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thinkahol *

The movement to smother solidarity : Johann Hari - 0 views

johannhari.com/...movement-to-smother-solidarity

relativism

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Jun 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Jun 10
     
    Should you shut up about human rights abuses because they are happening far away, to people you don't know, who have a different culture or colour or creed? There is now a growing movement across the world saying that, yes, empathy should be cauterised at national borders. The world is carved into cultures, and they should not try to comment critically on each other. Instead, they should be "respectful." You can criticise Your Own Kind, but not Foreigners, because they are unbridgeably different to you. This claim is now made by a strange coalition stretching from the Israeli government to African dictators to Western multiculturalists - and they are trying to give it the force of law.
Johann Höchtl

An Open Data Litmus Test: Is There a Download Button | Off the Map - Official Blog of F... - 0 views

blog.fortiusone.com/...est-is-there-a-download-button

open data principles

shared by Johann Höchtl on 29 Jun 10 - Cached
  • 1) Is there a download button?
  • 2) Data should always be linked to the derivative works created with it.
  • 3) Downloading should never be more than two clicks away (ideally one).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • 4) When you get to the data it should be available in multiple formats and be easy to use (i.e. data dictionaries).
  • 5) The data should be searchable and portable.
  • Johann Höchtl on 29 Jun 10
     
    Konkretere Prinzipien offener Daten: Wann kann man davon sprechen, dass eine Web Seite offene Daten anbietet?
thinkahol *

Organizing Help Wanted | Common Dreams - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...10-0

Organizing Help Wanted | Common Dreams

shared by thinkahol * on 10 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 10 Feb 11
     
    Right now, according to a number of studies, we are losing about $100 billion every year because corporate America and the very wealthy are stashing their money in tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda. We should be aware that in 2009, ExxonMobil made $19 billion in profits and not only did the company not pay anything in taxes, it got a $106 million refund from the IRS. We should also be aware that since 1997, we have almost tripled funding for the military. So if we are serious about reducing the deficit, those are things we need to look at-not at Social Security, not programs everyday Americans need.
thinkahol *

Commentary: Since 9/11, the government might know you're reading this | McClatchy - 0 views

www.mcclatchydc.com/...-since-911-the-government.html

Commentary: Since 9_11 the government might know you're reading this | McClatchy

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Sep 11
     
    "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." Many Americans have said this, or heard it, when discussing the expanded surveillance capabilities the government has claimed since 9/11. But, it turns out you should be concerned. Just ask peace activists in Pittsburgh, anti-death penalty activists in Maryland, Ron Paul supporters in Missouri, an anarchist in Texas, groups on both sides of the abortion debate in Wisconsin, Muslim-Americans and many others who pose no threat to their communities. Some of them were labeled as terrorists in state and federal databases or placed on terror watch-lists, impeding their travel, misleading investigators and putting these innocent Americans at risk. The Fourth Amendment requirement that you must be suspected of wrongdoing before the government searches your private records risks becoming a quaint notion. Congress weakened the laws designed to protect our privacy, while the executive branch secretly re-interprets or simply ignores the law with no consequence. While your privacy is being sacrificed, there's little evidence the new spying programs are catching terrorists. The question should be, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why is the government snooping on you?"
thinkahol *

American Soldiers speak out against the wars and accuse the government or crimes - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

American Soldiers speak out against the wars and accuse government or crimes - YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 01 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 01 Nov 11
     
    Listen to and SUPPORT those American Veterans that are now AWAKE and MAD AS HELL!! Original maker of this video is http://www.youtube.com/user/StopTheRobbery2 http://www.ivaw.org/about/why-we-are-against-wars http://www.ivaw.org/ I don't think everyone should just comment. I think everyone should re post this video over and over until 1 Billion on the internet have watched this video. End the war by re posting this video. God bless the World and its people with peace and humanity.
Parycek

Crowd-sourcing is not empowering enough - 0 views

www.deliberations.com.au/...-is-not-empowering-enough.html

deliberation Crowd-sourcing edem

shared by Parycek on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
    • Parycek
      Parycek on 20 Mar 10
       
      It invites individuals to foist and endorse (or not) ideas with no pressure to consider the full public consequences of them, including whether they can be sustained across ideological or partisan lines, or how practical they are, or how insulting of public officers. There is the published intention to attract a full range of public perspectives, but instead it tends to attract enclaves of people with committed strategies (eg. embarrass public officials) or perspectives (eg. technology is the answer). While national initiatives attract noise, in more local applications of such ideation, participation is often too thin to be meaningful. This all comes down the question of representativeness. If a governing body is going to legitimately use these ideas, and be compelled to do so, then there has to be good evidence that the contributors do actually form a descriptive representation of the public being governed. I think if you have a technical problem that requires particular expertise, then such ideation processes can find the needle in the haystack. Those of us who subscribe to technical forums know how well that works. I think some people feel that public policy ideation works the same way, but it doesn't because in a contested political environment, what "should be done" is claimed on normative rather than technical grounds. Another metaphor for the ranking in ideation is consumer selection, which many in political science would model as rational choice, privileging private over public interests. Should that be the motor for the selection of public policy? I write all this knowing full well that I risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. I just think we can do better. Some ideation processes should invite people randomly, to ensure full demographic spread on relevant dimensions (eg. age, education, political leaning). Let's have multi-stage processes, where contributors do more than just introduce and rank ideas--to their credit, thi
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    I fear that ultimately crowd-sourcing is damaging the enterprise of dialogue and deliberation (D&D).
Johann Höchtl

