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Javier E

A Super-Simple Way to Understand the Net Neutrality Debate - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-net-neutrality-debate.html

net-neutrality

shared by Javier E on 11 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • there is a really simple way of thinking of the debate over net neutrality: Is access to the Internet more like access to electricity, or more like cable television service?
  • For all the technical complexity of generating electricity and distributing it to millions of people, the economic arrangement is very simple: I give them money. They give me electricity. I do with it what I will.
  • Comcast, my cable provider, offers me a menu of packages from which I might choose, each with a different mix of channels. It goes through long and sometimes arduous negotiations with the owners of those cable channels and has a different business arrangement with each of them. The details of those arrangements are opaque to me as the consumer; all I know is that I can get the movie package for X dollars a month or the sports package for Y dollars and so on.
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  • One theory of the case, and the one that the Obama administration embraced Monday, is that the Internet is like electricity. It is fundamental to the 21st century economy, as essential to functioning in modern society as electricity. It is a public utility. “We cannot allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas,” the president said in his written statement.
  • just as your electric utility has no say in how you use the electricity they sell you, the Internet should be a reliable way to access content produced by anyone, regardless of whether they have any special business arrangement with the utility.
  • Those arguing against net neutrality, most significantly the cable companies, say the Internet will be a richer experience if the profit motive applies, if they can negotiate deals with major content providers (the equivalent of cable channels) so that Netflix or Hulu or other streaming services that use huge bandwidth have to pay for the privilege.
  • It would also give your Internet provider considerably more economic leverage. It would, in the non-net-neutrality world, be free to throttle the speed with which you could access services that don’t pay up, or block sites entirely, as surely as you cannot watch a cable channel that your cable provider chooses not to offer (perhaps because of a dispute with the channel over fees).
Javier E

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - 0 views

andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/...beyond-billboards.html

Christianity Christmas myth sin

shared by Javier E on 12 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • The Atlantic Home todaysDate();Sunday, December 12, 2010Sunday, December 12, 2010 Go Follow the Atlantic » atlanticPrintlayoutnavigation()Politics Presented ByBack to the Gold Standard? Joshua GreenSenate Dems Lose Vote on 'Don't Ask' RepealMegan Scully & Dan FriedmanA Primary Challenge to Obama? Marc Ambinder Business Presented byif (typeof window.dartOrd == 'undefined') {window.dartOrd = ('000000000' + Math.ceil(Math.random()*1000000000).toString()).slice(-9);}jsProperties = 'TheAtlanticOnline/channel_business;pos=navlogo;sz=88x31,215x64;tile=1';document.write('');if( $(".adNavlogo").html().search("grey.gif") != -1 ){$(".adNavlogo").hide();}Will the Economy Get Jobs for Christmas?Daniel Indiviglio27 Key Facts About US ExportsDerek ThompsonThe Last StimulusDerek Thompson Culture Presented ByThe 10 Biggest Sports Stories of 2010Eleanor Barkhorn and Kevin Fallon al
  • at the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.
runlai_jiang

Tech Tent: The woes of the world wide web - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...technology-43343958

net neutrality

shared by runlai_jiang on 11 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Sir Tim Berners-Lee tells Tech Tent that he has become less optimistic about the beneficial effects of his creation - but the web's founder is up for a fight about what he regards as a vital principle, net neutrality.
  • Both he and other web pioneers were hugely optimistic about its potential to foster collaboration and an open exchange of views. "Humanity once connected by technology would do wonderful things," he says.
  • In the United States the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has moved to scrap the net neutrality regulation brought in by the Obama administration.
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  • He had told the FCC boss that advances in computer processing power had made it easier for internet service providers to discriminate against certain web users for commercial or political reasons, perhaps slowing down traffic to one political party's website or making it harder for a rival company to process payments.
  • For Johnny Hornby of the advertising firm The&Partnership, the worry is the lack of control that the internet giants appear to have over the content that appears on their platforms.
  • The internet once seemed to promise perfectly targeted advertising that pleased both consumers and the companies trying to reach them: - another utopian vision that is now looking a bit frayed around the edges.
Javier E

