As many of you already know, the CrisisMappers Community is an informal network of members who operate at the cutting edge of crisis mapping and humanitarian technology. We are not a formal entity; we have no office, no one location, no staff, and no core funding to speak of. And yet, more than 3,000 individuals representing over 1,500 organizations in 140 countries around the world have joined this growing and thriving network.
Five recurring themes:
01 Validation . . 02 Security . . 03 Formal-informal partnerships . . 04 Need to scale up . . 05 Mainstreaming Crisis Mapping
Finding Credible Information Sources in Social Networks Based on Content & Social Structure
(PDF DOWNLOAD) “A task of primary importance for social network users is to decide whose updates to subscribe to in order to maximize the relevance, credibility, and quality of the information received. To address this problem, we conducted an experiment designed to measure the extent to which different factors in online
social networks affect both explicit and implicit judgments of credibility. The results of the study indicate that both the topical content of information sources and social network structure affect source credibility. Based on these results, we designed a novel method of automatically identifying and ranking social network users according to their relevance and expertise for a given topic. We performed empirical studies to compare a
variety of alternative ranking algorithms and a proprietary service provided by a commercial website specifically designed for the same purpose. Our findings show a great potential for automatically identifying and ranking credible users for any given topic.”
Phi Beta Iota: A lot of math–and not enough emphasis on bridging out of the online networks and into human direct contact. Still, a good demonstration of why social networks matter as a new level of citation analytics.
VISIT THEM to a) reserve your user name and/or b) make a contribution to their Kickstarter campaign.
Hypothes.is <http://hypothes.is> will be a distributed, open-source platform for the collaborative evaluation of information. It will enable sentence-level critique of written words combined with a sophisticated yet easy-to-use model of community peer-review. It will work wherever you are‹as an overlay on top of news, blogs, scientific articles, books, terms of service, ballot initiatives, legislation and regulations, software code and more‹without requiring participation of the underlying site.
It is based on a new draft standard for annotating digital documents currently being developed by the Open Annotation Collaboration, a consortium that includes the Internet Archive, NISO, O'Reilly Books, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and a number of academic institutions.
Phi Beta Iota: Apart from rapidly exposing lies by governments and corporations (“put enough eyeballs on it, no bug is invisible”) this has potential for also exposing covert sources of mis-information, connections between sources being harmonized covertly, and so on. This has great promise.
Charles Hugh Smith raises the question of how much of the U.S. economy consists of the actual output of goods and services, versus the friction entailed in producing them. As a small example, he cites a physicians’ group that includes ten doctors — and twelve billing clerks.
The larger and more hierarchical institutions become, and the more centralized the economic system, the larger the total share of production that will go to overhead, administration, waste, and the cost of doing business. The reasons are structural and geometrical.
The organizers of the spreading Occupy initiative are taking their awareness and moral indignation right to corporate territory—Wall Street, the corporate lobbies in Washington, D.C. and their likes around the nation. The denizens of corporate territory have taken notice, with varying degrees of alarm, hoping that wintry weather will thin out the encampments.
But the corporate plunderers have not changed their behavior, continuing to dominate, outsource labor, deceive, pump the war machine, pollute, demand taxpayers bailouts, and guarantee and provide open checkbooks for the election campaigns of their indentured politicians.
