The Monkey Cage Studie: Warum Internetzensur zu gewaltsameren Aufständen führt » Von Kirsten » netzpolitik.org Der nächste Krawall kommt bestimmt. Über die Frage, wann und wie er kommt, haben sich nicht nur Psychologen den Kopf zerbrochen. Am 14. August veröffentlichten Antonio A. Casilli, Forscher der Telecom ParisTech, und Paola Tubaro der Universität zu Greenwich die Studie „Why Net Censorship in Times of Political Unrest Results in More Violent Uprisings: A Social Simulation Experiment on the UK Rios“. Das 17-seitige Papier möchte beweisen, dass es bei vollkommener Abwesenheit von Zensur nicht nur zu einer geringeren Anzahl von Eskalationen, sondern auch zu längeren Perioden des sozialen Friedens nach jedem Aufstand kommt. Die beiden Forscher simulierten für ihre Thesen die Zensur sozialer Medien und Kommunikationsmittel nicht mit technologischen Mitteln. Die Realität scheint der Studie zumindest Recht zu geben: Als Ägypten offline ging, wurde nicht weniger demonstriert. (Crossposting von vasistas?)
Public Reason · a blog for political philosophers Internet Freedom Of Speech Information wants to be free, and the Internet fosters freedom of speech on a global scale. The Internet is a common area, a public space like any village square, except that it is the largest common area that has ever existed. Anything that anybody wishes to say can be heard by anyone else with access to the Internet, and this world-wide community is as large and diverse as humanity itself. Therefore, from a practical point of view, no one community's standards can govern the type of speech permissible on the Internet. In the words of John Barlow, a founding member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) -- "In Cyberspace, the First Amendment is a local ordinance". The principle of freedom of speech is also embedded in the Internet's robust architecture. If you believe that progress of human civilization depends on individual expression of new ideas, especially unpopular ideas, then the principle of freedom of speech is the most important value society can uphold. Tiananmen.
Comparative Constitutions Election Updates Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference Social Science Statistics Blog 28 April 2013 App Stats: Roberts, Stewart, and Tingley on "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" We hope you can join us this Wednesday, May 1, 2013 for the Applied Statistics Workshop. Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, and Dustin Tingley, all from the Department of Government at Harvard University, will give a presentation entitled "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments". A light lunch will be served at 12 pm and the talk will begin at 12.15. "Topic models for open ended survey responses with applications to experiments" Molly Roberts, Brandon Stewart, and Dustin Tingley Government Department, Harvard University CGIS K354 (1737 Cambridge St.) Abstract: Despite broad use of surveys and survey experiments by political science, the vast majority of survey analysis deals with responses to options along a scale or from pre-established categories. Posted by Konstantin Kashin at 11:25 PM | Comments (2) 22 April 2013
Politics by the Numbers Signifying Nothing Informed Comment The decision of Standard & Poor to downgrade the credit rating of the United States of America from AAA to AA+ was clearly based on uncertainty in two major areas. The first and least important was the wrangling on the debt ceiling, which took the US to the brink of not being able to meet its debt servicing obligations for as long as the impasse lasted. The second was the increasing refusal of the American business classes to pay their fair share of taxes. If a couple borrowed a big sum from the bank and had debt servicing obligations of say $10,000 a month, and they were repeatedly late and had a series of big shouting matches in the bank lobby about whether they might not just skip this month’s payment, then the next time they went to that bank for a loan, it would be declined or higher interest would be demanded, since they were clearly acting as though they were a bad bet for the loan officers. It would not take a large tax hike on the wealthy to fix the problem.