Networks Understanding Networks @ MIT Media Lab, October 2011.
Economies are networks of businesses, just as businesses are networks of people, and people are networks of cells. Networks are everywhere, and the MIT Media Lab's fall member event celebrated their ubiquity by exploring how these structured interactions affect our economy, businesses, health, and even the way we understand ourselves.
Anne-Marie Slaughter speaks on the need for government to encourage local, self-organizing social action, rather than excessive strategizing photo by Kris Krüg for PopTech
You are a specialist on RtL languages. How many people start writing on the right and does this not smear the ink when you move while writing to the left ?
These are actually two questions :)
I’ll start with the second: no, it doesn’t smear the ink. I don’t remember that it ever bothered me, and to make sure i just tested it on a piece of paper. Several times i read the claim that that was the reason the Greeks switched to writing left-to-right when they adapted the Phoenician alphabet (the older version of Hebrew) to their language, but unless I am missing something that just doesn’t seem to be a good reason.
An effort to crowdsource information on radiation levels in Japan in the wake of the March earthquake and tsunami will expand, with new funding from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Citizen scientists and researchers in Japan working with the group Safecast will receive an increased supply of sensors and measurement devices and a revamp of the software used to process and store the data collected.
Last year, Sarah Fortune came to PopTech looking for a solution. The 2010 PopTech Science Fellow and researcher at the Harvard School of Public Health had hit a wall in her research on Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis. She needed a way to analyze streams of images of the bacteria -- as quickly and cheaply as possible -- or one line of her research would stall.
“I thought maybe we could crowdsource it,” she recalled yesterday in front of a packed house at PopTech 2011. “So I asked onstage, ‘Is there an app for that?’ Unbelievably, someone in the audience called out and then made it happen.”
That someone was Josh Nesbit, a 2009 Social Innovation Fellow, who connected Fortune to Lukas Biewald, co-founder of CrowdFlower, an Internet-based crowdsourcing company. The rest, as they say, is history.
The conversations are abuzz with people talking about politics, protests and what the future holds for the country. I will be in Egypt for the next nine days, as well as in Qatar for the Arabic Wikipedia Convening and in Jordan to research opportunities in the academic community as we find professors interested in adopting a project called the Global Education Program.
I have been tasked by the Wikimedia Foundation to help with an initiative that aims to increase Arabic Wikipedia content, as alluded to in this recent post about the Arabic Catalyst Project.
Yesterday morning, in your presentation at PopTech, you showed a few examples of mobile photography exhibits -- on rickshaws and tuk tuks -- going places where that kind of exhibit has never been before. You called it “Taking the Gallery to the People.” Why was it important to you to get photographs out of galleries and out of the city?
In some ways, I am part of the problem I’ve been describing. I’m a middle-class male photographer. If I were in a slum, photographing a woman who probably doesn’t have a door to slam in my face in the first place, the power relationship between the two of us would not be very different than the power relationship between her and a Western photographer. We are perpetuating a situation in which the disenfranchised do not have the opportunity to tell their stories. To address this, we started doing two things: One was training women photographers; the other thing was teaching working-class children photography. I’ve very happy that today our agency has a large number of women and people who have come from a middle-class background. And they have a very different story to tell.
Founder of Malaysia’s most popular independent online news source, Premesh Chandran continues to connect and empower citizens despite the personal risks.
What are the risks you run by operating Malaysiakini, and what compelled you to found Malaysiakini despite those risks?
There is great risk: laws that allow for detention in jail without the right to a trial, or media laws like sedition that allow you to be jailed, depending on what you publish.
Join the conversation by answering Fellows’ weekly questions via TED Conversations. This week, Prem asks:
We’re coming up with easy tools to build exciting online maps, what stuff would you like to see on a map?
Great shot of the TEDxUlaanbaatar organizing team. "With our first TEDxUlaanbaatar event, we hope to debut Mongolia to the TED community through a new lens, focusing on Mongolia’s rich past and promising future. In a blend of both Mongolians and expatriates, our team of organizers, contributors, and speakers are all working towards Mongolia’s LEGACY: Honoring Tradition, Designing the Future."
