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ankityng

Rajasthan Private Investment - 0 views

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    know more about Rajasthan Private Investment, Take advantage of the Rajasthan government's industry-friendly policy, leading firms like Honda, Eicher-Polaris and Ambuja Cements have made huge investments.
scross

German spy chief threatens Wikileaks - Wikileaks - 0 views

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    The head of the BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), Germany's equivalent to the CIA, has threatened Wikileaks with "immediate criminal prosecution" if it does not remove all "files or reports related to the BND".
Mike Wesch

The WELL: Bruce Sterling: State of the World, 2009 - 0 views

  • I have to love a guy who talks about a "collapse gap." He's got a blog called "ClubOrlov" at http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/, and in his intro to a guest post on December 23, he says " I called it as I saw it, and, unfortunately, I seem to have called it correctly. The US is collapsing before our eyes. Stage 1 collapse is very advanced now; stages 2 and 3 are picking up momentum."
  • So that leaves the Americans -- the global wealthy are clinging to 'em like a drunk to a lamppost.
  • I notice that John Robb, one of my favorite prophets of doom, has formed some tacit New Urbanist alliance with James Howard Kunstler, also one of my favorite prophets of doom.
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  • In my futurist book TOMORROW NOW I was speculating that there might be a post-national global new order arising in cities. Cities as laboratories of the post-Westphalian order.
  • I was on a call recently with a business that produces "resilient cities" planning, database-intensive digital planning.
  • if we allow ourselves to buy into the fragmentation of postmodernity, where positionality, diversity and ennui rule the day, we lose sight that there are big, tangible players who have the power to behave in ways with their political clout, capital, manufacturing and commerce that are either earth-friendly or not earth-friendly.
  • Instead, I hope we will approach a critical mass in the populace where we persistently insist––politically, economically, spiritually––that our business and government leaders adopt behaviors that embrace a new global consciousness
  • The same goes for Americans trying to rebel against Wall Street. There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so fat and stupid.
  • his is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that. Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media.
  • I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years.
  • This is a frank recognition of the stakes. It's aimed at the adults in the room.
  • People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about.
  • When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.
Mike Wesch

'Online Social Networking on Campus' :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source f... - 0 views

  • Facebook, for example, is understood by students as “real” with a complex web of rules that guide playful misrepresentation, for example.
  • In our study, it was evident that student use of Facebook was governed by the degree to which students felt that they controlled self-presentation or digital agency
  • A code of Facebook ethics for faculty currently exists on the site and I would recommend that faculty review it.
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  • I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.
  • There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends. Facebook provides the Groups feature, but I recommend building your own application or choosing an application provider like ourselves. Applications allow users to interact with one another outside of being Facebook Friends. In our app, Instructors can send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends.
  • As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.
Scott Girard

Judge orders Web site to unmask anonymous posters in libel case - 0 views

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    Judge wants to pursue libel case against anonymous posters after they bombard the story with 25,000+ comments - many of which vulgar and defamitory
Adam Bohannon

SLumming » Almost a Year: Education (in SL) - 0 views

  • I believe that any college or university which accepts US federal dollars and requires students to use second life as a classroom space is in violation of regulation 508 because SL is not accessible to individuals who are blind.
  • The creation of an inaccessible school is a de facto violation of US laws governing accessibility including IDEA, and regulations 504 and 508.
  • The much bruited installation of “voice chat” as accessibility option is merely an indication of how very little the educational establishment actually understands the issue of accessibility.
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  • Second, the main instantiation of educational activity in SL seems to be the recreation of the classroom in virtual space.
  • Third, efforts to introduce games and problem-based instruction as educational strategies have focused on adding a “game layer” on top of the SL environment rather than using the environment itself as a game.
  • I’ll be anxious to see how long it takes the educational community to realize that SL affords capabilities that transcend and exceed the capabilities of the classroom.
  • Fourth, my sense is that educators are generally tourists — outsiders looking in, just visiting — in the environment.
  • Few hold jobs. Comparatively few even “get off the island.” This is especially true of those educators who participate through the auspices of a private island. They’re very busy controlling the environment to suit their own purposes without really taking the time to understand the culture and environment. It’s no wonder they’re unable to recognized the inherent value of the space.
  • Fifth, everybody is interested in the space as an educational environment and almost nobody is looking at it as a learning environment.
  • They still think that there’s a direct correlation between teaching and learning in RL as well. That bias has been brought in world.
  • Conclusion: Teachers want to use the space. Most of them want to use it for the wrong reasons. Many don’t have a clue what it means to be “in the world” in any real sense, instead focusing on imposing RL constraints on SL constructs — even when those constraints are irrelevant.
Adam Bohannon

