Stop Hyping Big Data and Start Paying Attention to 'Long Data'

For the Internet-Deprived, McDonald's Is Study Hall CITRONELLE, Ala.—Joshua Edwards's eighth-grade paper about the Black Plague came with a McDouble and fries. Joshua sometimes does his homework at a McDonald's MCD 1.79 % restaurant—not because he is drawn by the burgers, but because the fast-food chain is one of the few places in this southern Alabama city of 4,000 where he can get online access free once the public library closes. Cheap smartphones and tablets have put Web-ready technology into more hands than ever. That divide is becoming a bigger problem now that a fast Internet connection has evolved into an essential tool for completing many assignments at public schools. "It is increasingly hard to argue that out-of-school access doesn't matter," said Doug Levin, executive director of a national group of state education technology directors. Moving faster would be expensive. Some are wary of deeper government intervention, arguing that many telecommunications companies are already fast expanding broadband access on their own. Mr.

A staggering map of the 54 countries that reportedly participated in the CIA’s rendition program Click to enlarge. (Max Fisher -- The Washington Post) After Sept. 11, 2001, the CIA launched a program of "extraordinary rendition" to handle terrorism suspects. The CIA's extraordinary rendition program is over, but its scope is still shrouded in some mystery. Their participation took several forms. Here's what the Open Society report has to say about the staggeringly global participation in the CIA program, including a full list of the countries it names: I was most curious about the involvement of two governments that are very much adversaries of the United States: those of Iran and Syria. Iran was involved in the capture and transfer of individuals subjected to CIA secret detention. The section on Syria is disturbing.

The new normal in Baghdad After violence that shattered hundreds of thousands of lives and left nearly everyone with a tragic story to tell, life in Iraq has settled into a strange normality — with no discernible direction or clear future. “How do you make sense of the last ten years?” said a novelist, who is trying to do just that. A decade after the US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, Iraq remains in crisis, although you wouldn’t know it from visiting Baghdad. Traffic is easing its way through the maze of roadblocks and concrete barriers that had made it a nightmare. Prime minister Nouri al-Maliki’s detractors have been growing as he has accumulated powers. That in turn almost inevitably rekindled Shia identity politics, in a society still scarred by sectarian violence, particularly rife between 2006 and 2008. Al-Maliki’s isolation So the prime minister finds himself surprisingly isolated. Moreover the nature of the political regime remains indefinable. US sinned by omission Entangled identities

The great oil swindle Recent headlines in the US press about the coming economic boom heralded by the shale gas revolution would lead you to think we are literally swimming in oil. A spate of reports last year, in particular the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook (WEO) in November 2012, forecast that the US will outstrip Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer by 2017, becoming, as Reuters put it, “all but self-sufficient in net terms” in energy production. According to the IEA, the projected increase in oil production from 84 mbpd (million barrels per day) in 2011 to 97 mbpd in 2035 will come “entirely from natural gas liquids and unconventional sources” — largely shale oil and gas — while conventional oil output will begin to fall from 2013. In early 2012, two US energy consultants, writing in the flagship British energy industry journal Petroleum Review, sounded the alarm. Dodgy economics of fracking Such a rapid decline has made shale gas distinctly unprofitable.

Brilliant light for developing world is powered by gravity Not everyone has access to electricity all the time. And not everyone has access to chemical energy or solar energy or nuclear energy all the time. But everyone on Earth has access to gravitational energy whenever they need it. The problem has always been making gravity useful for something, but this gravity-powered light manages to do exactly that. Essentially, this light (called GravityLight) operates just like a grandfather clock: there's a weight attached to a cable, and as the weight descends, it pulls the cable through a mechanism to extract energy from gravity-induced motion. GravityLight is designed to replace kerosene lanterns throughout the developing world. It's simple: it's a box with a light on it that comes with a cable and a bag. You, of course, being not in the developing world, will have to pay a bit of a premium to make sure that the GravityLight stays cheap for everyone else who needs one for more than novelty. Indiegogo, via Engadget

Rosa Parks Didn't Act Alone: Meet Claudette Colvin Rosa Parks, left, and Claudette Colvin. Parks photo from Ebony via Wikipedia Commons. In his warm-up for the first-ever inauguration of a black American president, the actor Samuel L. Jackson stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial, speaking of the sacrifices of everyday people to bring about the event we all witnessed this morning, including the well-worn story of Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat on the bus. Jackson told the story as the old history books do, more or less the way my child, then six years old, had learned it at school: Parks, a department store seamstress en route home from work, told the police she hadn't boarded the bus intending to get arrested. Parks was certainly brave. Colvin was a smart and rebellious teen whose family lived in King Hill, a small, poor section of town flanked by white neighborhoods. That's what happened that day. This was nothing like Rosa Parks' quiet arrest later. The news traveled fast, and the black community was livid.

Tsunamis in the Alps? Nearly 1,500 years ago a massive flood in Geneva reportedly swept away everything in its path—mills, houses, cattle, even entire churches. Now researchers believe they've found the unlikely sounding culprit: a tsunami-like killer wave in the Alps. The threat, they add, may still be very much alive. (Video: Tsunamis 101.) Spurred by a huge landslide, the medieval Lake Geneva "tsunami" (technically defined as a seismic ocean wave) swamped the city, which was already a trading hub, according to a new study. Far from any ocean, the massive wave was likely generated by a massive landslide into the Rhône River, which feeds and flows through Lake Geneva, according to a group of Swiss researchers. The team analyzed a massive sediment deposit at the bottom of the lake's easternmost corner and determined that the material had once sat above the lake and had slid all at once into the Rhône, near where the river flows into the eastern end of Lake Geneva (map).

