Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99% | Threat Level Protesters volunteering for the internet and information boards of the Occupy Wall Street protest work and broadcast from their media center in Zuccotti Plaza on Oct. 2, 2011. Photo: Bryan Derballa for Wired.com “I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest. They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse. [bug id="occupy"]The impetus is understandable. Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson.
Welcome to Zug: the sleepy Swiss town that became a global economic hub | Business Nestling beside a lake overlooked by snow-dusted mountains, Zug seems for all the world like just another cute, affluent Swiss town. You could wander its cobbled Altstadt, sample its culinary speciality, a liqueur-drenched Kirschtorte, even stay on to see one of Zug's renowned sunsets, without ever imagining you were at a cardinal point of the global economy - or in a town that, for years, was the hideout of the world's most wanted white-collar criminal. According to the government of the canton, or region, of which Zug is the capital, there are 27,000 companies on its commercial register - one for every man, woman and child in the town, leaving a few hundred to spare. A Zug-registered firm is building the strategically critical gas pipeline that will link Europe with Russia via the Baltic. About 3% of the world's petrol is traded, either as crude oil or refined product, through Zug and the neighbouring town of Baar. In addition, Zug offered Rich a much-needed bolthole after 1983.
Escalation in Digital Sleuthing Raises Quandary in Classrooms - Technology By Marc Parry The spread of technology designed to combat academic cheating has created a set of tricky challenges, and sometimes unexpected fallout, for faculty members determined to weed out plagiarism in their classrooms. In the latest development, the company that sells colleges access to Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection program that checks uploaded papers against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal content, now also caters directly to students with a newer tool called WriteCheck, which lets users scan papers for plagiarism before handing them in. Meanwhile, faculty members at some colleges are adopting a reverse image-search program called TinEye, which lets them investigate plagiarism in visual materials like photos and architectural designs. Cheating is nothing new. One expert on plagiarism, Rebecca Moore Howard, worries that the widespread adoption of antiplagiarism programs is putting professors in the role of police officers. Student Use of Software Ms. Ms. David E.
Honest Hyperbole and Free Speech - Adam Liptak Here was a typical Twitter message: “15% of Cincinnati’s Fire Dept browned out today to help pay for a streetcar boondoggle. If you think it’s a waste of money, VOTE YES on 48.” Mr. Miller, 46, a mechanical engineer, said he expected a debate. What he got instead was a legal action from supporters of the streetcar project under an Ohio law that forbids false statements in political campaigns. In the end, Mr. “I’ve got to second-guess myself every time I sit down in front of a computer,” he said. Last month, at a Supreme Court argument over a federal law that makes it a crime to lie about military honors, Justice Elena Kagan asked about laws like the one that had ensnared Mr. It turns out there are at least 17 states that forbid some kinds of false campaign speech, according to a pending Supreme Court petition in a case involving a Minnesota law. At the argument last month, Solicitor General Donald B. Mr. But Mr. According to Mr. The case about Mr. Is it possible that some of Mr. Mr.
Philip Trippenbach What Is Sony Now? Sir Howard Stringer remembers when 2011 was going to be wonderful. “This was the first year of the payoff,” he says, “and next year was going to be the second.” As chairman, president, and chief executive officer of Sony (SNE), Stringer had spent six years trying to return the Japanese icon to its former glory and open a new era of growth. Sony expected an annual operating profit of at least $2 billion, its best in three years. A batch of new products was headed for store shelves, including its first tablets, a compact 24-megapixel camera, and a portable PlayStation player. Sony was also preparing to launch a global network that would connect the company’s movies, music, and video games to all its televisions, tablets, PCs, and phones—an iTunes-like digital platform. The feeling of imminent triumph ended abruptly on Mar. 11. He considered returning to Tokyo but decided against it. There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders.
Pew Internet & American Life Project | The Mobile Difference Overview Cast a glance at any coffee shop, train station, or airport boarding gate, and it is easy to see that mobile access to the internet is taking root in our society. Open laptops or furrowed brows staring at palm-sized screens are evidence of how routinely information is exchanged on wireless networks. But the incidence of such activity is only one dimension of this phenomenon. The role of mobile internet access in evolving digital lifestyles is the cornerstone of the second typology of information and communication technology (ICT) users developed by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. Motivated by Mobility: Five groups in this typology – making up 39% of the adult population – have seen the frequency of their online use grow as their reliance on mobile devices has increased. For 39% of the adult population, mobile and wireline access tools have a symbiotic relationship. The second typology is based on a December 2007 survey of 3,553 American adults.
