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From Techdirt:
Kader Arif, the “rapporteur” for ACTA, has quit that role in disgust over the process behind getting the EU to sign onto ACTA. A rapporteur is a person “appointed by a deliberative body to investigate an issue.” However, it appears his investigation of ACTA didn’t make him very pleased:
I want to denounce in the strongest possible manner the entire process that led to the signature of this agreement: no inclusion of civil society organisations, a lack of transparency from the start of the negotiations, repeated postponing of the signature of the text without an explanation being ever given, exclusion of the EU Parliament’s demands that were expressed on several occasions in our assembly.
As rapporteur of this text, I have faced never-before-seen manoeuvres from the right wing of this Parliament to impose a rushed calendar before public opinion could be alerted, thus depriving the Parliament of its right to expression and of the tools at its disposal to convey citizens’ legitimate demands.” …
ACTA is what SOPA would be if you believed in global conspiracies writing secret agreements to do roughly the same thing. Except ACTA is real. This is not one of the issues where the Obama administration, which I overall enthusiastically support, is making me real happy.
Categories: net neutrality, policy Tagged with: acta • policy • sopa Date: January 26th, 2012 dw
Well, only kind of. The World Wide Web Foundation is looking for a CEO. Susan Crawford, got some free time? Al Gore, are you busy? Randall Munroe, after all how long does it take you to draw stick figures? Maybe (perish the thought) someone who isn’t American?
Categories: policy Date: January 26th, 2012 dw
HuffingtonPost has done a very nice job turning a piece I wrote for them (“13 ways the Net is making us smarter”) into a photo-illustrated slide show.
Categories: too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k Date: January 25th, 2012 dw
States are being pushed to pass legislation to prevent cities from offering municipal wifi, in order to preserve the current providers’ de facto monopolies. The latest are Georgia and South Carolina, because it would like be um terrible and, er, un-American to let localities experiment and maybe enter into private-public partnerships to speed more even distribution of Net access, or maybe even to view minimal Net access as some sort of public good or, well, do anything that doesn’t first of all maximize the profits of some large companies following a policy that has pushed America way down the global list of broadband access in terms of prices and speeds, because you know the Net is just used for porn and games and stuff and we have to PROTECT THE JOB CREATORS, yeah that’s it.
Categories: broadband, policy Tagged with: wifi Date: January 25th, 2012 dw
Skip Walter’s post about his growing acceptance and understanding of the need for digital humanities hits on so many of my intellectual pleasure spots, starting with Russ Ackoff’s knowledge network, and including Kate Hayles and Cathy Davidson, and more and more. (Yes, he mentions “Too Big to Know” in passing, but that’s irrelevant to my reaction.)
Categories: education, too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • digital humanities Date: January 24th, 2012 dw
Panagiotis Takis Metaxas (at the Berkman Center) and Eni Mustafaraj have written a paper called “trails of Trustworthiness in Real-Time Streams” [pdf] about how to support critical thinking about social networking conversations, while maintaining privacy. From the abstract:
When confronted with information that requires fast ac- tion, our system will enable its educated users to evaluate its provenance, its credibility and the independence of the multi- ple sources that may provide this information.
They say the only real hope is to solve the problem within closed streams that provide membership functions because there “it is possible to determine the a priori trustworthiness of a message received,” by evaluating the credibility of users on particular topics. They believe this can be done by watching the actions of users. For example, “In general, the more often a user re-posts messages from a sender, the more trusted the sender becomes.” And: “A message that has been sent by different, independent users has more trustworthiness than one that has been initiated by a single user.”
There’s much more in their paper…
Categories: too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k • trust Date: January 24th, 2012 dw
From a post by Derrick Harris at GigaOm:
A fully sequenced human genome results in about 100GB of raw data, although DNAnexus Founder and CEO Andreas Sundquist told me that volume increases to about 1TB by the time the genome has been analyzed. He also says we’re on pace to have 1 million genomes sequenced within the next two years. If that holds true, there will be approximately 1 million terabytes (or 1,000 petabytes, or 1 exabyte) of genome data floating around by 2014.
Why, that’s more than the number of books in the Library of Congress times miles to the moon plus the length of all football fields laid end to end!
Categories: too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k Date: January 24th, 2012 dw
Here’s a 20 minute interview on KUOW in Seattle from last week. We talk about networked knowledge, science, echo chambers, long form thinking, and the irresoluteness of experts.
Categories: too big to know Tagged with: 2b2k Date: January 23rd, 2012 dw
Google has announced that it is retiring Needlebase, a service it acquired with its ITA purchase. That’s too bad! Needlebase is a very cool tool. (It’s staying up until June 1 so you can download any work you’ve done there.)
Needlebase is a browser-based tool that creates a merged, cleaned, de-duped database from databases. Then you can create a variety of user-happy outputs. There are some examples here.
Google says it’s evaluating whether Needlebase can be threaded into its other offerings.
The black that covered so many sites yesterday spoke well. I think there were four messages.
First, This is our Internet. We built it. We built it for us, not for you. We get to turn off the lights, not you.
Second, we are better custodians of culture than are culture’s merchants because we understand that culture is what we have in common. We feel pain every time something is held back from this Commons.
Third, just as we can make someone famous rather than having to passively accept the celebrities you foist upon us, we can make an idea politically potent. Going dark was the self-assertion with which political engagement begins.
Fourth, there’s a growing “we” on the Internet. It is not as inclusive as we think, it’s far more diverse than we imagine, and it’s far less egalitarian than we should demand. But so was the “we” in “We the People.” The individual acts of darkness are the start of the We we need to nurture.
Categories: culture, policy, politics Tagged with: sopa Date: January 19th, 2012 dw
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