You and thousands of others around the world are contributing to an explosion of openness. From individual creators inviting collaborations, to national governments unlocking publicly funded work, the spirit and practice of sharing is snowballing—making a huge difference in the growth of educational, artistic, and scientific creativity and innovation.
Your donation can also make a difference by helping Creative Commons continue growing the technology and legal tools that help make sharing on the Internet possible. Click below to make a gift.
As you may remember, the LRMI Technical Working Group, with the input of the wider community, has been working to create a set of metadata terms to describe learning resources. This set of terms is being developed with the goal of gaining acceptance into the Schema.org specification.
Today I am pleased to share with you the current draft version of the LRMI specification. We are sharing this now so that the wider community has a chance to review and make comments. We know, as well as anyone, that sharing early drafts of the work product is a great way of improving the end result.
On Sunday, Tunisia will hold elections for the constituent assembly that will be tasked with re-writing the country's constitution. While much of the news coverage focuses on the question of how well the Islamist parties will do in relation to the more secular political forces, reports are quoting election observers and human rights groups who are optimistic that people are serious about the process of holding a real election. While this first election is only the first step in a long and winding path that may or may not succeed in establishing a vibrant Arab democracy in North Africa, people are full of hope.
Censorship is a key subject in the Tunisian political discoure and debates. There have recently been protests by conservatives demanding censorship of all media including TV, film, and Internet and protests by liberals against censorship. After all Internet censorship was lifted when Ben Ali stepped down in January, some censorship of pornographic and incendiary web content returned in May, prompting heated debates over who has the authority to decide what goes on the censorship list and whether that power will inevitably be abused.
Various members of the P2PU community have submitted some brilliant proposals for next year’s SXSWEdu. If you have a moment, it would be great if you could vote for the sessions on Panel Picker.
Here are a few suggestions for ways that a city can encourage people to share what they have in their homes. We encourage readers to post additional suggestions in the comments area
We wanted to find out if we could find some of the world’s best programmers using similar means, to cultivate potential future volunteers and job candidates. Thus, the idea of the Coding Challenge was born. The Coding Challenge will run until November 7, 2011, 23:59 UTC.
Grand prize winners for each challenge will receive an all-expenses paid trip to a Wikimedia event of their choice in 2012. Other winners will receive a certificate of coding excellence from the Wikimedia Foundation (a great addition to anyone's CV.)
Select your challenge:
1. Mobile Photo Upload
2. Making Wikipedia More Alive
3. Wikipedia Slideshow
On Oct. 3rd, we are honored to host the first ever TEDx China organizer workshop in Guangzhou. It was one of the most exciting events in recent months. There are over 50 TEDx organizers coming to this workshop. The air in the room was filled with energy from all these amazing people who shared the love for “ideas worth spreading”.
MIAMI - A new program which builds on the role libraries play as places of innovation and exploration is headed for the North Dade Regional Library. This innovative program will teach teens to use technology as a way to tell their stories and engage with the world around them in powerful and new ways.
Last week at the Web 2.0 Expo, I gave a talk on The Opportunity for Civic Startups. I was filling in for Code for America‘s Jen Pahlka, and the presentation itself is an hybrid of a version I did at the t=0 Entrepreneurship Festival at MIT a few weeks ago, a version Jen did at Future of Web Apps earlier this year and a version that Andrew McLaughlin has been giving. Here are my slides.
I broke it down into two main sections: (1) trends that are setting the stage for civic startups, and (2) models/approaches that civic startups are following. Unfortunately, the timing of the speaker notes on slideshare doesn’t match the slides, so the notes are in off by a few slides, but you can get the idea.
This isn’t just an idle boast either — Twitter’s commitment to this principle has been put to the test more than once already. In Britain, the company was hauled on the carpet by the British authorities along with Facebook and Research In Motion after the riots in London, because the governing party was considering blocking access to networks such as Twitter and BlackBerry instant messaging. In his Web 2.0 interview, Costolo said that the company resisted this idea, and instead pointed out that many of the Twitter messages about the riot were actually about cleaning up or promoting good behavior rather than inciting violence as many critics of the service seemed to suggest.
