Group items tagged

Problems

n Government Data

data loss privatization mis-publication greater respect for privacy and other citizen concerns, and excessive secrecy

About a year ago I wrote a simple web application to present UK train times in a simple format for mobile phone users.

When I wrote the app none of the official train timetable sites could do this and I don’t believe any can now.

To reiterate – I built this because it was convenient and would be useful to others.  Not to make a profit. …and today National Rail killed it.

There are far too many sessions on journalism and policy, and far too little on doing science . . .

“killer app” that integrates social media into the mainstream of science.

Tools for doing science are much harder to envision and build.  But these sorts of tools are much more likely to see uptake and use by the community, simply because scientists are more interested in doing science than they are in talking about science.

Internet Surpasses Television as Main News Source for Young Adults

a study from the Pew Research Center

Tweet counts have increased from 5,000 daily in 2007 to 90 million daily in 2010, while Facebook () went from 30 million users in 2007 to more than 500 million users today

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.

The whole section "Minority investment evaluations aren’t real" is so economically bizarre and incorrect that I don't even know where to start. It's like you wrote a blog post arguing that it is incorrect to refer to a 5' tall boy as 5' tall because he's often sitting down. Every single day every single public company in the world is valued by the last share traded, usually for a tiny fraction of the company.Finally, to the main point. Facebook has certainly figured out how to make money off of 500,000,000 users. And as they optimize, they will make a lot more money. When they figure out how to make another DIME off of every user, they will instantly be making another $50,000,000 a year... in pure profit. How much profit will 37signals make if you figure out how to make another dime off of every customer? Eh David? Facebook works on the theory that when you have a lot of people, you don't have to make as much per person, because the amount of money you make is the number of customers times the amount of money you make off of each one. Again, that pesky multiplication.

The bond and equity markets are based on sound regulation, transparency, and quarterly statements. Facebook has none of those things when it operates in the dark of the secondary markets.

f you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long

You think your business is different, that you’re only going to have one shot at press and everything needs to be perfect for when Techcrunch brings the world to your door. But if you only have one shot at getting an audience, you’re doing it wrong.

In that short rapid iteration environment the most important thing isn’t necessarily how perfect code is when you send it out, but how quickly you can revert if you need to so the cost of a mistake is really low, under a minute of brokenness.

the hard reality is that much of the public has been left behind, or tacked on as an afterthought

So how can we support "data-literacy" across the full spectrum of users, including media, NGOs, labor unions, professional associations, religious groups, universities, and the public at large? Here's one approach. It's time and resource intensive, but crucial — institutionalizing data literacy across societies.

From an official and public service point of view information providers want openness biased towards information access. One tends to encourage participation, but this is understood as mechanisms facilitating feedback, not as tools making the public producers of content. From a commercial point of view information providers also want to facilitate easy access, but these actors also have strong interests in encouraging openness with users acting as producers of content. These actors are more likely to develop an understanding of the “quality of information” with a bias towards information’s ability to appeal and engage an audience

Die Zeiten, in den sich der Informationsfluss in der arabischen Welt einfach staatlicherseits kontrollieren ließ, sind vorbei.Und es sind vor allem die Neuen Medien wie das Soziale Netzwerk Facebook, die Internet-Tagebücher der Blogger und der Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter, auf denen sich Nachrichten, die den arabischen Regierungen nicht genehm sind, wie ein Lauffeuer verbreiten.

Mehr Facebook-User als ZeitungsleserDas Internet ist für das Regime in Ägypten zum Oppositionsführer geworden. Gerade Facebook wird nicht nur in Ägypten, sondern überall in der arabischen Welt zu einem wichtigen Kommunikationsmittel, jenseits der staatlichen Zensur und der roten Linien, an die sich auch die unabhängige Presse halten muss. In der arabischen Welt gibt es inzwischen laut einer Studie der Agentur Spot on Public Relation in Dubai mehr Facebook-Nutzer als Zeitungsleser.

Demnach nutzen 15 Millionen Menschen in der arabischen Welt Facebook, verglichen mit der Auflage von etwas weniger als 14 Millionen Zeitungen, die auf Arabisch, Englisch und Französisch in der Region erscheinen."Wie ein Virus""Facebook und andere Social Networks beginnen nun zu definieren, wie Menschen Informationen entdecken und teilen und wie sie sich eine Meinung bilden", sagt Carington Malin, Vorstand von Spot on Public Relation.

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.

privacy advocates are pushing for a similar “do not track” feature that would let Internet users tell Web sites to stop surreptitiously tracking their online habits and collecting clues about age, salary, health, location and leisure activities.

Consumer advocates worry that the competing agendas of economic policy makers in the Obama administration, who want uniform international standards, and federal regulators, who are trying to balance consumer protection and commercial rights, will neglect the interests of people most affected by the privacy policies.

In the 1990s, the Commerce Department had an extremely prominent role in developing what we think of as Internet policy, and we are reinvigorating that historical role