For the most part, media-justice advocacy groups present a unified front in support of net neutrality, the concept — which many would like to see enshrined in federal regulation — that says telecom companies shouldn't be able to discriminate against users, content, or applications on the Internet. The telcos shouldn't be able to block controversial stories, or degrade traffic to websites that can't afford to pay more, or dictate the nature of online public debate. Net neutrality, its supporters argue, is nothing less than the civil rights issue of the 21st century. In an awkward ... Read More
Culturomics 2.0 Aims to Predict Future Events
September 15, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last week, shortly after Idea Lobby blogger Emily Badger wrote about "a new R&D project to test tools that would mine publicly available data to predict political and humanitarian crises, disease outbreaks, mass violence and instability," a professor at the University of Illinois published his findings on how a computational analysis of millions of news stories could have predicted the Arab Spring. Kalev H. Leetaru, writing in the online journal First Monday, showed how data mining in the worldwide news archive could have "have forecasted the revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, ... Read More
Spy Agency Seeks Digital Mosaic to Divine Future
September 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Governments have been caught off guard a lot lately: by revolutions, by riots, even by unemployment rates (or, to go back even further, by events like 9/11). In the information age — where there's no limit to publicly available data on everything from political chatter to gas prices — it seems policymakers should be better at predicting major societal shifts and events than at any point in history. Shouldn't all these little pieces of information be telling us something big? Shouldn't they be telling us about where the next mass migration will come from or where the next riot will ... Read More
Crowdfunding Puts Money with Public Interest
August 18, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
After losing their London-based publisher, co-editors Ruby Russell and Katherine Hunt of the grassroots art magazine Teller were forced to look in a new direction for their second issue. Self-funding was out of the question, so the editors launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter to ask the public for help. "It allowed us to pre-sell copies of our magazine and put the full cover price toward production costs, with some people donating larger sums," says Russell. "It's very easy to set up and use, and people responded very generously." With an original funding goal of ... Read More
Analyzing Culture with Google Books: Is It Social Science?
August 7, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
For more stories about all things Google, see the links at the end of this article. Earlier this year, a group of scientists — mostly in mathematics and evolutionary psychology — published an article in Science titled “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” The authors' technique, called “culturomics,” would, they said, “extend the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.” The authors employed a “corpus” of more than 5 million books — 500 billion words — ... Read More
How Google Disrespected Mexican History
July 10, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
In September 2006, Google News launched News Archive Search “to help users quickly and easily search for events, people and ideas over different periods of time.” Google News, in turn, had been launched in September 2002 “to [use] computers to organize the world’s news in real time.” Then, in September 2008 (September must be some sort of talisman in Sunnyvale), Google announced it was expanding the News Archive Search back in time “to make more old newspapers accessible and searchable online.” “History buffs: take note,” Google triumphantly proclaimed. Well, yes, ... Read More
Community Broadband Battles Private Telecom
June 1, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
On May 20, North Carolina adopted a law that will restrict local communities' ability to build their own broadband infrastructure, a long-running priority of regional telecom giant Time Warner Cable, which argued that private companies shouldn't have to compete with public utilities to get you on the Internet. The legislation was deeply controversial and went down to the wire — activist Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig published an open letter to Gov. Bev Perdue begging her to veto the bill in the eleventh hour. She declined. Now the law is the latest obstacle to what was becoming ... Read More
The Government Internet ID Proposal’s Pros and Cons
April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, "Why We Need It" — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion. The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, ... Read More
Better Candidate Websites Provide Democrats Advantage
April 6, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
President Obama kicked off his re-election campaign this week not with a speech or press conference, but via an online video. His choice of medium — and the news that he will hold a “virtual town hall” from Facebook headquarters later this month — reflected the increasing importance of the Internet as a campaign tool. As Obama showed in 2008, candidate websites are a valuable way to spread information, raise money and mobilize supporters. But to fulfill these functions, they need to be well designed and user friendly. Newly published research suggests that, if they want to be ... Read More
Cybercop Fights Organized Internet Crime
March 14, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
It was August 2005, and Steve Santorelli had recently left Scotland Yard to join Microsoft's Internet Crimes Investigation Team. He was camping in the forest near Redmond, Wash., with some of his team members, trying to escape their technology-dominated existence, when a call came in from the Microsoft lab. Other team members had just cracked the code to the notorious Zotob computer virus. "At the campsite, I overheard one of the guys mention the nickname C0der, and uniquely spelled C-Zero-D-E-R, being identified as the author of this virus. I almost choked on my coffee," Santorelli says. ... Read More
