Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

The discovery that Android devices - which are quickly becoming the best-selling products in the smartphone space - also collect location data indicates how essential such information has become to their effective operation. "Location services", which can help place a user on a map, are increasingly seen as important for providing enhanced services including advertising - which forms the basis of Google's business.

Smartphones running Google's Android software collect data about the user's movements in almost exactly the same way as the iPhone, according to an examination of files they contain. The discovery, made by a Swedish researcher, comes as the Democratic senator Al Franken has written to Apple's chief executive Steve Jobs demanding to know why iPhones keep a secret file recording the location of their users as they move around, as the Guardian revealed this week.

Magnus Eriksson, a Swedish programmer, has shown that Android phones – now the bestselling smartphones – do the same, though for a shorter period. According to files discovered by Android devices keep a record of the locations and unique IDs of the last 50 mobile masts that it has communicated with, and the last 200 Wi-Fi networks that it has "seen". These are overwritten, oldest first, when the relevant list is full. It is not yet known whether the lists are sent to Google. That differs from Apple, where the data is stored for up to a year.

The authors of the new paper point out just how hard it is to study languages. We're aware of over 7,000 of them, and they vary significantly in complexity. There are a number of large language families that are likely derived from a single root, but a large number of languages don't slot easily into one of the major groups. Against that backdrop, even a set of simple structural decisions—does the noun or verb come first? where does the preposition go?—become dizzyingly complex, with different patterns apparent even within a single language tree.

Linguists, however, have been attempting to find order within the chaos. Noam Chomsky helped establish the Generative school of thought, which suggests that there must be some constraints to this madness, some rules that help make a language easier for children to pick up, and hence more likely to persist. Others have approached this issue via a statistical approach (the authors credit those inspired by Joseph Greenberg for this), looking for word-order rules that consistently correlate across language families. This approach has identified a handful of what may be language universals, but our uncertainty about language relationships can make it challenging to know when some of these are correlations are simply derived from a common inheritance.

For anyone with a biology background, having traits shared through common inheritance should ring a bell. Evolutionary biologists have long been able to build family trees of related species, called phylogenetic trees. By figuring out what species have the most traits in common and grouping them together, it's possible to identify when certain features have evolved in the past. In recent years, the increase in computing power and DNA sequences to align has led to some very sophisticated phylogenetic software, which can analyze every possible tree and perform a Bayesian statistical analysis to figure out which trees are most likely to represent reality. By treating language features like subject-verb order as a trait, the authors were able to perform this sort of analysis on four different language families: 79 Indo-European languages, 130 Austronesian languages, 66 Bantu languages, and 26 Uto-Aztecan languages. Although we don't have a complete roster of the languages in those families, they include over 2,400 languages that have been evolving for a minimum of 4,000 years.

Open government cannot succeed through technology only.  Open data, ideation platforms, cloud solutions, and social media are great tools but when they are used to deliver government services using existing models they can only deliver partial value, value which can not be measured and value that is unclear to anyone but the technology practitioners that are delivering the services.

It is this thinking that has led a small group of us to launch a new Group on Govloop called Culture Change and Open Government.  Bill Brantley wrote a great overview of the group which notes that “The purpose of this group is to create an international community of practice devoted to discussing how to use cultural change to bring about open government and to use this site to plan and stage unconferences devoted to cultural change“

“Open government is a citizen-centric philosophy and strategy that believes the best results are usually driven by partnerships between citizens and government, at all levels. It is focused entirely on achieving goals through increased efficiency, better management, information transparency, and citizen engagement and most often leverages newer technologies to achieve the desired outcomes. This is bringing business approaches, business technologies, to government“.

The reality is that a bold new energy and climate change policy would inevitably result in dislocations in certain industries and upset long-established ways of life in many regions; in addition, it would lead to higher prices for basic commodities such as gas, home heating oil, and food. In societies where there are strong social safety nets -- universal healthcare, universal preschool, strong support for new parents, significant investments in public transportation, and sustained support for higher education -- the changes wrought by a paradigm shift in energy will tend not to result in hugely destabilizing effects across whole towns and communities. In fact, with good planning and investments in critical infrastructure, strong environmental policies can result in overall improvements in the quality of life for nearly everyone. Throughout much of the developed world, citizens are willing to pay prices for gasoline that would lead to riots in American streets, because they know that the government revenue raised by high gas taxes is used for programs that directly benefit them. In other words, ten-dollar-a-gallon gas isn’t such a big deal when everyone has great healthcare, great public transportation, and free high-quality schooling.

