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
Tuesday, January 8, 2013
The Future of Crowd Work
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.
See also
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
Monday, January 7, 2013
The Web’s New Monopolists
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
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?
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
Thursday, January 3, 2013
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?
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
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
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
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.
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?
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
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
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
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
Internet Use in Households and by Individuals in 2012
From the report: "The percentage of individuals in the EU who used the internet in 2012 was 73
%. About one third of individuals used the internet on mobile devices away from
home or work. There were significant differences in mobile internet usage
between countries. The shares for individuals who used portable computers or
handheld devices through a mobile phone network or wireless connection away
from home or work were above 50 % in six Member States: Denmark, Ireland,
Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. The shares were below 20 % in
five Member States: Bulgaria, Italy, Hungary, Lithuania and Romania.
The proportion of households in the EU with access to the internet was 76 %
in 2012, an increase of 6 percentage points compared with 2010. Broadband
access enables higher speed when browsing and performing activities. It has now
reached a level close to saturation among households with internet access. In
the EU27, 72 % of households have access to broadband at home, an increase of
11 percentage points compared with 2010." Read more
The Protection of Classified Information: The Legal Framework
From the report: "This report provides an overview of the relationship between
executive and legislative authority over national security information, and
summarizes the current laws that form the legal framework protecting classified
information, including current executive orders and some agency regulations
pertaining to the handling of unauthorized disclosures of classified
information by government officers and employees. The report also summarizes
criminal laws that pertain specifically to the unauthorized disclosure of
classified information, as well as civil and administrative penalties. Finally,
the report describes some recent developments in executive branch security
policies and legislation currently before Congress (S. 3454)." Read more
Attention Rivalry among Online Platforms and Its Implications for Antitrust Analysis
From the report: "Online
attention rivals provide products and features to obtain the attention of
consumers and sell some of that attention, through other products and services,
to merchants, developers and others who value it. The multi-sided business of
seeking and providing attention is fluid with rivalries crossing boundaries
defined by the features of the products and services. It is also dynamic.
Rivals introduce new products and services, some involving drastic innovation,
frequently. Online attention rivals impose competitive constraints on each
other. Product differentiation tempers the significance of these constraints in
particular situations. But the relevant differentiation mainly involves aspects
of the attention that is procured and sold rather than, necessarily, particular
features of the products and services used for acquiring and delivering that
attention. Antitrust analysis should consider these competitive constraints in
evaluating market definition, market power, and the potential for anticompetitive
effects. Most importantly, antitrust analysis should focus on competition for
seeking and providing attention rather than the particular products and
services used for securing and delivering this attention. The existence of
competition among attention rivals does not imply that antitrust should reduce
the vigor with which it examines mergers and exclusionary practices among these
platforms. It just needs to look for problems in the right places." Read more
Addressing the Broadband Demand Gap: Drivers and Public Policies
From the report: "The
debate about the digital divide in the field of Internet
use and broadband has, in large part, been generated around statistics of
households that own a computer and have purchased a broadband subscription (in
other words, service penetration). As a result, the political discussion and
public dialogue have focused until now on the need to increase adoption based
on wider coverage of telecommunications networks. The underlying premise of
this statement is that if the problems that delay infrastructure deployment
were addressed, the challenge of the digital divide would be overcome. Without
denying that there is some causal relationship between investment and adoption,
it is important to note that one of the key variables that explains the digital
divide is located on the demand side, rather than on the supply side. The
purpose of this paper is to analyze the divide from this perspective in
industrialized countries and compare it with a similar phenomenon in Latin
America." Read more
Rules of Crowdsourcing: Models, Issues, and Systems of Control
From the report: "In
this paper, we first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of
crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web
technologies. We then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing websites using
content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on our
analysis, we develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the
empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. We also
discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial
control systems." Read more
Health-Care Sector Vulnerable to Hackers, Researchers Say
From the article: "As the health-care industry rushed onto the Internet in
search of efficiencies and improved care in recent years, it has exposed a wide
array of vulnerable hospital computers and medical devices to hacking,
according to documents and interviews." Read more
Marking the Birth of the Modern-Day Internet
"Marking the Birth of the Modern-Day Internet." Google Blog, January 1, 2013.
From the article: "Today is the 30th birthday of the modern-day Internet. Five years ago we marked the occasion with a doodle. This year we invited Vint Cerf to tell the story. Vint is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet for his contributions to shaping the Internet’s architecture, including co-designing the TCP/IP protocol. Today he works with Google to promote and protect the Internet." Read more
From the article: "Today is the 30th birthday of the modern-day Internet. Five years ago we marked the occasion with a doodle. This year we invited Vint Cerf to tell the story. Vint is widely regarded as one of the fathers of the Internet for his contributions to shaping the Internet’s architecture, including co-designing the TCP/IP protocol. Today he works with Google to promote and protect the Internet." Read more
Viewpoint: The Government Would Like to Keep Reading Your E-Mail
From the article: "There have long been calls on Congress to upgrade e-mail
privacy, but it still has not — and recently, it let us down once again. This
failure to act is not the usual Washington inertia or gridlock. It is because
there are a lot of people in government who like the idea of being able to read
citizens’ private e-mail. And Internet users — who have gotten good at pushing
back against Facebook over privacy issues — have not been putting pressure on
Congress to strengthen e-mail privacy." Read more