Berkman Buzz: October 11, 2013

The biggest challenge we face is the challenge we’ve always faced: mattering to people on a practical and conceptual level. The pace of information and infrastructural change has certainly accelerated in the last few decades in a way that has provoked increasingly difficult questions about how and why we matter, which in itself is not unique in the history of libraries...Information shifts, societies shift, organizations shift, but the impulse to read and share and inquire openly – which is the essence, the basis of libraries – doesn’t shift: just look at any contemporary or historical culture that suppressed speech and you will find constant evidence of this impulse in spite of terrible consequences.

CORRECTION: the Buzz initially incorrectly attributed this blogpost to Ryan Budish. This post was written by ASL 19 and published in Farsi on their blog. Since the June 14th presidential elections, a number of new, more moderate Iranian news and analysis sites have launched, and we’ve seen a resurgence in activity on many existing reformist websites.

[...] This blog post examines these new sites, and assesses what it may mean for online news in Iran over the coming years.

How has the shutdown affected you? ?@Ajam is looking for your stories. ?http://alj.am/1fFEGdm
—Latoya Peterson (@LatoyaPeterson)

I’m very happy to share some new work that involves quite a bit of collaboration: two articles and a truly epic mega-mix devoted to the rich, ruff-and-ready sound of raggamuffin hip-hop — aka, dancehall-derived flows over breakbeat-based beats (ca. 1987-94). It’s a distinctive and special repertory, near & dear to me and my co-curator, Pacey Foster, and as longtime readers of W&W will discern, it’s a sound that emerges directly from the circumstances I examine in my dissertation.

Thanks to the US government shutdown, the Library of Congress website went down today. So did NASA, the NSF, the USDA, the FTC, and the National Park Service. On the other hand, privately-run websites such as the Internet Archive (and, thankfully, its glorious Wayback Machine!) remain online and unaffected by these sorts of government changes.

As I shared the other week, I’ve been working on a data competition with Kaggle and SeeClickFix involving 311 data from four cities: Chicago, New Haven, Oakland and Richmond.

So first things first – the competition is now live. Indeed, there are already 19 teams and 56 submissions that have been made. Fortunately, time is on your side, there are 56 days to go.

How the 'Failure' Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation. ?http://bit.ly/1hnqcup
—Dave Winer (@davewiner)

Since 2010, digital direct action, including leaks, hacking and mass protest, has become a regular feature of political life on the Internet. The source, strengths and weakness of this activity are considered in this paper through an in-depth analysis of Anonymous, the protest ensemble that has been adept at magnifying issues, boosting existing — usually oppositional — movements and converting amorphous discontent into a tangible form. This paper, the third in the Internet Governance Paper Series, examines the intersecting elements that contribute to Anonymous’ contemporary geopolitical power: its ability to land media attention, its bold and recognizable aesthetics, its participatory openness, the misinformation that surrounds it and, in particular, its unpredictability.

OH MY GOD aerial robots. That is all. #droneconf
—Kate Darling (@grok_)

Three decades ago, a software programmer named Richard Stallman posted an announcement on an internet newsgroup, a bulletin board conversation service, about a project he was launching. It was called GNU ("for Gnu's Not Unix"): a software system that would be compatible with the Unix operating system but entirely unencumbered by "intellectual property" rights that could limit users' choices.

After a whirlwind of handing in, packing up, moving out, and arriving and getting set up back in the States, it’s finally time to share the work I have been building over the last year. I received my marks last week, and have excited to share that I have officially graduated with distinction and the Oxford Internet Institute MSc Thesis award for this work. Now I’m pleased to share the finished product with the QS community, my participants, and anyone else who has been interested in following my research.

This afternoon John Bohannon published an article in Science exposing lamentably low quality at a large number of OA journals. He and Science call it a "sting" and it's easy to see why. Unfortunately it may be hard to disentangle what the article does and doesn't show.

The biggest challenge we face is the challenge we’ve always faced: mattering to people on a practical and conceptual level. The pace of information and infrastructural change has certainly accelerated in the last few decades in a way that has provoked increasingly difficult questions about how and why we matter, which in itself is not unique in the history of libraries...Information shifts, societies shift, organizations shift, but the impulse to read and share and inquire openly – which is the essence, the basis of libraries – doesn’t shift: just look at any contemporary or historical culture that suppressed speech and you will find constant evidence of this impulse in spite of terrible consequences.

CORRECTION: the Buzz initially incorrectly attributed this blogpost to Ryan Budish. This post was written by ASL 19 and published in Farsi on their blog. Since the June 14th presidential elections, a number of new, more moderate Iranian news and analysis sites have launched, and we’ve seen a resurgence in activity on many existing reformist websites.

[...] This blog post examines these new sites, and assesses what it may mean for online news in Iran over the coming years.

How has the shutdown affected you? ?@Ajam is looking for your stories. ?http://alj.am/1fFEGdm
—Latoya Peterson (@LatoyaPeterson)

I’m very happy to share some new work that involves quite a bit of collaboration: two articles and a truly epic mega-mix devoted to the rich, ruff-and-ready sound of raggamuffin hip-hop — aka, dancehall-derived flows over breakbeat-based beats (ca. 1987-94). It’s a distinctive and special repertory, near & dear to me and my co-curator, Pacey Foster, and as longtime readers of W&W will discern, it’s a sound that emerges directly from the circumstances I examine in my dissertation.

Thanks to the US government shutdown, the Library of Congress website went down today. So did NASA, the NSF, the USDA, the FTC, and the National Park Service. On the other hand, privately-run websites such as the Internet Archive (and, thankfully, its glorious Wayback Machine!) remain online and unaffected by these sorts of government changes.

As I shared the other week, I’ve been working on a data competition with Kaggle and SeeClickFix involving 311 data from four cities: Chicago, New Haven, Oakland and Richmond.

So first things first – the competition is now live. Indeed, there are already 19 teams and 56 submissions that have been made. Fortunately, time is on your side, there are 56 days to go.

How the 'Failure' Culture of Startups Is Killing Innovation. ?http://bit.ly/1hnqcup
—Dave Winer (@davewiner)

Since 2010, digital direct action, including leaks, hacking and mass protest, has become a regular feature of political life on the Internet. The source, strengths and weakness of this activity are considered in this paper through an in-depth analysis of Anonymous, the protest ensemble that has been adept at magnifying issues, boosting existing — usually oppositional — movements and converting amorphous discontent into a tangible form. This paper, the third in the Internet Governance Paper Series, examines the intersecting elements that contribute to Anonymous’ contemporary geopolitical power: its ability to land media attention, its bold and recognizable aesthetics, its participatory openness, the misinformation that surrounds it and, in particular, its unpredictability.

OH MY GOD aerial robots. That is all. #droneconf
—Kate Darling (@grok_)

Three decades ago, a software programmer named Richard Stallman posted an announcement on an internet newsgroup, a bulletin board conversation service, about a project he was launching. It was called GNU ("for Gnu's Not Unix"): a software system that would be compatible with the Unix operating system but entirely unencumbered by "intellectual property" rights that could limit users' choices.

After a whirlwind of handing in, packing up, moving out, and arriving and getting set up back in the States, it’s finally time to share the work I have been building over the last year. I received my marks last week, and have excited to share that I have officially graduated with distinction and the Oxford Internet Institute MSc Thesis award for this work. Now I’m pleased to share the finished product with the QS community, my participants, and anyone else who has been interested in following my research.

This afternoon John Bohannon published an article in Science exposing lamentably low quality at a large number of OA journals. He and Science call it a "sting" and it's easy to see why. Unfortunately it may be hard to disentangle what the article does and doesn't show.