Here is the news - but only if Facebook thinks you need to know | John Naughton | Opini... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...s-publishers-feeding-the-beast

media algorithm facebook social media news power influence

shared by Javier E on 16 May 16 - No Cached
  • power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think
  • This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented.
  • For a long time, Google was the 800lb gorilla in this domain, because its dominance of search determined what people could find in the unimaginable wastelands of cyberspace
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  • search could be – and was – personalised, because Google’s algorithms could figure out what each user was most likely to be interested in, and therefore what kinds of information would be most relevant for her or him. So, imperceptibly, but inexorably over time, we have come to live in what Eli Pariser christened a “filter bubble”.
  • Before the internet, our problem with information was its scarcity. Now our problem is unmanageable abundance. So now the scarce resources are attention and time, over which a vicious war has broken out between traditional media and the internet-based upstarts.
  • YouTube has a billion users, half of whom access it via mobile devices. The average time spent on the site is 40 minutes. Facebook now claims to have 1.65 billion monthly active users, who spend on average 50 minutes a day on its services. So if Google is an 800lb gorilla, Facebook is a megaton King Kong.
  • Competition for attention and time is a zero-sum game that traditional media are losing. In desperation, they are trying both to appease Facebook and to harness its hold on people’s attention
  • In doing so, they have entered into a truly Faustian bargain. Because while publishers can without difficulty ship their stuff to Instant Articles, they cannot control which ones Facebook users actually get to see. This is because users’ news feeds are determined by Facebook’s machine-learning algorithms that try to guess what each user would like to see (and what might dispose them to click on an advertisement).
  • when you ask – as Professor George Brock memorably did – whether Mark Zuckerberg and his satraps understand that they have acquired editorial responsibilities, they look blank. Facebook is not a publisher, they explain, merely a “platform”. And, besides, no humans are involved in curating users’ news feeds: it’s all done by algorithms and is therefore neutral. In other words: nothing to see here; move on.
  • Any algorithm that has to make choices has criteria that are specified by its designers. And those criteria are expressions of human values. Engineers may think they are “neutral”, but long experience has shown us they are babes in the woods of politics, economics and ideology.
Javier E

[Six Questions] | Astra Taylor on The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture ... - 1 views

harpers.org/...taylor-on-the-peoples-platform

monopoly Internet libertarian media market freedom capitalism Big Data discrimination centralization commercial

