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thinkahol *

It's Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment - 0 views

www.juancole.com/...ia-now-freer-than-the-u-s.html

It's Official: Tunisia Now Freer than the U.S. | Informed Comment

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11
     
    An Arab country with neither secret police nor censorship is unprecedented in recent decades. Tunisia is inspiring similar demands in Egypt and Jordan. When skeptics wonder if the Revolutions of 2011 would really change anything essential in the region, they would be wise to keep an eye on these two developments in Tunisia, which, if consolidated, would represent an epochal transformation of culture and politics. Arguably, Tunisians are now freer than Americans. The US government thinks our private emails are actually public. The FBI and NSA routinely read our email and they and other branches of the US government issue security letters in the place of warrants allowing them to tap phones and monitor whom we call, and even to call up our library records and conduct searches of our homes without telling us about it. Millions of telephone records were turned over to George W. Bush by our weaselly telecom companies. Courts allow government agents to sneak onto our property and put GPS tracking devices under our automobiles without so much as a warrant or even probable cause. Mr. Obama thinks this way of proceeding is a dandy idea.
thinkahol *

America Is NOT Broke - 0 views

readersupportednews.org/...5178-america-is-not-broke

America Is NOT Broke

shared by thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 09 Mar 11
     
    America is not broke. Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich. Today just 400 Americans have more wealth than half of all Americans combined. Let me say that again. 400 obscenely rich people, most of whom benefited in some way from the multi-trillion dollar taxpayer "bailout" of 2008, now have more loot, stock and property than the assets of 155 million Americans combined. If you can't bring yourself to call that a financial coup d'état, then you are simply not being honest about what you know in your heart to be true.
thinkahol *

The Exile Nation Project | Watch Free Documentary Online - 0 views

topdocumentaryfilms.com/exile-nation-project

The Exile Nation Project | Watch Free Documentary Online

shared by thinkahol * on 21 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 21 Apr 11
     
    The Land of the Free punishes or imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation. This collection of testimonials from criminal offenders, family members, and experts on America's criminal justice system puts a human face on the millions of Americans subjugated by the US Government's 40 year, one trillion dollar social catastrophe: The War on Drugs; a failed policy underscored by fear, politics, racial prejudice and intolerance in a public atmosphere of out of sight, out of mind. The United States has only 5% of the world's population, yet a full 25% of the world's prisoners. At 2.5 million, the US has more prisoners than even China does with five times the population of the United States. 8 million Americans (1 in every 31) languish under some form of state monitoring known as correctional supervision. On top of that, the security and livelihood of over 13 million more has been forever altered by a felony conviction. The American use of punishment is so pervasive, and so disproportionate, that even the conservative magazine The Economist declared in 2010, never in the civilized world have so many been locked up for so little. The project will unfold over a two year period, beginning with the release of this feature-length documentary and then continuing on with the release of short films and complete interviews from each of the 100 participants in the project, meant to represent the 1 in 100 Americans that are currently sitting behind bars.
thinkahol *

Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of the Deficit Discussion? | Common... - 0 views

www.commondreams.org/...12

Why is the Most Wasteful Government Agency Not Part of Deficit Discussion? | Common Dreams

shared by thinkahol * on 13 Jul 11 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 13 Jul 11
     
    In all the talk about the federal deficit, why is the single largest culprit left out of the conversation? Why is the one part of government that best epitomizes everything conservatives say they hate about government-- waste, incompetence, and corruption-all but exempt from conservative criticism? Of course, I'm talking about the Pentagon. Any serious battle plan to reduce the deficit must take on the Pentagon. In 2011 military spending accounted for more than 58 percent of all federal discretionary spending and even more if the interest on the federal debt that is related to military spending were added. In the last ten years we have spent more than $7.6 trillion on military and homeland security according to the National Priorities Project.
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 *

The revolution will be tweeted - science-in-society - 06 February 2012 - New Scientist - 0 views

www.newscientist.com/...evolution-will-be-tweeted.html

The revolution will be tweeted - science-in-society 06 February 2012 New Scientist

shared by thinkahol * on 06 Feb 12 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 06 Feb 12
     
    Economic meltdown, pro-democracy revolts, protest camps - it's kicking off everywhere. But was all this catalysed by new social media and technologies as many claimed? Paul Mason, a BBC correspondent who witnessed much of the unrest at first-hand, tells Liz Else that it's a lot subtler than that
Johann Höchtl

Facebook's friendship trap | Eleanor Mills - Times Online - 0 views

www.timesonline.co.uk/...article7139965.ece

SNS facebook socialmedia

shared by Johann Höchtl on 30 May 10 - Cached
  • Last week my vague feelings of unease about social networking were fanned by a fascinating study by the Mental Health Foundation, which blamed high levels of loneliness among young people on their use of virtual, rather than real, communication. Dubbed the “Eleanor Rigby generation”, those aged 18-34 (84% of whom use the internet regularly) are the most likely to be lonely, according to the report. And 31% admitted that they spent too much time online rather than face to face.
  • The psychologist Dr Aric Sigman says that social networking sites undermine social skills and the ability to read body language.
Judith Schossboeck

Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus - 1 views

www.niemanlab.org/...re-moral-choice-than-consuming

opengov opensociety transparency

shared by Judith Schossboeck on 29 Jun 10 - Cached
  • Judith Schossboeck on 29 Jun 10
     
