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systems that allow crowdsourced judgment to be tweaked, not to the taste of the general mass, which produces lowest common denominator effects, but to people and experts that you can trust for their judgment.

these systems are now implemented by Buzz and Digg 4

Important for me though, is that they don’t just take your social graph as is, because that mixes many different people for different reasons, but that you can tweak the groups.

“This is the problem with the internet! It’s full of crap!” Many would argue that without professional producers, editors, publishers, and the natural scarcity that we became accustomed to, there’s a flood of low-quality material that we can’t possible sift through on our own. From blogs to music to software to journalism, one of the biggest fears of the established order is how to handle the oncoming glut of mediocrity. Who shall tell us The Good from The Bad? “We need gatekeepers, and they need to be paid!”

The Internet has enabled us to build our social graph, and in turn, that social graph acts as an aggregate gatekeeper. The better that these systems for crowdsourcing the curation of content become, the more accurate the results will be.

This social-graph-as-curation is still relatively new, even by Internet standards. However, with tools like Buzz and Digg 4 (which allows you to see the aggregate ratings for content based on your social graph, and not the whole wide world) this technique is catching up to human publishers fast. For those areas where we don’t have strong social ties, we can count on reputation systems to help us “rate the raters”. These systems allow strangers to rate each other’s content, giving users some idea of who to trust, without having to know them personally. Yelp has a fairly mature reputation system, where locations are rated by users, but the users are rated, in turn, by each other.

Reputation systems and the social graph allow us to crowdsource curation.

Can you imagine if Apple had to approve your videos for posting on Youtube, where every minute, 24 hours of footage are uploaded? There’s no way humans could keep up! The traditional forms of curation and gatekeeping simply can not scale to meet the increase in production and transmission that the Internet allows. Crowdsourcing is the only curatorial/editorial mechanism that can scale to match the increased ability to produce that the Internet has given us.

While colleges have been trumpeting the power of social media as an educational tool, here in Asia, going public with classwork runs counter to many cultural norms, surprising transplanted professors and making some students a little uneasy.

Publicly oriented Web 2.0 tools, like wikis, for instance, run up against ideas about how one should treat others in public. "People were very reluctant to edit things that other people had posted," said American-trained C. Jason Woodard, an assistant professor of information systems who started the wiki project two years ago. "I guess out of deference. People were very careful to not want to edit their peers. Getting people out of that mind-set has been a real challenge."

Students are also afraid of embarrassing themselves. Some privately expressed concern to me about putting unfinished work out on the Web for the world to see, as the assignment calls for them to do

faced hesitancy when asking students to use social-media tools for class projects. Few students seemed to freely post to blogs or Twitter, electing instead to communicate using Facebook accounts with the privacy set so that only close friends could see them

In a small country like Singapore, the traditional face-to-face network still reigns supreme. Members of a network are extremely loyal to that network, and if you are outside of it, a lot of times you aren't even given the time of day.

In fact, Singapore's future depends on technology and innovation at least according to its leaders, who have worked for years to position the country as friendly to the foreign investment that serves as its lifeblood. The city-state literally has no natural resources except its people, who it hopes to turn into "knowledge workers" (a buzzword I heard many times during my visit).

Yet this is a culture that many here describe as conservative, where people are not known for pushing boundaries. That was the first impression that Giorgos Cheliotis had when he first arrived to teach in Singapore several years ago from his native Greece.

he suspects they may be more comfortable because they are seniors, and because they feel that it has been assigned, and so they must.

The Japan Shogi Association, incidentally, seems to have a deep fear of computers beating humans. In 2005, it introduced a ban on professional members playing computers without permission, and Shimizu's defeat was the first since a simpler computer system was beaten by a (male) champion, Akira Watanabe, in 2007.

Perhaps the association doesn't mind so much if a woman is beaten: NHK reports that the JSA will conduct an in-depth analysis of the match before it decides whether to allow the software to challenge a higher-ranking male professional player.