BBC NEWS | Americas | Pentagon bans Google map-makers - 0 views

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    The US defence department has banned the giant internet search engine Google from filming inside and making detailed studies of US military bases.
scross

Wikileaks - Wikileaks - 0 views

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    wikileaks website. From the page: "Disclosed documents are classified, censored or otherwise opaque to the public record. We rely on readers to alert their communities and press to the revelations here. Go to it!"
Mike Wesch

Being Real - by Judith Donath - 0 views

  • This chapter will address the problem of teleidentity: how do we - or do we - "know" another person whom we have encountered in a mediated environment?
  • Knowing something about a person's social identity is fundamental for knowing how to act toward them, for the complex rules of social conduct that govern our behavior toward each other cannot function in the absence of information about the other
  • When we first meet someone, we perceive only a few details about them: perhaps their appearance, a few words they utter, the context in which we meet them. Yet our impression of them is much deeper. As George Simmel wrote in his influential 1908 article How is Society Possible? we do not see merely the few details we have actually observed, but "just as we compensate for a blind spot in our field of vision so that we are no longer aware of it, so a fragmentary structure is transformed... into the completeness of an individuality."
Mike Wesch

Participative Pedagogy for a Literacy of Literacies - Freesouls - 0 views

  • Does knowing something about the way technical architecture influences behavior mean that we can put that knowledge to use?
  • Can inhumane or dehumanizing effects of digital socializing be mitigated or eliminated by better media design?
  • in Coase's Penguin,[7] and then in The Wealth of Networks,[8] Benkler contributed to important theoretical foundations for a new way of thinking about online activity−"commons based peer production," technically made possible by a billion PCs and Internet connections−as a new form of organizing economic production, together with the market and the firm. If Benkler is right, the new story about how humans get things done includes an important corollary−if tools like the PC and the Internet make it easy enough, people are willing to work together for non-market incentives to create software, encyclopedias and archives of public domain literature.
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  • So much of what we take for granted as part of daily life online, from the BIND software that makes domain names work, to the Apache webserver that powers a sizable chunk of the world's websites, to the cheap Linux servers that Google stacks into its global datacloud, was created by volunteers who gave their creations away to make possible something larger−the Web as we know it.
  • Is it possible to understand exactly what it is about the web that makes Wikipedia, Linux, FightAIDS@Home, the Gutenberg Project and Creative Commons possible? And if so, can this theoretical knowledge be put to practical use?
  • "We must now turn our attention to building systems that support human sociality."
  • We must develop a participative pedagogy, assisted by digital media and networked publics, that focuses on catalyzing, inspiring, nourishing, facilitating, and guiding literacies essential to individual and collective life.
  • to humanize the use of instruments that might otherwise enable commodification, mechanization and dehumanization
  • By literacy, I mean, following on Neil Postman and others, the set of skills that enable individuals to encode and decode knowledge and power via speech, writing, printing and collective action, and which, when learned, introduce the individual to a community.
  • Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible.
  • If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.
  • Like the early days of print, radio, and television, the present structure of the participatory media regime−the political, economic, social and cultural institutions that constrain and empower the way the new medium can be used, and which impose structures on flows of information and capital−is still unsettled. As legislative and regulatory battles, business competition, and social institutions vie to control the new regime, a potentially decisive and presently unknown variable is the degree and kind of public participation. Because the unique power of the new media regime is precisely its participatory potential, the number of people who participate in using it during its formative years, and the skill with which they attempt to take advantage of this potential, is particularly salient.
Kevin Champion

