in the “cloud.” Then Congress, perhaps in homage to Darth Vader, decided to alter the deal: A bill weakening the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988 has been sent to the president for his signature, but without the corresponding badly-needed reforms to the ElectronicCommunications Privacy Act of 1986." Read more

E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines

Rainee, Lee, and Maeve Duggan. "E-book Reading Jumps; Print Book Reading Declines." Pew Research Center Internet and American Life Project, December 27, 2012.

From the report: "The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23%. At the same time, the number of those who read printed books in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population ages 16 and older to 67%.

Overall, the number of book readers in late 2012 was 75% of the population ages 16 and older, a small and statistically insignificant decline from 78% in late 2011." Read more

EU Open Data Portal Now In Public Beta

"EU Open Data Portal Now In Public Beta." European Public Sector Information Platform, December 21, 2012.

The European Commission has launched its open data portal, announced last year December, in public beta. While the site is already on-line, the EC has requested to not widely circulate the URL yet. In January 2013 the beta launch will be more widely announced.

The EC data portal, at launch provides access to 5800+ data sets, mostly coming from Eurostat. With this portal the EC intends to lead by example in opening up public sector information pro-actively for free re-use in Europe, as part of the European open data strategy.

The EC portal is for now aimed at publishing the EC's own data, but is at the same time a first step towards a pan-European data portal that will provide access to all underlying national (and regional, local) data portals across the 27 Member States." Read more