Others use data. A timer running on Robin Barooah’s computer tells him that he has been living in the United States for 8 years, 2 months and 10 days. At various times in his life, Barooah — a 38-year-old self-employed software designer from England who now lives in Oakland, Calif. — has also made careful records of his work, his sleep and his diet.

A few months ago, Barooah began to wean himself from coffee. His method was precise. He made a large cup of coffee and removed 20 milliliters weekly. This went on for more than four months, until barely a sip remained in the cup. He drank it and called himself cured. Unlike his previous attempts to quit, this time there were no headaches, no extreme cravings. Still, he was tempted, and on Oct. 12 last year, while distracted at his desk, he told himself that he could probably concentrate better if he had a cup. Coffee may have been bad for his health, he thought, but perhaps it was good for his concentration. Barooah wasn’t about to try to answer a question like this with guesswork. He had a good data set that showed how many minutes he spent each day in focused work. With this, he could do an objective analysis. Barooah made a chart with dates on the bottom and his work time along the side. Running down the middle was a big black line labeled “Stopped drinking coffee.” On the left side of the line, low spikes and narrow columns. On the right side, high spikes and thick columns. The data had delivered their verdict, and coffee lost.

“People have such very poor sense of time,” Barooah says, and without good time calibration, it is much harder to see the consequences of your actions. If you want to replace the vagaries of intuition with something more reliable, you first need to gather data. Once you know the facts, you can live by them.

“It was just too sensitive, and we didn’t want to go there,” said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google. “You want to avoid enabling stalker behavior.”

The second article focuses on innovations in high frequency trading in financial markets, which bears some responsibility for the so-called "flash crash" of May 6th last year, in which the DJIA plunged more than 700 points in just minutes.

One debate has focused on whether some traders are firing off fake orders thousands of times a second to slow down exchanges and mislead others. Michael Durbin, who helped build high-frequency trading systems for companies like Citadel and is the author of the book “All About High-Frequency Trading,” says that most of the industry is legitimate and benefits investors. But, he says, the rules need to be strengthened to curb some disturbing practices.

This situation raises what I see to be core questions in the governance of innovation -- to what degree can innovation be shaped for achieving intended purposes? and, To what degree can the consequences of innovation be anticipated?

iPhone apps transmitted more data than the apps on phones using Google Inc.'s Android operating system. Because of the test's size, it's not known if the pattern holds among the hundreds of thousands of apps available.

TextPlus 4, a popular iPhone app for text messaging. It sent the phone's unique ID number to eight ad companies and the phone's zip code, along with the user's age and gender, to two of them.

Pandora, a popular music app, sent age, gender, location and phone identifiers to various ad networks. iPhone and Android versions of a game called Paper Toss—players try to throw paper wads into a trash can—each sent the phone's ID number to at least five ad companies. Grindr, an iPhone app for meeting gay men, sent gender, location and phone ID to three ad companies.

iPhone maker Apple Inc. says it reviews each app before offering it to users. Both Apple and Google say they protect users by requiring apps to obtain permission before revealing certain kinds of information, such as location.

The Journal found that these rules can be skirted. One iPhone app, Pumpkin Maker (a pumpkin-carving game), transmits location to an ad network without asking permission. Apple declines to comment on whether the app violated its rules.

With few exceptions, app users can't "opt out" of phone tracking, as is possible, in limited form, on regular computers. On computers it is also possible to block or delete "cookies," which are tiny tracking files. These techniques generally don't work on cellphone apps.

makers of TextPlus 4, Pandora and Grindr say the data they pass on to outside firms isn't linked to an individual's name. Personal details such as age and gender are volunteered by users, they say. The maker of Pumpkin Maker says he didn't know Apple required apps to seek user approval before transmitting location. The maker of Paper Toss didn't respond to requests for comment.

Many apps don't offer even a basic form of consumer protection: written privacy policies. Forty-five of the 101 apps didn't provide privacy policies on their websites or inside the apps at the time of testing. Neither Apple nor Google requires app privacy policies.

the most widely shared detail was the unique ID number assigned to every phone.