    Shirky envisions an era of lower creative quality on average but greater innovation, an increase in transparency in all areas of society, and a dramatic rise in productivity that will transform our civilization. "[E]ven the banal uses of our creative capacity (posting YouTube videos of kittens on treadmills or writing bloviating blog posts) are still more creative and generous than watching TV. We don't really care how individuals create and share; it's enough that they exercise this kind of freedom."
thinkahol *

The New York Times > National > Portraits of Grief > Mohammad Salman Hamdani: An All-Am... - 0 views

events.nytimes.com/...POG-09HAMDANI.html

All-American Jedi

shared by thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 17 Aug 10
     
    More than anything else, Mohammad Salman Hamdani wanted people to see him for who he truly was, not for who he seemed to be.
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.
Judith Schossboeck

Twitter in Congress - Outreach vs. Transparency - 0 views

papers.ssrn.com/...papers.cfm

socielmedia gov20 twitter

shared by Judith Schossboeck on 03 Aug 10 - Cached
  • Judith Schossboeck on 03 Aug 10
     
    The paper provides some support in favor of Twitter adoption being driven by outreach reasons, rather than the well-popularized transparency motive. Furthermore, outreach considerations factor into a Republican's perceived benefit more than a Democrat's.
thinkahol *

YouTube - A Look at an American Propaganda Program. - 0 views

www.youtube.com/watch

american propaganda program DoD defense

shared by thinkahol * on 16 Aug 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 16 Aug 10
     
    April 22, 2008 Democracy Now! Pentagon's Pundits: A Look at the Defense Department's Propaganda Program The New York Times has revealed new details on how the Pentagon recruited more than seventy-five retired military officers to appear on TV outlets as so-called military analysts ahead of the Iraq war to portray Iraq as an urgent threat. The Times reported the Pentagon continues to use the analysts in a propaganda campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration's wartime performance. We speak with Col. Sam Gardiner (Ret.) and Peter Hart of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. (excerpt)
thinkahol *

The great management consultancy scam - and how it could be coming for your job : Johan... - 0 views

johannhari.com/...t-could-be-coming-for-your-job

management consultant

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10
     
    "In the long fake boom of the Nineties and Noughties, we were sold a thousand scams. End government regulation of the financial system! Turn banks into casinos! Pay CEOs 500 times more than their staff! Bow, bow, bow before our mansion-dwelling overlords and the Total Efficiency they will bring! Yet from under the rubble left by these delusions, one of the greatest scams has skipped out unscathed, and it is now successfully selling itself as a solution to the fading of the boom-light. It is probably in your workplace now, or coming soon. Its name? Management consultancy."
thinkahol *

The taming and domestication of religious faith is one of the unceasing chores of civil... - 0 views

www.slate.com/2266154

Christopher Hitchens

shared by thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10 - No Cached
  • thinkahol * on 07 Sep 10
     
    "A recent blizzard of liberal columns has framed the debate over American Islam as if it were no more than the most recent stage in the glorious history of our religious tolerance. This phrasing of the question has the (presumably intentional) effect of marginalizing doubts and of lumping any doubters with the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings, the anti-Semites, and other bigots and shellbacks. So I pause to take part in a thought experiment, and to ask myself: Am I in favor of the untrammeled "free exercise of religion"?"
Johann Höchtl

U.S. Teen Mobile Report: Calling Yesterday, Texting Today, Using Apps Tomorrow | Nielse... - 0 views

blog.nielsen.com/...ting-today-using-apps-tomorrow

cell phone teens nielsen usage data USA

shared by Johann Höchtl on 15 Oct 10 - No Cached
  • If it seems like American teens are texting all the time, it’s probably because on average they’re sending or receiving 3,339 texts a month.
  • No one texts more than teens (age 13-17), especially teen females, who send and receive an average of 4,050 texts per month. Teen males also outpace other male age groups, sending and receiving an average of 2,539 texts.
  • Texting is Easier and Faster than Voice Calls
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Texting is currently the centerpiece of mobile teen behavior. 43 percent claim it is their primary reason for getting a cellphone, which explains why QWERTY input is the first thing they look for choosing their devices.
  • Teens are not only using more data, but they are also downloading a wider range of applications. Software downloads among teen subscribers who use apps enjoyed a solid 12 percent increase in activity versus last year, from 26 to 38 percent.
Parycek

Americans give low marks to Obama transparency effort at agencies - 0 views

www.nextgov.com/...ng_20101020_9428.php

policy open government opendata opengov obama

shared by Parycek on 02 Nov 10 - No Cached
  • Parycek on 02 Nov 10
     
    The public isn't convinced that the Obama administration is being fully open with Americans, more than a year and a half after the president launched a governmentwide transparency effort, according to a new survey conducted by ForeSee Results and Nextgov.
thinkahol *

Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans - Andy Greenberg - The Firewal... - 0 views

blogs.forbes.com/...deployed-in-street-roving-vans

Full-Body Scan Technology Deployed In Street-Roving Vans - Andy Greenberg The Firewall Forbes

shared by thinkahol * on 30 Nov 10 - Cached
  • thinkahol * on 30 Nov 10
     
    Massachusetts company AS&E has sold more than 500 van-based scanners that can see through clothing and walls.
Parycek

Welcome to OData Primer - 1 views

odataprimer.com

data opendata opengov

shared by Parycek on 06 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • Parycek on 06 Dec 10
     
    Open Data Protocol (OData) is an open protocol for sharing data. It provides a way to break down data silos and increase the shared value of data by creating an ecosystem in which data consumers can interoperate with data producers in a way that is far more powerful than currently possible, enabling more applications to make sense of a broader set of data. Every producer and consumer of data that participates in this ecosystem increases its overall value.
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).
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