Advanced Cyber/IO – Page 148 – Public Intelligence Blog

Add to this idea a more open “peer review” process in place of the present obscure, back-scratching, club-based peer review process, and climate science might be well on its way to depoliticization.

Open access will be crucial to maintain public confidence in science

Making research papers freely available is about much more than breaking the monopoly of rich academic publishers

Peter Coles is professor of theoretical astrophysics at Cardiff University, The Guardian, 20 April 2012

The Guardian's recent articles about the absurdities of the academic journal racket have brought out into the open some very important arguments that many academics, including myself, have been making for many years with little apparent effect.

Now this issue is receiving wider attention, I hope sufficient pressure will develop to force radical changes to the way research is communicated, not only between scientists but also between scientists and the public, because this is not just about the exorbitant cost of academic journals and the behaviour of the industry that publishes them. It's about the much wider issue of how science should operate in a democratic society.

Read full story.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2012/04/242012/04/24

Owl: 63 Drone Launch Sites Across the USA

Academia, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Commerce, Government, Law Enforcement, Military

The maps in this web page are astonishing – it shows the sites of 63 active drone sites in the US. Officials were forced to reveal it after a FOIA lawsuit.

The real question, which the article does not explore much, is what kind of drone missions will these sites support? Will they support another leg in the elite's plan to conduct population reduction, sending out killer drones to cull the overeaters? Given the military and federal locations of some drone sites, such an impression is strengthened by an interesting fact revealed in one of the descriptions of the map for the DC area: “The Beltway around Washington DC has the highest concentration of urban and suburban drone sites, including the U.S. Marine Corp base as Quantico Station, Virginia.” Perhaps drone-generated genocide is too over-the-top. Maybe they are using them to merely assert much more control and oversight of the population, gathering much more private information more cheaply and effectively.

Is there a drone in your neighbourhood? Rise of spy planes exposed after FAA is forced to reveal 63 launch sites across U.S.

Phi Beta Iota: Highly recommended — full story with a number of very explicit locational maps.

2012/04/222012/04/22

Jon Lebkowsky: Google News Boss on Trends in Online Access — Intelligence Producers Could Learn…

Advanced Cyber/IO

Richard Gingras at the International Symposium on Online Journalism

The leader of Google News gave an insightful talk about the current state of online journalism. Here are my tweets during his keynote. Appreciated his visionary thinking about the state and future of news, especially the extent to which the concept of a “news story” is being redefined and reshaped as the Internet evolves past old media paradigms (page/periodical/book) and new forms of distribution emerge that are a more natural fit for technical and social networks. One caveat: he doesn’t really have to think the same way as some of the other speakers about finding a new business model – Google already has one that works. Also note that he was feeling good about Google+. (You think Facebook has Google+ beat? We used to think that Apple was never going to be a leader.)

(Pardon my typos.)

Phi Beta Iota: Tweets distilled below.

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: Google News Boss on Trends in Online Access — Intelligence Producers Could Learn…”

2012/04/22

Jon Lebkowsky: 21st Century New Sources & Methods for Journalism

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Blog Wisdom, Media, Methods & Process, Mobile

International Symposium on Online Journalism: New approaches in engaging with the news community

ISOJ Program

Angela Lee: Audience preference and editorial judgment: a study of time-lagged influence in online news

To what extent are audiences influencing editors and journalists, and vice versa? Editorial judgement measured based on placement on paper; audience preference measured by clicks, looking at a 3-hour interval. Audience preference influences editorial decisions three hours later (which suggests editors are watching behavior and responding). However not seeing a reciprocal effect of editorial judgement on audiences.

I’m wondering if the results are influenced by assumptions embedded in the structure of the methodology for the report.

Some popular stories get pushed down on the home page, not sure why? Could be relevance of speed and immediacy – stories might be pushed down to make room for fresh content. Lee calls for input from journalists at the conference.

Alfred Hermida (who’s also been live blogging the conference, and who wrote the book on Participatory Journalism).

Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. How is sourcing evolving in the networked social sphere?

“We looked at sourcing, because sourcing matters.” Who we talk to as journalists affects not just what we report, but the meaning we derive from the reporting. When journalists cite non-elite sources or alternative voices, we treat them as deviant, as the others. Powerful and privileged dominate sourcing.

Carvin was doing a very different type of reporting, messaging and retweeting on Twitter. Carvin was like a “must-read newswire” (per Columbia Journalism Review). 162 sources in Tunisia, 185 sources in Egypt. Coded into categories: mainstream media, institutional elites, alternative voices, and other. Alternative voices included people involved in the protests.

Continue reading “Jon Lebkowsky: 21st Century New Sources & Methods for Journalism”

2012/04/21

Patrick Meier: Building Egypt 2.0: When Institutions Fail, Crowdsourcing Surges

11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO

Building Egypt 2.0: When Institutions Fail, Crowdsourcing Surges

I recently presented at Where 2.0 and had the chance to catch Adel Youssef’s excellent talk on “How Location Based Services is Used to Build Egypt 2.0.” He shared some important gems on digital activism. For example, while Facebook allowed Egyptians to “like” a protest event or say they were headed to the streets, check-in’s were a more powerful way to recruit others because they let your friends know that you were actively in the location and actually protesting. In other words, activists were not checking into a place per se, but rather creating an event and checking into that to encourage people to participate in said event.

Includes video and more information.

2012/04/212012/04/21

Howard Rheingold: SweetSearch for Students

04 Education, Advanced Cyber/IO

About SweetSearch

SweetSearch is a Search Engine for Students.

It searches only the 35,000 Web sites that our staff of research experts and librarians and teachers have evaluated and approved when creating the content on findingDulcinea. We constantly evaluate our search results and “fine-tune” them, by increasing the ranking of Web sites from organizations such as the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, PBS and university Web sites.

SweetSearch helps students find outstanding information, faster. It enables them to determine the most relevant results from a list of credible resources, and makes it much easier for them to find primary sources. We exclude not only obvious spam sites, but also marginal sites that read well, but lack academic or journalistic rigor. As importantly, the very best Web sites that are often buried on other search engines appear on the first page of SweetSearch results.

Home Page

To see a short video of us demonstrating SweetSearch, click here.

For more, including a comparison of search results between SweetSearch and Google and Bing, read this blog post.

We'd love to get your feedback on SweetSearch. Try your own searches and let us know what you think by e-mailing info@dulcineamedia.com.

SweetSearch.com is owned and operated by Dulcinea Media. Click here to learn more about our Company and staff.

2012/04/202012/04/20

Sepp Hasslberger: New ‘terahertz’ scanner lets mobile phones see through walls

Advanced Cyber/IO

This opens up vast possibilities of consumer-accessible imaging technologies that are less damaging than x-rays. Imagine your tricorder decked out with a terahertz chip…

New ‘terahertz' scanner lets mobile phones see through walls

“A hi-tech chip allows a phone to ‘see through' walls, wood and plastics – and (although the researchers are coy about this) through fabrics such as clothing.

“Doctors could also use the imagers to look inside the body for cancer tumours without damaging X-Rays or large, expensive MRI scanners.”

“The terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum, one of the wavelength ranges that falls between microwave and infrared, has not been accessible for most consumer devices.”

‘We've created approaches that open a previously untapped portion of the electromagnetic spectrum for consumer use and life-saving medical applications,’ said Dr. Kenneth O, professor of electrical engineering at UT Dallas.

Learn more.

Category: Advanced Cyber/IO

Chuck Spinney: Open Science or Corrupt Science?