On iPhones, this number is the "UDID," or Unique Device Identifier. Android IDs go by other names. These IDs are set by phone makers, carriers or makers of the operating system, and typically can't be blocked or deleted. "The great thing about mobile is you can't clear a UDID like you can a cookie," says Meghan O'Holleran of Traffic Marketplace, an Internet ad network that is expanding into mobile apps. "That's how we track everything."

O'Holleran says Traffic Marketplace, a unit of Epic Media Group, monitors smartphone users whenever it can. "We watch what apps you download, how frequently you use them, how much time you spend on them, how deep into the app you go," she says. She says the data is aggregated and not linked to an individual.

Apple and Google ad networks let advertisers target groups of users. Both companies say they don't track individuals based on the way they use apps.

Apple limits what can be installed on an iPhone by requiring iPhone apps to be offered exclusively through its App Store. Apple reviews those apps for function, offensiveness and other criteria.

Apple says iPhone apps "cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user's prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used." Many apps tested by the Journal appeared to violate that rule, by sending a user's location to ad networks, without informing users. Apple declines to discuss how it interprets or enforces the policy.

Google doesn't review the apps, which can be downloaded from many vendors. Google says app makers "bear the responsibility for how they handle user information." Google requires Android apps to notify users, before they download the app, of the data sources the app intends to access. Possible sources include the phone's camera, memory, contact list, and more than 100 others. If users don't like what a particular app wants to access, they can choose not to install the app, Google says.

Neither Apple nor Google requires apps to ask permission to access some forms of the device ID, or to send it to outsiders. When smartphone users let an app see their location, apps generally don't disclose if they will pass the location to ad companies.

Lack of standard practices means different companies treat the same information differently. For example, Apple says that, internally, it treats the iPhone's UDID as "personally identifiable information." That's because, Apple says, it can be combined with other personal details about people—such as names or email addresses—that Apple has via the App Store or its iTunes music services. By contrast, Google and most app makers don't consider device IDs to be identifying information.

A growing industry is assembling this data into profiles of cellphone users. Mobclix, the ad exchange, matches more than 25 ad networks with some 15,000 apps seeking advertisers. The Palo Alto, Calif., company collects phone IDs, encodes them (to obscure the number), and assigns them to interest categories based on what apps people download and how much time they spend using an app, among other factors. By tracking a phone's location, Mobclix also makes a "best guess" of where a person lives, says Mr. Gurbuxani, the Mobclix executive. Mobclix then matches that location with spending and demographic data from Nielsen Co.

Mobclix can place a user in one of 150 "segments" it offers to advertisers, from "green enthusiasts" to "soccer moms." For example, "die hard gamers" are 15-to-25-year-old males with more than 20 apps on their phones who use an app for more than 20 minutes at a time. Mobclix says its system is powerful, but that its categories are broad enough to not identify individuals. "It's about how you track people better," Mr. Gurbuxani says.

four app makers posted privacy policies after being contacted by the Journal, including Rovio Mobile Ltd., the Finnish company behind the popular game Angry Birds (in which birds battle egg-snatching pigs). A spokesman says Rovio had been working on the policy, and the Journal inquiry made it a good time to unveil it.

Free and paid versions of Angry Birds were tested on an iPhone. The apps sent the phone's UDID and location to the Chillingo unit of Electronic Arts Inc., which markets the games. Chillingo says it doesn't use the information for advertising and doesn't share it with outsiders.

Some developers feel pressure to release more data about people. Max Binshtok, creator of the DailyHoroscope Android app, says ad-network executives encouraged him to transmit users' locations. Mr. Binshtok says he declined because of privacy concerns. But ads targeted by location bring in two to five times as much money as untargeted ads, Mr. Binshtok says. "We are losing a lot of revenue."

Apple targets ads to phone users based largely on what it knows about them through its App Store and iTunes music service. The targeting criteria can include the types of songs, videos and apps a person downloads, according to an Apple ad presentation reviewed by the Journal. The presentation named 103 targeting categories, including: karaoke, Christian/gospel music, anime, business news, health apps, games and horror movies. People familiar with iAd say Apple doesn't track what users do inside apps and offers advertisers broad categories of people, not specific individuals. Apple has signaled that it has ideas for targeting people more closely. In a patent application filed this past May, Apple outlined a system for placing and pricing ads based on a person's "web history or search history" and "the contents of a media library." For example, home-improvement advertisers might pay more to reach a person who downloaded do-it-yourself TV shows, the document says.

