For the last decade we have been researching these issues, and much of that work is represented and described here. Most recently, we have undertaken a large-scale research project designed to assess people's understandings of credibility across the wide range of digital information resources available today, including new and emerging forms. Through this work our goal is to learn more about how people find and use online information that they believe to be credible, and to refine and develop appropriate theories of credibility assessment in the contemporary media environment. What we learn in this research will help to advance social science, improve how we educate people to think critically, and contribute to discussions of public policy development.

After two years of number-crunching in his cluttered office at UC San Diego, Hirsch had it—an invention important enough to warrant publication in the (very prestigious) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In his 2005 article, Hirsch introduced the h-index (named after himself, of course). The key was focusing not on where you published but on how many times other researchers cited your work. In practice, you take all the papers you've published and rank them by how many times each has been cited. Say paper number one has been cited 10,000 times. Paper number two, 8,000 cites. Paper number 32 has 33 citations, but number 33 has received just 28. You've published 32 papers with more than 32 citations—your h-index is 32. Or to put it more technically, the h-index is the number n of a researcher's papers that have been cited by other papers at least n times. High numbers = important science = important scientist.

The Web of Knowledge now comprises 700 million cited references from 23,000 journals published since 1804. It's used by 20 million researchers in nearly 100 countries. Anyone—scientist, dean, lab director—can sort the entries and tell someone's fortune. Nothing approaches it for breadth and longevity. Though the Journal Impact Factor has competitors, it remains the gold standard. "You may not like the database, but it has not been replaced," Garfield says.

The SoMo experience begins with tools like GPS that can identify where we are and where we are going in real time. GPS is further enhanced through the marking of actual physical locations -- geotagging. Geotagging can include everything from "soundprints" to video markers, and the tagging of locally relevant reviews and news. GeoGraffiti, for example, allows mobile phone users to record a message tied to a specific place that is later retrievable by anyone who finds themselves near the same location. Geotaggers can leave a virtual "Kilgore was here" tag at any place, freezing in time and making publicly available their location-specific activities, interactions and thoughts. Mobile social networking is also coming on strong with applications like Foursquare and Britekite. Mobile phone users can discover each other, both friends and strangers, via profiles they make available at a particular location. Such applications are good for networking on the fly and immediately finding out if your friends are nearby at a given time.

There's a lot of crime data. For almost every reported crime, there's a paper or digital record of it somewhere, which means hundreds of thousands of data points - number of thefts, break-ins, assaults, and homicides as well as where and when the incidents occurred. With all this data it's no surprise that the NYPD (and more recently, the LAPD) took a liking to COMPSTAT, an accountability management system driven by data. While a lot of this crime data is kept confidential to respect people's privacy, there's still plenty of publicly available records. Here we take a look at twenty visualization examples that explore this data.

You could spend this summer working on your killer tan... or you could use the downtime to get heads up on the thousands of other grads competing for journalism jobs. Use this checklist to improve your journalism skills and set yourself apart from the pack:

Christine Peterson, VP of the Foresight Institute, coined the term “open source” in the late 1990s. She now proposes that this concept of peer-based collaboration and sharing can be applied to another emerging technology – sensors.   See Also h+ Magazine Current Issue Search (and Destroy) Engines Not So Quiet on the Cyber Front Hacking The Economy “The intent of the project is to take advantage of advances in sensing to improve both security and the environment, while preserving — even strengthening — privacy, freedom, and civil liberties,” says Peterson in a recent press release. h+ Magazine spoke with Ms. Peterson about this open-source style project, known as the Open Source Sensing initiative.

n noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide.

In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis: the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter]; the use of a completely new style of communication; the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists; a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience. All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well. It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too. This shouldn't be read as an indictment of social networking technologies in general, or of Twitter in particular. As I said at the outset, I'm thrilled at how critical this technology has been to the viability and potential success of the pro-democracy demonstrations. As the cat-and-mouse game around proxy servers further suggests, the only way for a state to entirely cut off the use of these kinds of tools is to kill its own information networks, blinding itself and effectively removing itself from the global economy. What I'm arguing, however, is that we shouldn't see the positive political successes of emerging social tools as being the sole model. We should be aware that, as these tools proliferate, they will inevitably be used for far more deadly goals.

As Web-enabled smartphones have become standard on the belts and in the totes of executives, people in meetings are increasingly caving in to temptation to check e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, even (shhh!) ESPN.com. But a spirited debate about etiquette has broken out. Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril.

Despite resistance, the etiquette debate seems to be tilting in the favor of smartphone use, many executives said. Managing directors do it. Summer associates do it. It spans gender and generation, private and public sectors.

Still, the practice retains the potential to annoy.

Hands-free legislation leads people to believe that it’s safe (or at least safer) to drive while talking on a cell phone with the aid of a hands-free device, reports Governing. Well, it’s not. Governing points to a 2006 study that found no difference between drivers talking on hand-held phones and those talking on hands-free devices—as soon as people started talking, they became more likely to rear end another car than a legally drunk driver. More recently, researchers found that simply talking on a phone cuts the brain activity devoted to driving nearly 40 percent.

But we note two trends that suggest a bleak future: the increase in non-anonymous mob participation and the evolution of online services towards ever more efficient and real time communication platforms that facilitate mob creation and growth like never before. Things are changing online way too fast for society and culture to adapt. Something will eventually break. I’m going to pick on FriendFeed in this post because I believe it is the nearest thing to Shangri-La for mob justice enthusiasts.