Costolo also talked about Twitter’s philosophy about free speech. “We’re the free speech wing of the free speech party,” he said. Twitter, of course, has been instrumental in helping people organize protests in Egypt, Tunisia and the U.S., including the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Twitter can effect such social change in part because people can use pseudonyms but are discouraged or prevented from doing so on Facebook and Google+ social networks. “We respect and defend the user’s voice,” Costolo said.
He also reiterated Twitter’s stance to protect the privacy of its users and recounted the company’s brush with the U.S. government nearly a year ago. The U.S. obtained a court order asking that Twitter hand over information about four accounts of Twitter users in connection with an investigation of WikiLeaks.
TEDxSummit is a week-long event exclusively for TEDx organizers. Hosted by the Doha Film Institute (DFI), the inaugural event will gather TEDx organizers from around the world for a week of workshops, talks and cultural activities. At TEDxSummit, TEDx organizers will meet, share ideas, collaborate and brainstorm. Top TED and TEDx speakers from across the globe will give talks throughout the course of the week.
Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That's our commitment. And we need your help. Please support the Wikimedia Foundation by donating today.
Admirers of Chen Guangcheng, a lawyer who exposed forced sterilizations and abortions, have been beaten and rebuffed while trying to visit his village — but their numbers are growing.
Occupy Wall Street and the global “Occupy” protest movement have brought the issue of search and seizure of data on cellphones to the forefront in the United States and around the democratic world. Police have been seizing and searching the phones of protesters with the legal justification that they believe that phones contain evidence of crimes and and that the phone owner is planning to destroy the evidence. As Rebecca Rosen reports at the Atlantic, within the United States there isn't a clear policy on the issue and it varies state by state. The Supreme Court has recently denied a hearing on the issue, so Americans will have to wait for a clear answer on the issue. Meanwhile, there is the EFF's Cell Phone Guide for Occupy Wall Street (and Everyone Else).
I’m Quinn Norton, and for the next few months I’ll be your guide to the #OccupyWallStreet (#ows) protests as they move across the internet and the world.
I’ll be staying on top of the latest big news for Threat Level as best I can in the #occupations all over America and the world, but more than that I’ll be bringing you analysis of the methods and the meaning of the #occupation.
During the same time I’ll cover a separate but not unrelated phenomenon: the rise of Anonymous. I’ll be writing a concise history of the lulzy collective, and will explain their social structure and the patterns of their values. I’ll document their exploits and raids as they arise, but I will never seek to unmask any Anons.
Beth Coleman presents some of her recent research on the protests in Tahrir square, and a broader theory of how social networks and activism in the physical world work together today at the Berkman Center. With her is Mike Ananny, her coauthor and researcher in danah boyd’s lab at Microsoft Research. The presentation, “Tweeting the Revolution”, tries to understand how we read large data sets to understand located action. This is a timely topic because we’re seeing a rise in protest activity that’s been missing from the public sphere for a few decades. Coleman wants to know what we can understand about social media and people’s willingness to take an activist stance. One of the foci of her work is the idea of mediated copresence, which she sees as a major way of understanding the relationship between technology and public action.
Tahrir Square offers an opportunity to think through the relationship between three types of speech:
- Public speech, the broadcast of information to a broad audience
- Civic speech, speech within the networks of your located environment
- Poetic speech, speech about expressing needs and interests
CubeStormer II solves the Rubik's Cube puzzle faster than the human world record.
This ARM Powered robot was designed, built and programmed by Mike Dobson and David Gilday, creators respectively of CubeStormer http://youtu.be/eaRcWB3jwMo and Android Speedcuber http://youtu.be/ylFb4pqAUd8.
#OccupyWallStreet is a hashtag revolt. As I learned with my own little #FuckYouWashington uprising, a hashtag has no owner, no heirarchy, no canon or credo. It is a blank slate onto which anyone may impose his or her frustrations, complaints, demands, wishes, or principles.