The patent application also lists another possible way to target people with ads: the contents of a friend's media library. How would Apple learn who a cellphone user's friends are, and what kinds of media they prefer? The patent says Apple could tap "known connections on one or more social-networking websites" or "publicly available information or private databases describing purchasing decisions, brand preferences," and other data. In September, Apple introduced a social-networking service within iTunes, called Ping, that lets users share music preferences with friends. Apple declined to comment.

Suppose we found that computers are diminishing our capacity for certain pleasures, or making us worse off in other ways. Why couldn’t we simply spend less time in front of the screen and more time doing the things we used to do before computers came along – like burying our noses in novels? Well, it may be that computers are affecting us in a more insidious fashion than we realise. They may be reshaping our brains – and not for the better. That was the drift of ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid?’, a 2008 cover story by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic.

Carr thinks that he was himself an unwitting victim of the computer’s mind-altering powers. Now in his early fifties, he describes his life as a ‘two-act play’, ‘Analogue Youth’ followed by ‘Digital Adulthood’. In 1986, five years out of college, he dismayed his wife by spending nearly all their savings on an early version of the Apple Mac. Soon afterwards, he says, he lost the ability to edit or revise on paper. Around 1990, he acquired a modem and an AOL subscription, which entitled him to spend five hours a week online sending email, visiting ‘chat rooms’ and reading old newspaper articles. It was around this time that the programmer Tim Berners-Lee wrote the code for the World Wide Web, which, in due course, Carr would be restlessly exploring with the aid of his new Netscape browser.

Carr launches into a brief history of brain science, which culminates in a discussion of ‘neuroplasticity’: the idea that experience affects the structure of the brain. Scientific orthodoxy used to hold that the adult brain was fixed and immutable: experience could alter the strengths of the connections among its neurons, it was believed, but not its overall architecture. By the late 1960s, however, striking evidence of brain plasticity began to emerge. In one series of experiments, researchers cut nerves in the hands of monkeys, and then, using microelectrode probes, observed that the monkeys’ brains reorganised themselves to compensate for the peripheral damage. Later, tests on people who had lost an arm or a leg revealed something similar: the brain areas that used to receive sensory input from the lost limbs seemed to get taken over by circuits that register sensations from other parts of the body (which may account for the ‘phantom limb’ phenomenon). Signs of brain plasticity have been observed in healthy people, too. Violinists, for instance, tend to have larger cortical areas devoted to processing signals from their fingering hands than do non-violinists. And brain scans of London cab drivers taken in the 1990s revealed that they had larger than normal posterior hippocampuses – a part of the brain that stores spatial representations – and that the increase in size was proportional to the number of years they had been in the job.

The brain’s ability to change its own structure, as Carr sees it, is nothing less than ‘a loophole for free thought and free will’. But, he hastens to add, ‘bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones.’ Indeed, neuroplasticity has been invoked to explain depression, tinnitus, pornography addiction and masochistic self-mutilation (this last is supposedly a result of pain pathways getting rewired to the brain’s pleasure centres). Once new neural circuits become established in our brains, they demand to be fed, and they can hijack brain areas devoted to valuable mental skills. Thus, Carr writes: ‘The possibility of intellectual decay is inherent in the malleability of our brains.’ And the internet ‘delivers precisely the kind of sensory and cognitive stimuli – repetitive, intensive, interactive, addictive – that have been shown to result in strong and rapid alterations in brain circuits and functions’. He quotes the brain scientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer of neuroplasticity and the man behind the monkey experiments in the 1960s, to the effect that the brain can be ‘massively remodelled’ by exposure to the internet and online tools like Google. ‘THEIR HEAVY USE HAS NEUROLOGICAL CONSEQUENCES,’ Merzenich warns in caps – in a blog post, no less.

