David Weinberger's Blog, page 100
January 29, 2012
January 28, 2012
Berkman Buzz
This week's Berkman Buzz
Jonathan Zittrain hosts Computers Gone Wild [link]
Yochai Benkler discusses the Megaupload indictment [link]
Zeynep Tufekci argues that Twitter's new tweet blocking policy is good for free speech [link]
Wayne Marshall explores nationalism and tradition in Congolese hip-hop [link]
Ethan Zuckerman liveblogs the launch of David Weinberger's "Too Big To Know" [link]
Weekly Global Voices: Serbia: The Media War Against Angelina Jolie [link]
EFF explains Twitter's new take-down policy
There's a good explainer by Eva Galperin of Twitter's new policy on censoring tweets within countries that demand it, At BoingBoing, Xeni Jardin points to one particularly relevant fact: this applies to countries whwere Twitter is establishing physical offices.
January 27, 2012
European Parliament has official look into ACTA. He then resigns in disgust.
Kader Arif, the "rapporteur" for ACTA, has quit that role in disgust over the process behind getting the EU to sign onto ACTA. A rapporteur is a person "appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue." However, it appears his investigation of ACTA didn't make him very pleased:
I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament's demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.
As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens' legitimate demands." …
ACTA is what SOPA would be if you believed in global conspiracies writing secret agreements to do roughly the same thing. Except ACTA is real. This is not one of the issues where the Obama administration, which I overall enthusiastically support, is making me real happy.
January 26, 2012
Wanna be President of the Internets?
Well, only kind of. The World Wide Web Foundation is looking for a CEO. Susan Crawford, got some free time? Al Gore, are you busy? Randall Munroe, after all how long does it take you to draw stick figures? Maybe (perish the thought) someone who isn't American?
January 25, 2012
[2b2k] 13 ways the Net is making us smarter
HuffingtonPost has done a very nice job turning a piece I wrote for them ("13 ways the Net is making us smarter") into a photo-illustrated slide show.
States banning municipal wifi.
States are being pushed to pass legislation to prevent cities from offering municipal wifi, in order to preserve the current providers' de facto monopolies. The latest are Georgia and South Carolina, because it would like be um terrible and, er, un-American to let localities experiment and maybe enter into private-public partnerships to speed more even distribution of Net access, or maybe even to view minimal Net access as some sort of public good or, well, do anything that doesn't first of all maximize the profits of some large companies following a policy that has pushed America way down the global list of broadband access in terms of prices and speeds, because you know the Net is just used for porn and games and stuff and we have to PROTECT THE JOB CREATORS, yeah that's it.
January 24, 2012
Digital humanities
Skip Walter's post about his growing acceptance and understanding of the need for digital humanities hits on so many of my intellectual pleasure spots, starting with Russ Ackoff's knowledge network, and including Kate Hayles and Cathy Davidson, and more and more. (Yes, he mentions "Too Big to Know" in passing, but that's irrelevant to my reaction.)
[2b2k] Trails of Trust
Panagiotis Takis Metaxas (at the Berkman Center) and Eni Mustafaraj have written a paper called "trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams" [pdf] about how to support critical thinking about social networking conversations, while maintaining privacy. From the abstract:
When confronted with information that requires fast ac- tion, our system will enable its educated users to evaluate its provenance, its credibility and the independence of the multi- ple sources that may provide this information.
They say the only real hope is to solve the problem within closed streams that provide membership functions because there "it is possible to determine the a priori trustworthiness of a message received," by evaluating the credibility of users on particular topics. They believe this can be done by watching the actions of users. For example, "In general, the more often a user re-posts messages from a sender, the more trusted the sender becomes." And: "A message that has been sent by different, independent users has more trustworthiness than one that has been initiated by a single user."
There's much more in their paper…
[2b2k] An exabyte of genomics data
From a post by Derrick Harris at GigaOm:
A fully sequenced human genome results in about 100GB of raw data, although DNAnexus Founder and CEO Andreas Sundquist told me that volume increases to about 1TB by the time the genome has been analyzed. He also says we're on pace to have 1 million genomes sequenced within the next two years. If that holds true, there will be approximately 1 million terabytes (or 1,000 petabytes, or 1 exabyte) of genome data floating around by 2014.
Why, that's more than the number of books in the Library of Congress times miles to the moon plus the length of all football fields laid end to end!
