I joined the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) well over 3 years ago with a very specific mission and mandate: to develop and deploy next generation humanitarian technologies. So I built the Institute’s Social Innovation Program from the ground up and recruited the majority of the full-time experts (scientists, engineers, research assistants, interns & project manager) who have become integral to the Program’s success.
To help citizens navigate their way towards informed choices amidst the flood of political messaging, we will be building on journalism partnerships to present digital library reference pages for political ads. Our journalism launch partners include Politifact, FactCheck.org and the Center for Public Integrity.
Google is considering putting itself in charge of online truth, in order to assist users in an age of information overload. The web giant would rank search results based on each site’s ‘truth score' instead of its popularity level. Read more.
This contribution to the “Mindfulness & Compassion” conference is focused on where the moral compass of integral mindfulness points. Being integrally mindful is about taking mindfulness off the meditation cushion and infusing all dimensions of our life with it; not only the life of you and me, but also of collective entities, such as organizations, networks, nations.
I should begin by emphasizing that our knowledge of ISIS is extremely scant. We know close to nothing about ISIS’ social base. We know little about how it made its military gains, and even less about the nature of the coalitions into which it has entered with various groups—from other Islamist rebels in Syria to secular Ba‘athists in Iraq.
Sensationalist accounts of “shari‘a justice” notwithstanding, we do not have much information about how ISIS administers the lives of millions of people who reside in the territories it now controls.
Information about the militants who fight for ISIS is likewise scarce. Most of what we know is gleaned from recruitment videos and propaganda, not the most reliable sources. There is little on the backgrounds and motives of those who choose to join the group, least of all the non-Western recruits who form the bulk of ISIS’ fighting force. In the absence of this information, it is difficult to even say what ISIS is if we are to rely on anything beyond the group’s self-representations.
Spy the Lie‘s techniue and informal logic work together to help us disinfect our infospheres from crap, bilious bombast, media-babble, disinformation campaigns, pseudoevents, and bad information of every stripe. These days common sense itself doesn’t cut it. We need tools!
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In fact, we computing professionals have unwittingly made infopollution much worse by increasing storage network capacity and bandwidth without a corresponding advance in filtering capability. We’ve turned big data into big dada.
Ibrar Bhatt, shares some of the insights he has been been able to discover in his research work for his forthcoming PhD thesis (“A sociomaterial account of assignment writing in Further Education classrooms”) for the University of Leeds.
In his short blog analysis he first comprehensively defines the new emerging content curation space, and then he highlights
the relevance this may have, once it is validated and acknowledged, in allowing students to explore the creation of reports and the development of new work assignments in a new light.