shared by Javier E on 12 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Astra Taylor, a cultural critic and the director of the documentaries Zizek! and Examined Life, challenges the notion that the Internet has brought us into an age of cultural democracy. While some have hailed the medium as a platform for diverse voices and the free exchange of information and ideas, Taylor shows that these assumptions are suspect at best. Instead, she argues, the new cultural order looks much like the old: big voices overshadow small ones, content is sensationalist and powered by advertisements, quality work is underfunded, and corporate giants like Google and Facebook rule. The Internet does offer promising tools, Taylor writes, but a cultural democracy will be born only if we work collaboratively to develop the potential of this powerful resource
  • Most people don’t realize how little information can be conveyed in a feature film. The transcripts of both of my movies are probably equivalent in length to a Harper’s cover story.
  • why should Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google get a free pass? Why should we expect them to behave any differently over the long term? The tradition of progressive media criticism that came out of the Frankfurt School, not to mention the basic concept of political economy (looking at the way business interests shape the cultural landscape), was nowhere to be seen, and that worried me. It’s not like political economy became irrelevant the second the Internet was invented.
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  • How do we reconcile our enjoyment of social media even as we understand that the corporations who control them aren’t always acting in our best interests?
  • hat was because the underlying economic conditions hadn’t been changed or “disrupted,” to use a favorite Silicon Valley phrase. Google has to serve its shareholders, just like NBCUniversal does. As a result, many of the unappealing aspects of the legacy-media model have simply carried over into a digital age — namely, commercialism, consolidation, and centralization. In fact, the new system is even more dependent on advertising dollars than the one that preceded it, and digital advertising is far more invasive and ubiquitous
  • the popular narrative — new communications technologies would topple the establishment and empower regular people — didn’t accurately capture reality. Something more complex and predictable was happening. The old-media dinosaurs weren’t dying out, but were adapting to the online environment; meanwhile the new tech titans were coming increasingly to resemble their predecessors
  • I use lots of products that are created by companies whose business practices I object to and that don’t act in my best interests, or the best interests of workers or the environment — we all do, since that’s part of living under capitalism. That said, I refuse to invest so much in any platform that I can’t quit without remorse
  • these services aren’t free even if we don’t pay money for them; we pay with our personal data, with our privacy. This feeds into the larger surveillance debate, since government snooping piggybacks on corporate data collection. As I argue in the book, there are also negative cultural consequences (e.g., when advertisers are paying the tab we get more of the kind of culture marketers like to associate themselves with and less of the stuff they don’t) and worrying social costs. For example, the White House and the Federal Trade Commission have both recently warned that the era of “big data” opens new avenues of discrimination and may erode hard-won consumer protections.
  • I’m resistant to the tendency to place this responsibility solely on the shoulders of users. Gadgets and platforms are designed to be addictive, with every element from color schemes to headlines carefully tested to maximize clickability and engagement. The recent news that Facebook tweaked its algorithms for a week in 2012, showing hundreds of thousands of users only “happy” or “sad” posts in order to study emotional contagion — in other words, to manipulate people’s mental states — is further evidence that these platforms are not neutral. In the end, Facebook wants us to feel the emotion of wanting to visit Facebook frequently
  • social inequalities that exist in the real world remain meaningful online. What are the particular dangers of discrimination on the Internet?
  • That it’s invisible or at least harder to track and prove. We haven’t figured out how to deal with the unique ways prejudice plays out over digital channels, and that’s partly because some folks can’t accept the fact that discrimination persists online. (After all, there is no sign on the door that reads Minorities Not Allowed.)
  • just because the Internet is open doesn’t mean it’s equal; offline hierarchies carry over to the online world and are even amplified there. For the past year or so, there has been a lively discussion taking place about the disproportionate and often outrageous sexual harassment women face simply for entering virtual space and asserting themselves there — research verifies that female Internet users are dramatically more likely to be threatened or stalked than their male counterparts — and yet there is very little agreement about what, if anything, can be done to address the problem.
  • What steps can we take to encourage better representation of independent and non-commercial media? We need to fund it, first and foremost. As individuals this means paying for the stuff we believe in and want to see thrive. But I don’t think enlightened consumption can get us where we need to go on its own. I’m skeptical of the idea that we can shop our way to a better world. The dominance of commercial media is a social and political problem that demands a collective solution, so I make an argument for state funding and propose a reconceptualization of public media. More generally, I’m struck by the fact that we use these civic-minded metaphors, calling Google Books a “library” or Twitter a “town square” — or even calling social media “social” — but real public options are off the table, at least in the United States. We hand the digital commons over to private corporations at our peril.
  • 6. You advocate for greater government regulation of the Internet. Why is this important?
  • I’m for regulating specific things, like Internet access, which is what the fight for net neutrality is ultimately about. We also need stronger privacy protections and restrictions on data gathering, retention, and use, which won’t happen without a fight.
  • I challenge the techno-libertarian insistence that the government has no productive role to play and that it needs to keep its hands off the Internet for fear that it will be “broken.” The Internet and personal computing as we know them wouldn’t exist without state investment and innovation, so let’s be real.
  • there’s a pervasive and ill-advised faith that technology will promote competition if left to its own devices (“competition is a click away,” tech executives like to say), but that’s not true for a variety of reasons. The paradox of our current media landscape is this: our devices and consumption patterns are ever more personalized, yet we’re simultaneously connected to this immense, opaque, centralized infrastructure. We’re all dependent on a handful of firms that are effectively monopolies — from Time Warner and Comcast on up to Google and Facebook — and we’re seeing increased vertical integration, with companies acting as both distributors and creators of content. Amazon aspires to be the bookstore, the bookshelf, and the book. Google isn’t just a search engine, a popular browser, and an operating system; it also invests in original content
  • So it’s not that the Internet needs to be regulated but that these big tech corporations need to be subject to governmental oversight. After all, they are reaching farther and farther into our intimate lives. They’re watching us. Someone should be watching them.
Javier E