The press, Google, its algorithm, their scale In their fight against Google, traditional media firmly believe the search engine needs them to refine (and monetize) its algorithm. Let’s explore the facts. The European press got itself in a bitter battle against Google. In a nutshell, legacy media want money from the search engine: first, for the snippets of news it grabs and feeds into its Google News service; second, on a broader basis, for all the referencing Google builds with news media material. In Germany, the Bundestag is working on a bill to force all news aggregators to pay their toll; in France, the executive is pushing for a negotiated solution before year-end. Italy is more or less following the same path. In the controversy, an argument keeps rearing its head. First of all, pretending to know Google is indeed… pretentious. Coming back to the Press issues, let’s consider both quantitative and qualitative approaches. Now, let’s consider the nature of searches. What about monetization ? You see where I’m heading to.

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science - Climate Change - Environment A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt. The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry. However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas. Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

?So many people died? Pham To looked great for 78 years old. (At least, that’s about how old he thought he was.) His hair was thin, gray, and receding at the temples, but his eyes were lively and his physique robust — all the more remarkable given what he had lived through. I listened intently, as I had so many times before to so many similar stories, but it was still beyond my ability to comprehend. It’s probably beyond yours, too. Pham To told me that the planes began their bombing runs in 1965 and that periodic artillery shelling started about the same time. And it only got worse. One, two… many Vietnams? At the beginning of the Iraq War, and for years after, reporters, pundits, veterans, politicians, and ordinary Americans asked whether the American debacle in Southeast Asia was being repeated. The same held true for Afghanistan. In those years, “Vietnam” even proved a surprisingly two-sided analogy — after, at least, generals began reading and citing revisionist texts about that war. An unimaginable toll

The Inequality That Matters - Tyler Cowen The Costs of Green Dreams The environmental and economic costs of Germany’s decision to shut down its nuclear reactors are growing. Wealth of nations India’s Hindu temples have huge stores of gold sitting idle outside the banking system. Modi wants to change that, and it’s rankling important parts of his Hindu base. Don't Cry to Me Argentina The President tells her people (and the web): “Everything has to do with everything.” Culture Wars Chinese scientists are facing a big backlash for an unethical experiment that edited the DNA of embryos—a historical first. Putin's Prospects Russian workers who have gone without pay due to the economic troubles are protesting at the national scale. The Afterparty Rages On Libya’s failure becomes a campaign issue in the UK.

Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies Chris Buzelli On a brisk spring Tuesday in 1976, a pair of executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in "the forging of public opinion." The trade group had recently pulled off one of the greatest turnarounds in PR history. For nearly a decade, the sugar industry had been buffeted by crisis after crisis as the media and the public soured on sugar and scientists began to view it as a likely cause of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease. Industry ads claiming that eating sugar helped you lose weight had been called out by the Federal Trade Commission, and the Food and Drug Administration had launched a review of whether sugar was even safe to eat. Consumption had declined 12 percent in just two years, and producers could see where that trend might lead. Precisely how did the sugar industry engineer its turnaround? At best, the studies seemed a token effort.

Algeria, Mali, and why this week has looked like an obscene remake of earlier Western interventions - Comment - Voices And there you have it. Our dead men didn't matter in the slightest to him. And he had a point, didn't he? For we are outraged today, not by the massacre of the innocents, but because the hostages killed by the Algerian army - along with some of their captors - were largely white, blue-eyed chaps rather than darker, brown-eyed chaps. Had all the "Western" hostages - I am including the Japanese in this ridiculous, all-purpose definition - been rescued and had the innocent dead all been Algerian, there would have been no talk yesterday of a "botched raid". If all those slaughtered in the Algerian helicopter bombing had been Algerian, we would have mentioned the "tragic consequences" of the raid, but our headlines would have dwelt on the courage and efficiency of Algeria's military rescuers, alongside interviews with grateful Western families. Racism isn't the word for it. So you know whom we care about. I called up another friend, a French ex-legionnaire, yesterday.

Why do we cosy up to these Wahhabi tyrants? - Comment - Voices Camilla, wife of our future king, wore a flimsy, unsecured headscarf on her trip to Saudi Arabia. It rebelliously slipped off and almost uncovered all her hair! According to the strict, conservative Saudi Wahhabi practice of Islam, uncovered hidden female tresses, old and young, are as licentious as exposed pubic hair. There has been some bother over this official visit by Charles and Camilla to a country which has just executed seven men. To expect the Prince to stand up for human rights is about as hopeless as expecting him to be an equal-rights champion of his nation. Iran, led by the abhorrent President Ahmadinejad, also executes and tortures its people, but its women can drive, work, go to university, initiate divorce and get custody of their children. Yes, very slowly, some pitifully small rights are being handed to women. Then there is the hushed and hushed up spread of Wahhabi Islam from north to south, east to west. The oil’s the thing and I do understand that.