Skip to main content

Home/ opensociety/ Group items tagged system

Rss Feed Group items tagged

thinkahol *

Hedges: No way in US system to vote against banks - YouTube - 0 views

  •  
    Between Occupy Wall Street, in New York, and the other cities it's spread to, as well as the October 2011 movement that just began here in D.C, something seems to be happening in this country. Earlier at Freedom Plaza Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author, tells us what this could lead to.
thinkahol *

FDL Book Salon Welcomes Lawrence Lessig, Republic, Lost: A Declaration for Independence... - 0 views

  •  
    If, as Lessig conclusively demonstrates, Congress is indifferent to the will of the people and to democratic debate - because it has been captured by monied interests to whose interests it exclusively attends - then the people lose the ability to affect what government does in any realm. It doesn't make much difference which problem you believe is most pressing: this is the dynamic that lies at the heart of it. Inaction on climate issues is due to the power of polluters and energy companies; the power of the private health insurance industry blocks fundamental health-care reform; endless war and civil liberties abuses are sustained by the power of the surveillance and National Security State industries; and a failure to achieve real Wall Street reform is due to the fact that, as Sen. Dick Durbin amazingly acknowledged about the institution in which he serves, "the banks frankly own the place." Without finding an effective way to address that overarching problem, the only recourse for citizens becomes either passive acceptance of their powerlessness (i.e., apathy and withdrawal) or disruption and unrest fomented outside of the electoral system (the driving ethos of OccupyWallStreet).
thinkahol *

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

  •  
    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:
thinkahol *

Slavoj Zizek: 'Now the field is open' - Talk to Al Jazeera - Al Jazeera English - 0 views

  •  
    The philosopher discusses the momentous changes taking place in the global financial and political system.
thinkahol *

Fars News Agency :: Iranian Students to Stage Rally in Support of Wall Street Uprising - 0 views

  •  
    TEHRAN (FNA)- Millions of Iranian students are due to stage nationwide rallies on November 4 to voice their strong support for the Wall Street protests which have now overwhelmed all the western countries ruled by the capitalist system.
thinkahol *

Book release: With Liberty and Justice for Some - Salon.com - 0 views

  •  
    I'm genuinely excited today to announce the release of my new book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. As of this morning, it is available in bookstores as well as for shipping online. The book focuses on what I began realizing several years ago is the crucial theme tying together most of the topics I write about: America's two-tiered justice system - specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world's largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be - the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities - into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality. This is how I described that development in the book:
Johann Höchtl

Postserver.at - Briefe im Internet # Anleitung - 0 views

  • Postserver.at bietet Ihnen im Moment zwei Arten der Registrierung. Die einfachste ist die Registrierung mit Ihrer bestehenden e-Mail Adresse. Diese Benutzer werden im System mit der "Vertrauensstufe Standard" vermerkt. Benötigen Sie in Ihrer Korrespondenz höchste Rechtssicherheit, sowie eine eindeutige Personen-Authentifizierung, dann müssen Sie sich mit Ihrer Bürgerkarte am Dienst anmelden bzw. falls Sie eine solche nicht haben, diese Bürgerkarte zuerst beantragen
Johann Höchtl

Scott Adams Blog: Startup Country 07/27/2010 - 0 views

  • My idea for today is that established nations could launch startup countries within their own borders, free of all the legacy restrictions in the parent country. The startup country, let's say the size of modern day Israel, would be designed from the ground up for efficiency.
  • The entire banking system would be automated. There would be no cash in the start-up country. You wouldn't need to "apply" for a loan because the virtual bank would always have a current notion of your credit-worthiness.
  • The tax code in the startup country would be simplified to the point where residents might forget it exists.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Most of what is scary about the government having power is the lack of transparency. The startup nation would have full transparency. Any citizen could log on to his computer and see what court orders had been issued for what videos and why.
  • Arguably, China accidentally performed a variant of this experiment with Hong Kong. Oversimplifying the history, Hong Kong was part of China and leased to the United Kingdom for 99 years, like a startup country within a country.
  •  
    über das bin ich auch schon gestolpert. interesting!
Judith Schossboeck