Facebook's Troubling One-Way Mirror - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-troubling-one-way-mirror.html

facebook psychology social media

shared by Javier E on 23 May 16 - No Cached
  • If you bothered to read the fine print when you created your Facebook account, you would have noticed just how much of yourself you were giving over to Mark Zuckerberg and his $340 billion social network.
  • In exchange for an admittedly magical level of connectivity, you were giving them your life as content — the right to run ads around video from your daughter’s basketball game; pictures from your off-the-chain birthday party, or an emotional note about your return to health after serious illness. You also gave them the right to use your information to help advertisers market to you
  • at the heart of the relationship is a level of trust and a waiving of privacy that Facebook requires from its users as it pursues its mission to “make the world more open and connected.”
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  • how open is Facebook willing to be in return?
  • not very.
  • that should concern anyone of any political persuasion as Facebook continues to gain influence over the national — and international — conversation
  • Increasingly, those users are spending time on Facebook not only to share personal nuggets with friends, but, for more than 40 percent of American adults, according to Pew Research Center, to stay on top of news
  • It now has an inordinate power to control a good part of the national discussion should it choose to do so, a role it shares with Sili
  • There was the initial statement that Facebook could find “no evidence” supporting the allegations; Facebook said it did not “insert stories artificially” into the Trending list, and that it had “rigorous guidelines” to ensure neutrality. But when journalists like my colleague Farhad Manjoo asked for more details about editorial guidelines, the company declined to discuss them.
  • Only after The Guardian newspaper obtained an old copy of the Trending Topics guidelines did Facebook provide more information, and an up-to-date copy of them. (They showed that humans work with algorithms to shape the lists and introduce headlines on their own under some circumstances, contradicting Facebook’s initial statement, Recode noted.) It was openness by way of a bullet to the foot.
  • a more important issue emerged during the meeting that had been lying beneath the surface, and has been for a while now: the power of the algorithms that determine what goes into individual Facebook pages.
  • “What they have is a disproportionate amount of power, and that’s the real story,” Mr. Carlson told me. “It’s just concentrated in a way you’ve never seen before in media.”
  • What most people don’t realize is that not everything they like or share necessarily gets a prominent place in their friends’ newsfeeds: The Facebook algorithm sends it to those it determines will find it most engaging.
  • For outlets like The Daily Caller, The Huffington Post, The Washington Post or The New York Times — for whom Facebook’s audience is vital to growth — any algorithmic change can affect how many people see their journalism.
  • This gives Facebook enormous influence over how newsrooms, almost universally eager for Facebook exposure, make decisions and money. Alan Rusbridger, a former editor of The Guardian, called this a “profound and alarming” development in a column in The New Statesman last week.
  • , Facebook declines to talk in great detail about its algorithms, noting that it does not want to make it easy to game its system. That system, don’t forget, is devised to keep people on Facebook by giving them what they want
Javier E

Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?: Scientific American - 0 views