Ten years of Windows XP: how longevity became a curse Windows XP's retail release was October 25, 2001, ten years ago today. Though no longer readily available to buy, it continues to cast a long shadow over the PC industry: even now, a slim majority of desktop users are still using the operating system. Windows XP didn't boast exciting new features or radical changes, but it was nonetheless a pivotal moment in Microsoft's history. It was Microsoft's first mass-market operating system in the Windows NT family. It was also Microsoft's first consumer operating system that offered true protected memory, preemptive multitasking, multiprocessor support, and multiuser security. The transition to pure 32-bit, modern operating systems was a slow and painful one. In the history of PC operating systems, Windows XP stands alone. The success was remarkable for an operating system whose reception was initially quite muted. It faced tough competition from Microsoft's other operating systems. In the end, none of the objections mattered.
Shindig - an Apache incubator project for OpenSocial and gadgets Palantir, the War on Terror's Secret Weapon In October, a foreign national named Mike Fikri purchased a one-way plane ticket from Cairo to Miami, where he rented a condo. Over the previous few weeks, he’d made a number of large withdrawals from a Russian bank account and placed repeated calls to a few people in Syria. More recently, he rented a truck, drove to Orlando, and visited Walt Disney World by himself. As numerous security videos indicate, he did not frolic at the happiest place on earth. He spent his day taking pictures of crowded plazas and gate areas. None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA’s Palantir system. As the CIA analyst starts poking around on Fikri’s file inside of Palantir, a story emerges. Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples. The antifraud tools of the time could not keep up with the crooks. Michael E.
Empirical Software Engineering As researchers investigate how software gets made, a new empire for empirical research opens up Greg Wilson, Jorge Aranda Software engineering has long considered itself one of the hard sciences. A growing number of researchers believe software engineering is now at a turning point comparable to the dawn of evidence-based medicine, when the health-care community began examining its practices and sorting out which interventions actually worked and which were just-so stories. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Broadly speaking, people who study programming empirically come at the problem from one of two angles. The other camp typically focuses on the “what” rather than the “who.” The questions we and our colleagues seek to answer are as wide-ranging as those an anthropologist might ask during first contact with a previously unknown culture. Along the way, our field is grappling with the fundamental issues that define any new science. Like all negative results, this one is a bit disappointing.
How to See the Invisible Everybody’s amazed by touch-screen phones. They’re so thin, so powerful, so beautiful! But this revolution is just getting under way. Then there are the apps. That term usually refers to a live-camera view with superimposed informational graphics. If you’re color-blind like me, then apps like Say Color or Color ID represent a classic example of what augmented reality can do. Other apps change what you see. But it’s not. Some of the most promising AR apps are meant to help you when you’re out and about. When you’re in a big city, apps like Layar and Wikitude let you peer through the phone at the world around you. Several of these apps are not, ahem, paragons of software stability. As much fun as they are to use, AR apps mean walking through your environment with your eyes on your phone, held at arm’s length—a posture with unfortunate implications for social interaction, serendipitous discovery and avoiding bus traffic.
Top 10 Pictures That Shocked The World It has often been said throughout time that a picture is worth a thousand words. Any picture may be worth a thousand words, but only a few rare photos tell more than a thousand words. They tell a powerful story, a story poignant enough to change the world and galvanize each of us. From the iconic images of Omayra Sanchez’s tragic death to the horrifying images of the Bhopal Gas disaster in 1984, the power of photography is still alive and invincible. Here is my top 10 list of photos that shocked the world: Warning: Be prepared for images of violence and death (in one case, the photograph of a dead child) if you scroll down. 10. Carol Guzy, the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize for spot news photography, received her most recent Pulitzer in 2000 for her touching photographs of Kosovo refugees. The above picture portrays Agim Shala, a two-year-old boy, who is passed through a fence made with barbed wire to his family. 9. Bullet casings cover entirely a street in Monrovia. 8. F. 7. 6.