Zur Appropriation socio-technischer Systeme am Beispiel Twitter - 0 views

  •  
    Twitter-Stuff von Peter Mambrey u.a.
Johann Höchtl

Google search index splits with MapReduce * The Register - 0 views

  • Google Caffeine — the remodeled search infrastructure rolled out across Google's worldwide data center network earlier this year — is not based on MapReduce, the distributed number-crunching platform that famously underpinned the company's previous indexing system. As the likes of Yahoo!, Facebook, and Microsoft work to duplicate MapReduce through the open source Hadoop project, Google is moving on.
Parycek

SMALL CHANGE Why the revolution will not be tweeted - 2 views

  • The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns
  • There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
  • The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with. That’s why you can have a thousand “friends” on Facebook, as you never could in real life.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • “Social networks are particularly effective at increasing motivation,”
  • But that’s not true. Social networks are effective at increasing participation—by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires
  • social media are not about this kind of hierarchical organization. Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies. Unlike hierarchies, with their rules and procedures, networks aren’t controlled by a single central authority. Decisions are made through consensus, and the ties that bind people to the group are loose.
  • There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars.
  • The drawbacks of networks scarcely matter if the network isn’t interested in systemic change—if it just wants to frighten or humiliate or make a splash—or if it doesn’t need to think strategically. But if you’re taking on a powerful and organized establishment you have to be a hierarchy.
  • it is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability
  •  
    Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell
Johann Höchtl

Apache UIMA - Apache UIMA - 0 views

  • Unstructured Information Management applications are software systems that analyze large volumes of unstructured information in order to discover knowledge that is relevant to an end user. An example UIM application might ingest plain text and identify entities, such as persons, places, organizations; or relations, such as works-for or located-at.
  •  
    Backbone für den Semantic Desktop? Oder das Verwaltungsbüro der Zukunft mit dem vielgepriesenen "automatischen Wissensmanagement"
Judith Schossboeck

Is democracy threatened by the unchecked nature of information on the internet? - 0 views

  •  
    In the balance of this paper, we place the emergence of the Internet in the broader context of the development of different systems of media and politics which have emerged throughout American history.
Johann Höchtl

Open 311 - 0 views

  •  
    Open311 is a form of technology that provides open channels of communication for issues that concern public space and public services. Primarily, Open311 refers to a standardized technology for location-based collaborative issue-tracking. By offering free web API access to an existing 311 service, Open311 is an evolution of the phone-based 311 systems that many cities in North America offer.
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

  • 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.
Judith Schossboeck

Visualisation of political system and evolution in America - 0 views

  •  
    democrats and republicans, visualisation of social and economic beliefs
Johann Höchtl

The Official Netflix Blog: Netflix Prize Update - 0 views

  • In the past few months, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) asked us how a Netflix Prize sequel might affect Netflix members' privacy, and a lawsuit was filed by KamberLaw LLC pertaining to the sequel.
  • In light of all this, we have decided to not pursue the Netflix Prize sequel that we announced on August 6, 2009.We will continue to explore ways to collaborate with the research community and improve our recommendations system so we can constantly improve the movie recommendations we make for you. So stay tuned.
  •  
    Netflix Prize sequel discontinued
didi duk

Die persönliche Arbeits- und Lernumgebung - eine Alternative zum LMS? - 1 views

  •  
    Eine weitere interessante Umgebung ist http://www.edu20.org/
Johann Höchtl

Agile will fail GovIT, says corporate lawyer - Public Sector IT - 0 views

  • The Agile methodology is meant to deliver IT projects flexibly, in iterations.
  • But the lack of clearly defined project roles and requirements is a problem for Agile.
  • There are four clear reasons why Agile won't work in government ICT. The most obvious is that government customers want to know up-front how much a system will cost
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Departmental budgets are managed very tightly, and they must be approved
  • Agile is fourthly not suited to public sector management structures.
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 43 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page