Big Data Reaches The Hill: A Guide To Making It More Actionable - 0 views

gov.aol.com/...e-to-making-it-more-actionable

big data administration

shared by Johann Höchtl on 14 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • What Congress should do to help big data Allow access to confidential data such as the Census data centers Allow sharing between statistical agencies Have a chief data dfficer that promotes a federal data science community of data scientists and statisticians
  • Hadoop projects are costing 50 times more than expected DHS failed fast with a big data in the cloud project, but quickly and at less cost
  • The federal government should foster real innovation with government data
  • Johann Höchtl on 14 Oct 12
     
    Big Data Projekte der Verwaltung in den USA waren bisher noch nicht so erfolgreich. Eine kurze Analyse
Johann Höchtl

U.S. unveils plan to make online transactions safer - Technology & science - Security -... - 0 views

www.msnbc.msn.com/...echnology_and_science-security

identification USA web sites online security ID

shared by Johann Höchtl on 27 Jun 10 - Cached
  • In a draft plan released Friday, the White House laid out an argument for a yet-undeveloped, voluntary identification system and set up a website to gather input from experts and everyday Internet users on how it should be structured.
  • In a draft plan released Friday, the White House laid out an argument for a yet-undeveloped, voluntary identification system and set up a website to gather input from experts and everyday Internet users on how it should be structured.
  • Ari Schwartz, vice president at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said the unfettered openness of the Internet is what allowed it to grow and prosper but also created security gaps that need to be addressed.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • the opportunity is there to make things more interoperable and more uniform
  • The draft plan is part of an administration effort to promote cyber security both within the government and among society as a whole.
Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Yahoo Google Microsoft Facebook culture hackers innovation cubicle old

shared by Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
  • Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10
     
    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Johann Höchtl

It's time for a new version of government - Fortune Tech - 0 views

tech.fortune.cnn.com/...or-a-new-version-of-government

fortune gov2.0 citizen government new version of

shared by Johann Höchtl on 07 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • Create a management framework that accepts and rewards internal entrepreneurs.
  • Government 2.0 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.
  • Government employees are traditionally risk-averse, a good thing when the pace of change is relatively slow.  However, in today's fast-paced world the pace of government change, the pace of government execution is often too slow.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 1) Focus on success at the local level.
  • 2) Force competitive solutions for non-core services.
  • 3) Engage citizens in creating value and saving money. True results are being delivered in the private and public sector when customers/citizens are engaged in the process.  Platforms like BubbleIdeas, UserVoice, IdeaScale, and others, are being used to give citizens a voice in the daily execution of government. I
  • 4) Become agile, delivering on 100 day plans. While politicians often make promises for their first 100 days in office we rarely see clearly defined goals combined with execution plans and measurable outcomes publicly displayed. 
  • Government entities should select an easy to define project to complete every 100 days.  The projects goals, plans, and metrics for success should be published and updated weekly. 
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...government-20

gov2.0 datasf open government

shared by Johann Höchtl on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 
  • Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation
  • Potential loss of privacy Invalid data
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere
  • The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.
  • The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.
  • Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.
  • Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 
  • People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.
  • The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.
  • many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation
  • Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do
  • The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!
  • "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.
thinkahol *

Al Franken: The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...important-free-s_b_798984.html

Al Franken: The Most Important Free Speech Issue of Our Time

shared by thinkahol * on 21 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Dec 10
     
    This Tuesday is an important day in the fight to save the Internet. The FCC will meet to discuss its badly flawed proposal for net neutrality. If they approve it as is, I'll be outraged. And you should be, too.
thinkahol *

Revolutionary Philosophy is Revolution. | Thinkahol's Blog - 1 views

thinkahol.wordpress.com/...onary-philosophy-is-revolution

Revolutionary Philosophy is Revolution. | Thinkahol's Blog

shared by thinkahol * on 25 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 25 Feb 11
     
    Assuming philosophy should be relevant to the way we choose to live our lives, three questions guide this paper. What are some moral foundations for revolution? Do you realize what is happening? Are you willing to do anything about it?
thinkahol *

Cell Phone Censorship in San Francisco? » Blog of Rights: Official Blog of th... - 0 views

www.aclu.org/...phone-censorship-san-francisco

Cell Phone Censorship in San Francisco? » Blog of Rights: Official the American Civil Liberties Union

