Berkman Buzz: May 25, 2012

I have gotten a lot of amusement lately from the fact that one of Mark Zuckerberg's prototypes for Facebook was a little network called Six Degrees to Harry Lewis. Mark, who knew me because he had taken my theoretical computer science course, constructed the network by scraping the archives of the Harvard Crimson and linking names that were mentioned in the same news story. As former dean of the College, I was the maximum degree node. On January 23, 2004, MZ wrote to ask my permission to use my name in the name of the site, explaining that users would type in their names and see how many hops it took to be connected to me.

On Monday, the World Bank hosted an event called What the World Bank’s Open Access Policy Means for Development (you can view the video recording of the event at the link or embedded below). Participants included Peter Suber from Harvard University, Michael Carroll from American University (Mike is on the Board of Directors at Creative Commons), and Cyril Muller and Adam Wagstaff from the World Bank. The discussion was timely given the Bank’s recently-announced Open Access Policy and Open Knowledge Repository. We blogged about the Bank’s announcement of these two great initiatives. The World Bank’s Open Access Policy requires that all research outputs and knowledge products published by the Bank be licensed Creative Commons Attribution license (CC BY) as a default.

Shameless, post-hoc self-promotion, but video of my @berkmancenter talk just went up: http://bit.ly/JwvuZl. Feedback always welcome.
—Mike Ananny (@ananny)

The buyer is a person. That person does not require either a social network or absolutely-informed guesswork to know who he or she is or what they want to buy. Obviously advertising can help. It always has. But totally personalized advertising is icky and oxymoronic. And, after half a decade or more at the business of making maximally-personalized ads, the main result is what Michael calls “the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people’s Facebook profiles.”

Last week hacker collective Anonymous turned its attention to India and to what some have called India’s “long murky past” of Internet censorship. The organization launched “Operation India” on Thursday, May 17 with attacks that took down the websites of the Supreme Court of India, All India Congress, the Department of Telecomm, and the Ministry of Information and Telecommunications. On May 19, India’s governmental cybersecurity organization, Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In), fell victim to cyber attacks, as did the website of media subsidiary Reliance Big Entertainment. What links these targets is a shared history of censoring websites in India.

Yesterday, I was on WBUR's RadioBoston with Matthew Chingos, discussing his new study about online learning in higher education. Matt's study involved recruiting several hundred Introductory Statistics students at several college campuses who were willing to be randomly assigned to either a regular class or a hybrid online class. In the hybrid online class, students took an online version of Intro Statistics mediated entirely by a computer, with online readings, quizzes, activities and so forth. They also met once a week for a discussion section to answer questions.

Care about student debt? Help @ProPublica and @chronicle crowdsource data for a story. http://propub.ca/JtWbtf
—Aaron Shaw (@aaronshaw)

Eve teasing (sexual harassment of women) is one of the major problems in Bangladesh which many women face everyday. This social problem exists everywhere be it in rural or in urban areas. One of the main reasons of girls being married off at an early age or them dropping out of school is “eve teasing”. Many times these incidents lead to violence and even deaths. There had been instances of parents or siblings giving their lives to stop “eve teasing”.

Strict laws and regulations cannot deter these incidents from happening. Sometimes the harassers get away because of the silence of the society. Recently in the capital Dhaka, a blogger has taken a strong stance against the perpetrators of an “eve teasing” incident and he asked the help of other bloggers to unmask the identity of these violators.