Kevin Kelly -- The Technium - 0 views

  • In the case of the One Machine we should look for evidence of self-governance at the level of the greater cloud rather than at the component chip level. A very common cloud-level phenomenon is a DDoS attack. In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack a vast hidden network of computers under the control of a master computer are awakened from their ordinary tasks and secretly assigned to "ping" (call) a particular target computer in mass in order to overwhelm it and take it offline. Some of these networks (called bot nets) may reach a million unsuspecting computers, so the effect of this distributed attack is quite substantial. From the individual level it is hard to detect the net, to pin down its command, and to stop it. DDoS attacks are so massive that they can disrupt traffic flows outside of the targeted routers - a consequence we might expect from an superorganism level event.
  • Unsurprisingly the vast flows of bits in the global internet exhibit periodic rhythms. Most of these are diurnal, and resemble a heartbeat. But perturbations of internet bit flows caused by massive traffic congestion can also be seen. Analysis of these "abnormal" events show great similarity to abnormal heart beats. They deviate from an "at rest" rhythms the same way that fluctuations of a diseased heart deviated from a healthy heart beat. Prediction: The One Machine has a low order of autonomy at present. If the superorganism hypothesis is correct in the next decade we should detect increased scale-invariant phenomenon, more cases of stabilizing feedback loops, and a more autonomous traffic management system.
  • 3) Perhaps 4chan is its face? Perhaps Anonymous speaks for the ii? Memes drift up out of the morass of /b/tards into the world, seemingly without a concrete source. “I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER” may be the global intelligence saying “hi”… or perhaps more poetically, babbling like a baby. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564928060441097.html?mod=rss_E-Commerce/Media
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    Kevin Kelly is an amazing theorist about technology and here outlines the potential of it creating a global superorganism. Section II about autonomy is very interesting in context and a commenter suggests that perhaps Anonymous is the emerging face of this autonomous superorganism. Very intriguining indeed, but do you buy it?
Mike Wesch

The Postmodern Condition by Jean-Francois Lyotard. 1979 - 0 views

  • The nature of knowledge cannot survive unchanged within this context of general transformation.
  • Along with the hegemony of computers comes a certain logic, and therefore a certain set of prescriptions determining which statements are accepted as “knowledge” statements.
  • thorough exteriorisation of knowledge with respect to the “knower,”
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  • will one day fight for control of information
  • he form of value
  • Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold
  • Wittgenstein, taking up the study of language again from scratch, focuses his attention on the effects of different modes of discourse; he calls the various types of utterances he identifies along the way (a few of which I have listed) language games.
  • especially if it is to undergo an exteriorisation with respect to the “knower” and an alienation from its user even greater than has previously been the case
  • revealing that knowledge and power are simply two sides of the same question: who decides what knowledge is, and who knows what needs to be decided? In the computer age, the question of knowledge is now more than ever a question of government.
  • New legal issues will be raised, and with them the question: “who will know?”
  • the observable social bond is composed of language “moves.”
  • One can decide that the principal role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society, and act in accordance with that decision, only if one has already decided that society is a giant machine.
  • For brevity’s sake, suffice it to say that functions of regulation, and therefore of reproduction, are being and will be further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines. Increasingly, the central question is becoming who will have access to the information these machines must have in storage to guarantee that the right decisions are made. Access to data is, and will continue to be, the prerogative of experts of all stripes. The ruling class is and will continue to be the class of decision makers. Even now it is no longer composed of the traditional political class, but of a composite layer of corporate leaders, high-level administrators, and the heads of the major professional, labor, political, and religious organisations.
  • This breaking up of the grand Narratives (discussed below, sections 9 and 10) leads to what some authors analyse in terms of the dissolution of the social bond and the disintegration of social aggregates into a mass of individual atoms thrown into the absurdity of Brownian motion.
  • It would be superficial to reduce its significance to the traditional alternative between manipulatory speech and the unilateral transmission of messages on the one hand, and free expression and dialogue on the other.
  • What is needed if we are to understand social relations in this manner, on whatever scale we choose, is not only a theory of communication, but a theory of games which accepts agonistics as a founding principle.
  • Rather, the limits are themselves the stakes and provisional results of language strategies, within the institution and without.
  • This, I think, is the appropriate approach to contemporary institutions of knowledge.
Adam Bohannon

Hearing on the "Digital Future of the United States: Part I -- The Future of the World ... - 0 views

  • Though I was privileged to lead the effort that gave rise to the Web in the mid-1990s, it has long passed the point of being something designed by a single person or even a single organization. It has become a public resource upon which many individuals, communities, companies and governments depend. And, from its beginning, it is a medium that has been created and sustained by the cooperative efforts of people all over the world.
  • The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails.... The Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation.
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