Group items tagged

What's to stop an online mass of anonymous but connected people from suddenly turning into a mean mob, just like masses of people have time and time again in the history of every human culture? It's amazing that details in the design of online software can bring out such varied potentials in human behavior. It's time to think about that power on a moral basis.

In this research, Durkheim's theory of the universalization of religious beliefs is extended to analyze the occurrence of religious rituals. Drawing upon Schutz's phenomenology of social relations, we amplify theoretically the Durkheimian perspective and suggest that the universalization process is stimulated by an increase in anonymity (as opposed to intimacy) in society. Structural factors consistent with anonymity--i.e., increasing population density, political and economic differentiation, and monetary exchange--are hypothesized to influence the universalization of ritual occurrence

In a rather wet community, members easily specify other members. This is effective for managing memberships and changing knowledge from tacit to formal. In a rather dry community, members barely identify with other members at all. This method is suitable for the formal-to-tacit phase of knowledge creation. Finally, it is discussed how social intelligence should be designed and what features are needed to support knowledge-creating communities.

We are Anonymous.Recently, it has come to our attention that several online retailers have decided to ride the coattails of our sudden popularity by offering aparrel and other swag bearing our image. This is extremely offensive to Anonymous, as the very idea of wearing an article that identifies one as anonymous flies directly into the face of who exactly we are. We are anonymous. We cook your meals. We haul your trash. We connect your calls. We drive your ambulances and we guard you while you sleep. We put you under the knife to remove your bloated, infected spleen. We deliver your mail. We relay the evening news from the comfort of your television set, and we work dilligently to print it to give you something to read with your coffee and croissants the next morning. We are everyone and we are no one. We do not need to advertise our identity.Because our image is not a copyright, we can not stop anyone from selling items bearing it. However, we can suggest that you do not purchase these items. Wearing anything that tells the world you are anonymous compromises the veil of protection being anonymous provides, as well as cancelling out your anonymity. Wearing a t-shirt is like wearing a crosshair. You become an easy target for the Cult of $cientology and it puts you at serious risk of harm by its operatives. Use good judgement. Do not compromise yourself and your fellow Anonymous. Do not reveal your personal information to an online retailer that could possibly be a front for data mining operations by the cult.Remain Anonymous. Remain vigilant.We are Anonymous.We are LegionWe do not forgive.We do not forget.And we are certainly not some Xenu-forsaken fashion statement!

What it shows is that, as a function of the people a Facebook user actively communicate with, you are passively engaging with between 2 and 2.5 times more people in their network. I’m sure many people have had this feeling, but these data make this effect more transparent.

The stark contrast between reciprocal and passive networks shows the effect of technologies such as News Feed. If these people were required to talk on the phone to each other, we might see something like the reciprocal network, where everyone is connected to a small number of individuals. Moving to an environment where everyone is passively engaged with each other, some event, such as a new baby or engagement can propagate very quickly through this highly connected network.

All Friends: the largest representation of a person’s network is the set of all people they have verified as friends. Reciprocal Communication: as a measure of a sort of core network, we counted the number of people with whom a person had had reciprocal communications, or an active exchange of information between two parties. One-way Communication: the total set of people with whom a person has communicated. Maintained Relationships: to measure engagement, we took the set of people for whom a user had clicked on a News Feed story or visited their profile more than twice.

So searching through vast amounts of anonymized data, Contractor and his collaborators found that teens had online friendships that were disproportionately with people in their immediate geographic area -- likely with people they already knew. "That finding really went against a lot of the media hype," Contractor said. "People were worried about helpless teenagers talking with strangers, but that is not what we found. This is the first time this has been based on solid evidence." Teenagers also tended to be friends with the friends of their friends, not with people who weren't part of their network already, the researchers found.

TextAnalyst processes textual data through what is termed "natural language text analysis." Using linguistic rules and "artificial neural network technology," the program mimics human cognitive analytical processes. It begins by processing each document as a sequence of symbols, generating a hierarchical semantic network structure based on the frequency of terms and the relationships between them. After analyzing the document, each term (or theme) within the network is assigned an individual statistical weight (range 0-100) relative to its importance within the entire text. Additionally, the relationships between terms are also assigned a statistical weight, in effect highlighting the strength of thematic associations. TextAnalyst then engages in the process of renormalization - adjusting the statistical weight of each term based on its relationship to others. The renormalized values are termed "semantic weights" and can be arranged into a semantic network. High semantic weights are indicative of a term or theme having considerable significance within the overall text. Inter-item weights, also presented in the figures to follow, suggest significant association between text themes.

TextAnalyst processes textual data through what is termed "natural language text analysis." Using linguistic rules and "artificial neural network technology," the program mimics human cognitive analytical processes. It begins by processing each document as a sequence of symbols, generating a hierarchical semantic network structure based on the frequency of terms and the relationships between them. After analyzing the document, each term (or theme) within the network is assigned an individual statistical weight (range 0-100) relative to its importance within the entire text. Additionally, the relationships between terms are also assigned a statistical weight, in effect highlighting the strength of thematic associations. TextAnalyst then engages in the process of renormalization - adjusting the statistical weight of each term based on its relationship to others. The renormalized values are termed "semantic weights" and can be arranged into a semantic network. High semantic weights are indicative of a term or theme having considerable significance within the overall text. Inter-item weights, also presented in the figures to follow, suggest significant association between text themes.

The Cairo News Company, which provided satellite services and equipment for Al Jazeera, the BBC and CNN, was raided by police after it transmitted footage of the food riots.

But new media applications were changing the rules. This was demonstrated by the arrest of a journalism student from Berkeley named James Karl Buck, who was detained along with his Egyptian interpreter as he photographed a street protest. Buck used the Twitter application on his cell phone to send a snapshot of himself and the text message “arrested” to a list serve of his contacts. His friends used the message to prompt intervention from Berkeley and the U.S. consulate. Buck was soon able to Twitter the word “free,” and mounted an online campaign to release his interpreter.

police finally located him and tortured him for his Facebook password and names of the other group members (the vast majority of which he didn’t know).

The Grid evolved from the early desire to connect supercomputers into "metacomputers" that could be remotely controlled. The word "grid" was borrowed from the electricity grid, to imply that any compatible device could be plugged in anywhere on the Grid and be guaranteed a certain level of resources, regardless of where those resources might come from.

As with the Web, the initial impetus for a grid came from the scientific community, specifically high-energy physics, which needed extra resources to manage and analyze the huge amounts of data being collected.