www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm

brain work energy reseach calories thinking

shared by Javier E on 24 Jul 12 - Cached
  • Just as vigorous exercise tires our bodies, intellectual exertion should drain the brain. What the latest science reveals, however, is that the popular notion of mental exhaustion is too simplistic. The brain continuously slurps up huge amounts of energy for an organ of its size, regardless of whether we are tackling integral calculus or clicking through the week's top 10 LOLcats. Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more.
  • something must explain the feeling of mental exhaustion, even if its physiology differs from physical fatigue. Simply believing that our brains have expended a lot of effort might be enough to make us lethargic.
  • a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.
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  • Such fatigue seems much more likely to follow sustained mental effort that we do not seek for pleasure—such as the obligatory SAT—especially when we expect that the ordeal will drain our brains. If we think an exam or puzzle will be difficult, it often will be.
  • people routinely enjoy intellectually invigorating activities without suffering mental exhaustion.
  • Studies have shown that something similar happens when people exercise and play sports: a large component of physical exhaustion is in our heads. In related research, volunteers that cycled on an exercise bike following a 90-minute computerized test of sustained attention quit pedaling from exhaustion sooner than participants that watched emotionally neutral documentaries before exercising
  • In the specific case of the SAT, something beyond pure mental effort likely contributes to post-exam stupor: stress. After all, the brain does not function in a vacuum. Other organs burn up energy, too. Taking an exam that partially determines where one will spend the next four years is nerve-racking enough to send stress hormones swimming through the blood stream, induce sweating, quicken heart rates and encourage fidgeting and contorted body postures. The SAT and similar trials are not just mentally taxing—they are physically exhausting, too.
grayton downing

In Syria, Doctors Risk Life and Juggle Ethics - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...sk-life-and-juggle-ethics.html

syria doctors life ethics science research social media

shared by grayton downing on 22 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Majid, who gave only his first name to protect his safety, collected hair and urine samples, clothing, tree leaves, soil and even a dead bird. He shared it with the Syrian American Medical Society, a humanitarian group that had been delivering such samples to American intelligence officials, as proof of possible chemical attacks.
  • United Nations inspectors have taken the first steps to destroy Syria’s chemical stockpile.
  • Many Syrian doctors have fled; those who remain describe dire conditions where even the most basic care is not available.
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  • Mothers are desperate to have their children vaccinated; patients with chronic conditions like heart disease and diabetes struggle to get medicine; and there is “huge anxiety in the population,”
  • On Aug. 21, the group got word from some of its “silent partner” hospitals of a flood of patients with “neurotoxic symptoms” — roughly 3,600 in a period of three hours, including 355 who died.
  • The debate over whether doctors should expose human rights abuses has long been “one of these inside baseball arguments within the humanitarian community,” said Len Rubenstein, an expert on human rights and medical ethics at Johns Hopkins University. While Doctors Without Borders has a culture of “bearing witness,” he said, not all humanitarian organizations do.
  • The International Committee of the Red Cross, for instance, adheres to a strict code of political neutrality;
Javier E

George Soros: Facebook and Google a menace to society | Business | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...google-are-a-menace-to-society

fb social media google criticism democracy surveillance addiction innovation monopoly culture politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • Facebook and Google have become “obstacles to innovation” and are a “menace” to society whose “days are numbered”
  • “Mining and oil companies exploit the physical environment; social media companies exploit the social environment,” said the Hungarian-American businessman, according to a transcript of his speech.
  • “This is particularly nefarious because social media companies influence how people think and behave without them even being aware of it. This has far-reaching adverse consequences on the functioning of democracy, particularly on the integrity of elections.”
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  • In addition to skewing democracy, social media companies “deceive their users by manipulating their attention and directing it towards their own commercial purposes” and “deliberately engineer addiction to the services they provide”. The latter, he said, “can be very harmful, particularly for adolescents”
  • There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences.”
  • Soros warned of an “even more alarming prospect” on the horizon if data-rich internet companies such as Facebook and Google paired their corporate surveillance systems with state-sponsored surveillance – a trend that’s already emerging in places such as the Philippines.
  • “This may well result in a web of totalitarian control the likes of which not even Aldous Huxley or George Orwell could have imagined,”
  • “The internet monopolies have neither the will nor the inclination to protect society against the consequences of their actions. That turns them into a menace and it falls to the regulatory authorities to protect society against them,
  • He also echoed the words of world wide web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee when he said the tech giants had become “obstacles to innovation” that need to be regulated as public utilities “aimed at preserving competition, innovation and fair and open universal access”.
  • Earlier this week, Salesforce’s chief executive, Marc Benioff, said that Facebook should be regulated like a cigarette company because it’s addictive and harmful.
  • In November, Roger McNamee, who was an early investor in Facebook, described Facebook and Google as threats to public health.
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