Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Dashboard: cyber poetry “the art of uniting pleasure with truth.”

Senior federal bureaucrats have been accused of behaving like characters in the TV comedy Utopia for refusing to reveal what brands of wine and beer former prime minister Tony Abbott selected to supply whilst entertaining guests at personal functions Utopia bureaucrats ...

Country of struck with utopic language:
The vulgar pinnacle of a bizarre four corners with Kathy Jackson and Michael Lawler

Facebook’s Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos wrote in a blog post explaining the move to alert users of government spying attempts ...


Light, where there was once dark – Glencore funding edition FT Alphaville
hippo-baby links

“The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University ispleased to announce the launch of the Internet Monitor dashboard, a freely accessible tool that aims to improve information for policymakers, researchers, advocates, and user communities working to shape the future of the Internet by helping them understand trends in Internet health and activity through data analysis and visualization. “Over three billion people around the globe use the Internet—for communication, for education, for livelihood,” said Urs Gasser, Executive Director of the Berkman Center. “As the Internet becomes a vital part of more and more people’s lives and as we shape its future, we need both data and analysis to help understand how it’s working. The Internet Monitor dashboard brings this data and analysis together in an easily shareable way.” The dashboard lets users customize a collection of data visualization widgets—some offering real-time data—about Internet access and infrastructure, online content controls, and digital activity.


Via Quartz – This free online encyclopedia has achieved what Wikipedia can only dream of – “The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy may be the most interesting website on the internet. Not because of the content—which includes fascinating entries on everything from ambiguityto zombies—but because of the site itself Its creators have solved one of the internet’s fundamental problems: How to provide authoritative, rigorously accurate knowledge, at no cost to readers. It’s something the encyclopedia, or SEP, has managed to do for two decades. The internet is an information landfill. Somewhere in it—buried under piles of opinion, speculation, and misinformation—is virtually all of human knowledge. The story of the SEP shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet.  But sorting through the trash is difficult work. Even when you have something you think is valuable, it often turns out to be a cheap knock-off. The story of how the SEP is run, and how it came to be, shows that it is possible to create a less trashy internet—or at least a less trashy corner of it. A place where actual knowledge is sorted into a neat, separate pile instead of being thrown into the landfill. Where the world can go to learn everything that we know to be true. Something that would make humans a lot smarter than the internet we have today…”


“…In the past few years, administrative data have been used to investigate issues ranging from the side effects of vaccines to the lasting impact of a child’s neighbourhood on his or her ability to earn and prosper as an adult. Proponents say that these rich information sources could greatly improve how governments measure the effectiveness of social programmes such as providing stipends to help families move to more resource-rich neighbourhoods. But there is also concern that the rush to use these data could pose new threats to citizens’ privacy…Many nations collect administrative data on a massive scale, but only a few, notably in northern Europe, have so far made it easy for researchers to use those data..”


The Marketplace for Stolen Digital Information – McAfee – This report was researched and written by: Charles McFarland, François Paget, Raj Saman.
Raj Samani, CTO of Intel Security for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: “Data is the “oil” of the digital economy.