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Aug 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Aug 11
     
    Pop quiz: where did a government agency shut down cell service yesterday to disrupt a political protest? Syria? London? Nope. San Francisco. The answer may seem surprising, but that's exactly what happened yesterday evening. The Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) asked wireless providers to halt service in four stations in San Francisco to prevent protestors from communicating with each other. The action came after BART notified riders that there might be demonstrations in the city. All over the world people are using mobile devices to organize protests against repressive regimes, and we rightly criticize governments that respond by shutting down cell service, calling their actions anti-democratic and a violation of the rights to free expression and assembly. Are we really willing to tolerate the same silencing of protest here in the United States? BART's actions were glaringly small-minded as technology and the ability to be connected have many uses. Imagine if someone had a heart attack on the train when the phones were blocked and no one could call 911. And where do we draw the line? These protestors were using public transportation to get to the demonstration - should the government be able to shut that down too? Shutting down access to mobile phones is the wrong response to political protests, whether it's halfway around the world or right here at home. The First Amendment protects everybody's right to free expression, and when the government responds to people protesting against it by silencing them, it's dangerous to democracy.
thinkahol *

The End of the American Dream - Death of Democracy - YouTube - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

End of the American Dream - Death Democracy YouTube

shared by thinkahol * on 26 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 26 Sep 11
     
    In this interview on Canadian television Chris Hedges basically states that American democracy is dead and that only 'a revolution of the people' can restore the USA to democratic values. Since this is extremely unlikely, America will further degenerate, and end up as a semi-fascist corporate state, probably culminating in a right-wing backlash in the form of Nazi-like purges against Muslims, immigrants and other minority groups. And, of course, there will be more endless wars on defenceless nations to boost the arms industry and divert attention from the internal rot. Maybe the Americans should learn from the Egyptians rather than vice versa!
thinkahol *

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult | Truthout - 0 views

www.truth-out.org/...1314907779

Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult | Truthout

shared by thinkahol * on 20 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 20 Sep 11
     
    A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
thinkahol *

Climate of Fear: Jim Risen v. the Obama administration - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com - 0 views

www.salon.com/...index.html

Climate of Fear: Jim Risen v. the Obama administration - Glenn Greenwald Salon.com

shared by thinkahol * on 02 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 02 Jul 11
     
    [Barring unforeseen events, I'm going to leave this post at the top of the page for today and tomorrow, as I think the events it examines, rather in detail and at length, are vitally important and merit much more attention than they've received] The Obama DOJ's effort to force New York Times investigative journalist Jim Risen to testify in a whistleblower prosecution and reveal his source is really remarkable and revealing in several ways; it should be receiving much more attention than it is.  On its own, the whistleblower prosecution and accompanying targeting of Risen are pernicious, but more importantly, it underscores the menacing attempt by the Obama administration -- as Risen yesterday pointed out -- to threaten and intimidate whistleblowers, journalists and activists who meaningfully challenge what the government does in secret. The subpoena to Risen was originally issued but then abandoned by the Bush administration, and then revitalized by Obama lawyers.  It is part of the prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA agent whom the DOJ accuses of leaking to Risen the story of a severely botched agency plot -- from 11 years ago -- to infiltrate Iran's nuclear program, a story Risen wrote about six years after the fact in his 2006 best-selling book, State of War.  The DOJ wants to force Risen to testify under oath about whether Sterling was his source.
thinkahol *

Occupy Wall Street: Washington Still Doesn't Get It | Matt Taibbi | Rolling Stone - 0 views

www.rollingstone.com/...n-still-doesnt-get-it-20111021

Occupy Wall Street: Washington Still Doesn't Get It | Matt Taibbi Rolling Stone

shared by thinkahol * on 23 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 23 Oct 11
     
    I'll have more coming out about this in a few days, but there have been two disgusting developments in the realm of plutocratic intervention on behalf of Wall Street that everyone protesting should take note of. The fact that both of the following things took place in the middle of the full fever of OWS, when everyone is supposedly trying to placate anti-banker sentiment and Obama and the DCCC are supposedly pledging support of the protesters, shows how completely bankrupt this system is and how necessary street-level protests have become. Popular uprising is probably the only move left to stop developments like the following:
Johann Höchtl

The Economics of Open Data - Mini-Case, Transit Data & TransLink | eaves.ca - 0 views

eaves.ca/...ni-case-transit-data-translink

economic impact open data

shared by Johann Höchtl on 23 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • Being the monopoly holder of transit data does not benefit TransLink.
  • Consumers don't turn to who has the data, they turn to who makes the data easiest to use.
  • It should be focused on shifting the competitive value in the marketplace from access to accessibility.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The simple fact is that Google maps is radically easier to use for planning transit journeys than TransLink's own website AND THAT IS A GOOD THING FOR TRANSLINK.
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