It’s not that the web is making us less intelligent; if anything, the evidence suggests it sharpens more cognitive skills than it dulls. It’s not that the web is making us less happy, although there are certainly those who, like Carr, feel enslaved by its rhythms and cheated by the quality of its pleasures. It’s that the web may be an enemy of creativity. Which is why Woody Allen might be wise in avoiding it altogether.

empirical support for Carr’s conclusion is both slim and equivocal. To begin with, there is evidence that web surfing can increase the capacity of working memory. And while some studies have indeed shown that ‘hypertexts’ impede retention – in a 2001 Canadian study, for instance, people who read a version of Elizabeth Bowen’s story ‘The Demon Lover’ festooned with clickable links took longer and reported more confusion about the plot than did those who read it in an old-fashioned ‘linear’ text – others have failed to substantiate this claim. No study has shown that internet use degrades the ability to learn from a book, though that doesn’t stop people feeling that this is so – one medical blogger quoted by Carr laments, ‘I can’t read War and Peace any more.’

There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the official keepers of the world's climate data. Each publishes its own figures that feed into the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City produces a rolling estimate of the world's warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The third group is based in the UK and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth's mean surface temperature. The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point to a warming of around 0.75C.

You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says, warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others argue many climate records and the tools to analyse them have been public for years.

Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000 emails from a server at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) find their way on to the internet. The fuss over the messages, inevitably dubbed Climategate, gave Muller's nascent project added impetus. Climate sceptics had already attacked James Hansen, head of the Nasa group, for making political statements on climate change while maintaining his role as an objective scientist. The Climategate emails fuelled their protests. "With CRU's credibility undergoing a severe test, it was all the more important to have a new team jump in, do the analysis fresh and address all of the legitimate issues raised by sceptics," says Muller.

This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. "Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don't recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating," Muller says.

The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics professor at Berkeley and the man Nasa called when it wanted someone to check its risk estimates of space debris smashing into the International Space Station. He wanted Brillinger to oversee every stage of the project. Brillinger accepted straight away. Since the first meeting he has advised the scientists on how best to analyse their data and what pitfalls to avoid. "You can think of statisticians as the keepers of the scientific method, " Brillinger told me. "Can scientists and doctors reasonably draw the conclusions they are setting down? That's what we're here for."

For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley physicist who found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever faster rate, courtesy of mysterious "dark energy" that pushes against gravity. Another is Art Rosenfeld, the last student of the legendary Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, and something of a legend himself in energy research. Then there is Robert Jacobsen, a Berkeley physicist who is an expert on giant datasets; and Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has raised concerns over tribalism and hubris in climate science.

Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left Berkeley with a PhD last year, does most of the hard work. He has written software that trawls public databases, themselves the product of years of painstaking work, for global temperature records. These are compiled, de-duplicated and merged into one huge historical temperature record. The data, by all accounts, are a mess. There are 16 separate datasets in 14 different formats and they overlap, but not completely. Muller likens Rohde's achievement to Hercules's enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables.

The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself, Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide.

Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the first goal of Muller's project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data into an assessment on global warming.

The big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give one number. Muller's team will take temperature records from individual stations and weight them according to how reliable they are.

This is where the Berkeley group faces its toughest task by far and it will be judged on how well it deals with it. There are errors running through global warming data that arise from the simple fact that the global network of temperature stations was never designed or maintained to monitor climate change. The network grew in a piecemeal fashion, starting with temperature stations installed here and there, usually to record local weather.

Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in celsius instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these interferes with a station's temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up.

This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours because it doesn't rely on human interference. When the team publishes its results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense.

Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class scientific organisations have been wrestling with it for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment of how much the world is warming. "I've told the team I don't know if global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over climate change, if nothing else," says Muller. "Science has its weaknesses and it doesn't have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have."

It might not be a good sign that one prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some issues, hasn't followed the project either, but said "anything that [Muller] does will be well done". Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia was unclear on the details of the Berkeley project and didn't comment.

Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the biggest names in the business. At Nasa, Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising what he expects to be the minor differences between Berkeley's global warming assessment and those from the other groups. "We have enough trouble communicating with the public already," Hansen says. At the Met Office, Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, was in favour of the project if it was open and peer-reviewed.

Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office's Hadley Centre last year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at some of Muller's claims. The Berkeley group will not be the first to put its data and tools online, he says. Teams at Nasa and Noaa have been doing this for many years. And while Muller may have more data, they add little real value, Thorne says. Most are records from stations installed from the 1950s onwards, and then only in a few regions, such as North America. "Do you really need 20 stations in one region to get a monthly temperature figure? The answer is no. Supersaturating your coverage doesn't give you much more bang for your buck," he says. They will, however, help researchers spot short-term regional variations in climate change, something that is likely to be valuable as climate change takes hold.

Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands to benefit from Muller's project. "We need groups like Berkeley stepping up to the plate and taking this challenge on, because it's the only way we're going to move forwards. I wish there were 10 other groups doing this," he says.

Muller's project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them "without advocacy or agenda". Funding has come from a variety of places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a "kingpin of climate science denial". On this point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike.

No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. "As new kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable view by people, but I don't think it will fundamentally change people's minds," says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations too. "There are people you are never going to change. They have their beliefs and they're not going to back away from them."

The Wall Street Journal's examination of scraping—a trade that involves personal information as well as many other types of data—is part of the newspaper's investigation into the business of tracking people's activities online and selling details about their behavior and personal interests.

Some companies collect personal information for detailed background reports on individuals, such as email addresses, cell numbers, photographs and posts on social-network sites. Others offer what are known as listening services, which monitor in real time hundreds or thousands of news sources, blogs and websites to see what people are saying about specific products or topics.

One such service is offered by Dow Jones & Co., publisher of the Journal. Dow Jones collects data from the Web—which may include personal information contained in news articles and blog postings—that help corporate clients monitor how they are portrayed. It says it doesn't gather information from password-protected parts of sites.

The competition for data is fierce. PatientsLikeMe also sells data about its users. PatientsLikeMe says the data it sells is anonymized, no names attached.

Nielsen spokesman Matt Anchin says the company's reports to its clients include publicly available information gleaned from the Internet, "so if someone decides to share personally identifiable information, it could be included."

Internet users often have little recourse if personally identifiable data is scraped: There is no national law requiring data companies to let people remove or change information about themselves, though some firms let users remove their profiles under certain circumstances.

With a growing community of people determined to become collaborative producers rather than fit into the producer/consumer paradigm, and 3D files for physical objects already being shared like movies and music, the implications are profound. Products, and the manufacturing technology used to make them will continue to drop in price, become easier to make for individuals rather than large corporations, just as media is now shifting into the hands of the common people. And like the shift of information, industry will move from the elite and their agenda of preserving their power, to the end of empowering the people.

In a future alternative economy where everyone is a collaborative designer, producer, and manufacturer instead of passive consumers and when problems like "global climate change," "overpopulation," and "fuel crises" cross our path, we will counter them with technical solutions, not political indulgences like carbon taxes, and not draconian decrees like "one-child policies."

We will become the literal architects of our own future in this "personal manufacturing" revolution. While these technologies may still appear primitive, or somewhat "useless" or "impractical" we must remember where our personal computers stood on the eve of the dawning of the information age and how quickly they changed our lives. And while many of us may be unaware of this unfolding revolution, you can bet the globalists, power brokers, and all those that stand to lose from it not only see it but are already actively fighting against it.Understandably it takes some technical know-how to jump into the personal manufacturing revolution. In part 2 of "Alternative Economics" we will explore real world "low-tech" solutions to becoming self-sufficient, local, and rediscover the empowerment granted by doing so.

We could continuously sample a news source’s output to produce ongoing accuracy estimates, and build social software to help the audience report and filter errors. Meticulously applied, this approach would give a measure of the accuracy of each information source, and a measure of the efficiency of their corrections process (currently only about 3% of all errors are corrected.)