So I will impose mine. #OccupyWallStreet, to me, is about institutional failure. And so it is appropriate that #OccupyWallStreet itself is not run as an institution.
Meanwhile, its opposite, Anonymous, became synonymous for many with sheer chaos, whether they were attacking online businesses or careless celebrities. Fights over pseudonyms and identity verification at Google+ (aka “the Nym Wars“) only showed that sorting out online identity had reached an unhappy, polarized stalemate.
Christopher “moot” Poole, founder of message- and mediaboards 4chan and Canvas, might seem like an unlikely voice to advance or complicate this discussion.
“Facebook and Google do identity wrong, Twitter does it better,” is the most oft repeated soundbite from 4Chan founder’s Christopher Poole’s Web 2.0 Summit talk today. Actually the truth is a bit more complex than that, when talking about something as intangible and as in flux as the concept of identity online.
A new project is finding a way to connect protesters and designers. Last weekend, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C. hosted spontaneous "Hackathons" to brainstorm how to use various platforms to help Occupy Wall Street. One of the ideas hatched was Occupy Design, a new website that gives a "visual language" to protesters across the country. Jake Levitas, a designer from San Francisco who's heading up the project, says it's a chance to fight back at media who characterize the movement as directionless.
Towards the Development of internet in Tunisia: highlights on the importance of acting according to a clear strategy that needs to be adopted in the future for the development of Internet and broadband in Tunisia.
Isaac Mao was chosen Open Minded of the month of June. Here you can enjoy reading the complete interview that he granted us in those days.
It’s hard to imagine a society based on generosity and, at the same time, driven by the free market; don’t you agree?
It’s true. But capitalism has to evolve. It has been confirmed that the free market can also prove fatal for economies. Therefore, we need to modify the bases of capitalism. To find some slightly different foundations that allow for trust. And through trust, collaboration will come.
In reality, what you are proposing is that society be governed by Sharism…
Yes, exactly. As a result of my experience as businessperson and internaut, I realized that there are alternative business models and ways of relating based on people’s willingness to share. This tendency, which was already demonstrated by our ancestors, was brought back to life in the habitat of Internet some ten years ago, thanks to the blogger movement at first, and subsequently to 2.0 tools and social networks.
“The revolution will be Twittered!” declared journalist Andrew Sullivan after protests erupted in Iran in June 2009. Yet for all the talk about the democratizing power of the Internet, regimes in Iran and China are as stable and repressive as ever. In fact, authoritarian governments are effectively using the Internet to suppress free speech, hone their surveillance techniques, disseminate cutting-edge propaganda, and pacify their populations with digital entertainment. Could the recent Western obsession with promoting democracy by digital means backfire?
In this spirited book, journalist and social commentator Evgeny Morozov shows that by falling for the supposedly democratizing nature of the Internet, Western do-gooders may have missed how it also entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it harder—not easier—to promote democracy. Buzzwords like “21st-century statecraft” sound good in PowerPoint presentations, but the reality is that “digital diplomacy” requires just as much oversight and consideration as any other kind of diplomacy.
A global shift is under way. The world is rebalancing. PopTech 2011 looks ahead at the new rule sets, opportunities and imperatives that this great rebalancing might bring.
October 19 - 22, 2011, Camden, Maine USA.
#PopTech #PopTech2011 #Conference
Rebecca MacKinnon, an Internet scholar at the New America Foundation, who argues that private corporations are exerting excessive power over the Internet and should have that power checked, gave a preview of her book Consent of the Networked at the TEDGlobal 2011 conference. This bag also features related videos and posts.
Ethan Zuckerman is the recently-announced director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, officially starting in September 2011.
Ethan has been a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, where he is also a long-time fellow. His work at the Berkman Center has included research into global media attention, as well as the co-founding of...
Joichi Ito is the CEO of Creative Commons. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Technorati, Flickr, SocialText, Dopplr, Last.fm, Rupture, Kongregate and other Internet companies. He was invited to speak on DLD conference, LeWeb conference...
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