Americans are so battered and anxious right now. Median wages are flat, unemployment is high, politics is paralyzed. Middle-class families are one health problem away from ruin, and when they fall, there's no net. That kind of insecurity, as much as anything, explains the American reticence to launch bold new social programs.

Michael Levi points to a fantastic piece by Nassim Taleb and Mark Blyth wherein they approach a similar subject from a seemingly contrary angle, arguing that government efforts to suppress social and economic volatility can backfire. Without the experience of adjusting to small shocks as they come, we won't be prepared when the big shocks arrive:

James White of the University of Colorado at Boulder told fellow researchers to use plain language when describing their research to a general audience. Focusing on the reports technical details could obscure the basic science. To put it bluntly, “if you put more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, it will get warmer,” he said. US climate scientist Robert Corell said it was pertinent to try to reach out to all members of society to spread awareness of Arctic melt and the impact it has on the whole world. “Stop speaking in code. Rather than 'anthropogenic,' you could say 'human caused,” Corell said at the conference of nearly 400 scientists.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

mandatory data retention legislation. The bill that they have proposed requires that Internet Service Providers, such as Comcast and Time Warner, save records of the IP addresses they assign to their customers for a period of 18 months.

Data retention is a controversial topic and loudly opposed by the privacy community. To counter such criticism, the bill's authors have cunningly (and shamelessly) named it the Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. This of course means that anyone who opposes data retention must go on record as opposing measures to catch sexual predators.

The bill includes a curious exception to the retention requirements: it doesn't apply to wireless data providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, or operators of public WiFi networks, such as Starbucks and McDonalds. When questioned about this, a Republican committee staffer told CNET in May that the wireless loophole was added because wireless networks are designed in such a way that IP addresses are assigned to multiple users or accounts and they are "not technologically capable of retaining the type of data that law enforcement needs because that's not how their system works."

The state-of-the-art data centers, meant to make Chongqing a big player in the cloud computing game, might attract business, but the locals certainly aren’t too happy about it [via IT World]: That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of “No dogs and no Chinese allowed,”a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities

That has sparked an uproar among some Chinese Internet users, because the unfiltered Web access will be available only to foreign companies, according to the reports. People commenting on social-networking sites have slammed the zone as a throwback to the days of "No dogs and no Chinese allowed,"a reference to how local Chinese were prohibited in the early 20th century from entering certain foreigner communities.

Chongqing Economic and Information Technology Commission, which is overseeing development of the cloud zone, declined to comment on whether the media reports about Web access were accurate. A spokeswoman said the commission continues to "push forward" with the project.

"It goes beyond ironic," he said. "The Chinese government is marketing an uncensored, unfiltered Internet connection as a selling point, while they so blatantly and purposely deny that right to the vast majority of their citizens."

Hari admits to substituting his interviewees’ written words for their spoken words, quoting from their books and pretending that they actually said those words to him over coffee. But that is okay, he says, because his only aim was to reveal “what the subject thinks in the most comprehensible possible words” and to make sure that the reader “understood the point”.

The nub of Hari’s argument is that reality and truth are two different things, that what happens in the real world – in this case a chat between a journalist and some famous author or activist – can be twisted in the name of handing to people a neat, presumably preordained “truth”. It is a cause for concern that more journalists have not been taken aback by such a casual disassociation of truth from fact.

the sad fact is that the BS notion that it is okay to manipulate facts in order to present a Greater Truth is now widespread in the decadent British media. Mark Lawson once wrote a column titled “The government has lied and I am glad”, in which he said it was right for the British authorities and media to exaggerate the threat of AIDS because this “good lie” (his words) helped to improve Britons’ moral conduct. When Piers Morgan was sacked from the Mirror for publishing faked photos of British soldiers urinating on Iraqi prisoners he said it was his “moral duty” to publish the pictures because they spoke to an ugly reality in Iraq. When this month it was discovered that the Syrian lesbian blogger was a fake, some in the media who had fallen for “her” made-up reports said the good thing about the blog is that it helped to “draw attention to a nation’s woes”. And now Hari says it doesn’t matter it he invents a conversation because it helps to express a “vital message” in the “clearest possible words”.

Egon Willighagen commenting on Peter Murray-Rusk response to my blogpost  writes: Open Data is *not* about how to present (governmental) data in a human readable way to the general public to take advantage of (though I understand why he got that idea), but Open Data is about making this technically and legally *possible*. He did not get that point, unfortunately.

“Open Data” as articulated above by Willighagen has the form of a private club—open “technically” (and “legally”) to all to join but whose membership requires a degree of education, ressources, technical skill such as to put it out of the reach of any but a very select group.

Parminder Jeet Singh in his own comments contrasts Open Data with Public Data—a terminology and conceptual shift with which I am coming to agree—where Public Data is data which is not only “open” but also is designed and structured so as to be usable by the broad “public” (“the people”).

ost disclosure statements are not designed to be read; they are designed to be clicked on. But some companies actually want their customers to read and understand the statements. They don’t want customers who might sue, and, just in case, they want to be able to prove that the customers did understand the risks. So the leaders in disclosure statements right now tend to be financial and health-care companies – and also space-travel and extreme-sports vendors. They sincerely want to let their customers know what they are getting into, because a regretful customer is a vengeful one. That means making disclosure statements readable. I would suggest turning them into a quiz. The user would not simply click a single button, but would have to select the right button for each question. For example: What are my chances of dying in space? A) 5% B) 30% C) 1-4% (the correct answer, based on experience so far; current spacecraft are believed to be safer.) Now imagine: Who can see my data? A) I can. B) XYZ Corporation. C) XYZ Corporation’s marketing partners. (Click here to see the list.) D) XYZ Corporation’s affiliates and anyone it chooses. As the customer picks answers, she gets a good idea of what is going on. In fact, if you're a marketer, why not dispense with a single right answer and let the consumer specify what she wants to have happen with her data (and corresponding privileges/access rights if necessary)? That’s much more useful than vague policy statements. Suddenly, the disclosure statement becomes a consumer application that adds value to the vendor-consumer relationship.

And show the data themselves rather than a description.

this is all very easy if you are the site with which the user communicates directly; it is more difficult if you are in the background, a third party collecting information surreptitiously. But that practice should be stopped, anyway.

Mr Murdoch's close henchman Les Hinton assured MPs that the affair had been dealt with and when, two years later, Mr Coulson – by now director of communications for David Cameron – appeared before a renewed parliamentary inquiry he seemed confident of being fireproof. "We did not use subterfuge of any kind unless there was a clear public interest in doing so," he told MPs. When Scotland Yard concluded that, despite more allegations of hacking, there was nothing new to investigate, Wapping and Mr Coulson must again have concluded the affair was over.

But after an election campaign in which the Conservatives were roundly supported by Mr Murdoch's papers, a succession of further claimants against the News of the World has come forward. Sienna Miller, among others, seems determined to take her case to court, compelling Mulcaire to reveal his handlers and naming in court documents Ian Edmondson, once one of Coulson's executives. Mr Edmondson is now suspended. But the story is unlikely to end there

When Rupert Murdoch came to England last October to deliver a lecture, there were some in the audience who raised eyebrows when the media mogul broke off from a paean to Baroness Thatcher to say of his journalists: "We will vigorously pursue the truth – and we will not tolerate wrongdoing." The latter comment seemed to refer to the long-running phone-hacking scandal involving the News of the World, the tabloid he has owned for 41 years. Mr Murdoch's executives at his British headquarters in Wapping, east London, tried to draw a veil over the paper's own dirty secrets in 2007 and had no doubt assured him that the matter was history. Yet here was the boss, four years later, having to vouch for his organisation's honesty. Related articles

The conventional explanation for controversy over climate change emphasizes impediments to public understanding: Limited popular knowledge of science, the inability of ordinary citizens to assess technical information, and the resulting widespread use of unreliable cognitive heuristics to assess risk. A large survey of U.S. adults (N = 1540) found little support for this account. On the whole, the most scientifically literate and numerate subjects were slightly less likely, not more, to see climate change as a serious threat than the least scientifically literate and numerate ones. More importantly, greater scientific literacy and numeracy were associated with greater cultural polarization: Respondents predisposed by their values to dismiss climate change evidence became more dismissive, and those predisposed by their values to credit such evidence more concerned, as science literacy and numeracy increased. We suggest that this evidence reflects a conflict between two levels of rationality: The individual level, which is characterized by citizens’ effective use of their knowledge and reasoning capacities to form risk perceptions that express their cultural commitments; and the collective level, which is characterized by citizens’ failure to converge on the best available scientific evidence on how to promote their common welfare. Dispelling this, “tragedy of the risk-perception commons,” we argue, should be understood as the central aim of the science of science communication.