Real world reporting isn’t always clearly “right” or “wrong,” so it will often be hard to decide whether something is an error or not. But we’re not going for ultimate Truth here,  just a general way of measuring some important aspect of the idea we call “accuracy.” In practice it’s important that the error counting method is simple, clear and repeatable, so that you can compare error rates of different times and sources.

Subjective errors, though by definition involving judgment, should not be dismissed as merely differences in opinion. Sources found such errors to be about as common as factual errors and often more egregious [as rated by the sources.] But subjective errors are a very complex category

One of the major problems with previous news accuracy metrics is the effort and time required to produce them. In short, existing accuracy measurement methods are expensive and slow. I’ve been wondering if we can do better, and a simple idea comes to mind: sampling. The core idea is this: news sources could take an ongoing random sample of their output and check it for accuracy — a fact check spot check

Standard statistical theory tells us what the error on that estimate will be for any given number of samples (If I’ve got this right, the relevant formula is standard error of a population proportion estimate without replacement.) At a sample rate of a few stories per day, daily estimates of error rate won’t be worth much. But weekly and monthly aggregates will start to produce useful accuracy estimates

the first step would be admitting how inaccurate journalism has historically been. Then we have to come up with standardized accuracy evaluation procedures, in pursuit of metrics that capture enough of what we mean by “true” to be worth optimizing. Meanwhile, we can ramp up the efficiency of our online corrections processes until we find as many useful, legitimate errors as possible with as little staff time as possible. It might also be possible do data mining on types of errors and types of stories to figure out if there are patterns in how an organization fails to get facts right.

I’d love to live in a world where I could compare the accuracy of information sources, where errors got found and fixed with crowd-sourced ease, and where news organizations weren’t shy about telling me what they did and did not know. Basic factual accuracy is far from the only measure of good journalism, but perhaps it’s an improvement over the current sad state of affairs

All the applications will be web-based, meaning users won’t have to install apps, manage updates or even backup their data. All data will be stored in the cloud, and users won’t even have to bother with anti-virus software: Google claims it will monitor code to prevent malicious activity in Chrome OS web apps.

In 2009, for example, Stamen Design, a technology and design studio in San Francisco, created a live visualization of Twitter traffic during the MTV Video Music awards. In the animated graphic, floating bubbles, each displaying a photograph of a celebrity, expanded or contracted depending on the volume of Twitter activity about each star. The project provided a visceral way for viewers to understand which celebrities dominated Twitter talk in real time, says Eric Rodenbeck, the founder and creative director of Stamen Design.

Designers once created visual representations of data that would steer viewers to information that seemed the most important or newsworthy, he says; now they create visualizations that contain attractive overview images and then let users direct their own interactive experience — wherever it may take them. “It’s not about leading with a certain view anymore,” he says. “It’s about delivering the view that gets the most participation and engagement.”

it still leaves a lot of areas open for linguists to argue about. And the study did not build an exhaustive tree of any of the language families, in part because we probably don't have enough information to classify all of them at this point.

Still, it's hard to imagine any further details could overturn the gist of things, given how badly features failed to correlate across language families. And the work might be well received in some communities, since it provides an invitation to ask a fascinating question: given that there aren't obvious word order patterns across languages, how does the human brain do so well at learning the rules that are a peculiarity to any one of them?

3 questions to ask of any transparency initiative: If information is to be published in a database behind a form, then it’s hidden in plain sight. It cannot be easily found by a journalist, and only simple questions will be answered. If information is to be published in PDFs or JPEGs, or some format that you need proprietary software to see, then it cannot be easily be questioned by a journalist If you will have to pass a test to use the information, then obstacles will be placed between the journalist and that information The next time an organisation claims that they are opening up their information, tick those questions off. (If you want more, see Gurstein’s list of 7 elements that are needed to make effective use of open data).

Only one other country, Chile, has written network neutrality requirements into its telecommunications law. The Chilean law, which was approved in July 2010, took effect in May.

In the US, an attempt by the Federal Communications Commission to impose a similar set of network neutrality restrictions on American operators has been tied up in legal challenges from the industry.

After he found out that Facebook was throttling the email field once his extension got popular, he wrote the following on his Google+ profile: I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything!