Information Operations (IO) – Page 342 – Public Intelligence Blog

A Curated Guide About The Best Places Where To Learn How To Code: Bento

Bento is a website that, thanks to its author Jon Chan and the many user contributions, has gathered, organized and curated the very best resources available online where you can learn how to code. From html to javascript, ruby, php, Java, perl, Bento offers learning guidance for over 80 different technologies and coding languages.

Here is how Jon Chan, a 23 years old who launched this project in September of 2013, describes Bento:

“Bento is what I would have liked to have when I was learning to code. I started learning to code when I was very young – about ten years old. Then, the only things I had available were what I could find online and through a few dense books. Now, people have the exact opposite problem: how do you break through the noise and find what's actually valuable to learn? This site is here to help you figure that out.”

Bento is a perfect example of effective content curation as it does not simply collect and list all of the resources available to learn each language but it only suggests the very best ones, organizing them in easy, medium and hard and providing also “best of” / direct solutions that save readers lots of valuable time. Free to use.

Useful, simple and immediate to use. Well organized. 9/10

Bento: http://www.bentobox.io/

More info: http://www.bentobox.io/about

Submit new links here: https://github.com/JonHMChan/bento/

2014/04/282014/04/28

Patrick Meier: Got TweetCred? Use This Tool To Automatically Identify Credible Tweets

Crowd-Sourcing, Geospatial, Innovation, IO Tools, P2P / Panarchy, Politics, Resilience

Got TweetCred? Use it To Automatically Identify Credible Tweets

What if there were a way to automatically identify credible tweets during major events like disasters? Sounds rather far-fetched, right? Think again.

The new field of Digital Information Forensics is increasingly making use of Big Data analytics and techniques from artificial intelligence like machine learning to automatically verify social media. This is how my QCRI colleague ChaTo et al. already predicted both credible and non-credible tweets generated after the Chile Earthquake (with an accuracy of 86%). Meanwhile, my colleagues Aditi, et al. from IIIT Delhi also used machine learning to automatically rank the credibility of some 35 million tweets generated during a dozen major international events such as the UK Riots and the Libya Crisis. So we teamed up with Aditi et al. to turn those academic findings into TweetCred, a free app that identifies credible tweets automatically.

We’ve just launched the very first version of TweetCred—key word being first. This means that our new app is still experimental. On the plus side, since TweetCred is powered by machine learning, it will become increasingly accurate over time as more users make use of the app and “teach” it the difference between credible and non-credible tweets. Teaching TweetCred is as simple as a click of the mouse. Take the tweet below, for example.

Read full post with more links.

2014/04/282014/04/28

Berto Jongman: Citizens in Brazil Take Over Their Story

01 Brazil, 01 Poverty, 03 Economy, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Justice, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Media, Mobile

How social media gives new voice to Brazil's protests

Street protests continue to rock Brazil and, frustrated by mainstream media coverage, a new group of citizen journalists is using digital tools to tell a different side of the story

EXTRACT

But the battles are not just being waged on the street. Angered by what they see as a misrepresentation of the issues by traditional media, new independent media collectives and networks have emerged over the past year. Armed with smartphones, digital cameras, and apps such as Twitcasting and Twitcam that allow them to broadcast live online, they are presenting their own version of events. Some of them are reaching a huge audience across the country and are now looking to expand their reach internationally.

One such group is the Mídia Ninja, a self-styled loose collective of citizen journalists, which first emerged during last summer's protests. They are keen to present an alternative narrative to the mainstream media by reporting live from the frontline.

Read full article.

2014/04/282014/04/28

SchwartzReport: Time for Public to Fund and Own Internet at Local Level

Advanced Cyber/IO, Civil Society, Ethics

If I lived in a large city I would mount a bond issue campaign to do this. If I lived in a small community, I would organize and go into the town council. As it happens on our island telephone, internet, and cable are handled by a local company Whidbey Telcomm owned by the Henny family wh! o, for generations, have been deeply committed to the welfare of the island. If we don't take ownership of our access to the internet to the local level across America, as a citizen action, within five years the internet will be broken into ghettos and gated communities. Just another part of the Inequity Trend. Think about it. The window of opportunity will not last long.

We Know How to Save the Internet: Towns and Cities Across America Are Doing It
DAVID MORRIS, co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance – AlterNet (U.S.)

2014/04/272014/04/27

Robin Good: Flipped Up Twitter Feed Tool – Vellum Good Stuff

IO Tools

A Flipped-Up Twitter Feed with Only The Good Stuff In It: Vellum

If you find tracking news on Twitter a difficult task due to the amount of stories showing up, and the often missing context helping you understand the value and relevance of what is being shared, here is a new tool that may help you quiet down the visual noise and find more rapidly what is really important.

Vellum is a new free web app born out of a quick experiment at the New York Times R&D labs which allows you to see all of the most relevant Twitter stories coming from the people you follow, stripped of their commentary and showing their original title, description and source.

Vellum filters out text only tweets that contain no links, eliminates duplicates and surfaces only those tweets that have already been retweeted by multiple people.

“Vellum acts as a reading list for your Twitter feed, finding all the links that are being shared by those you follow on Twitter and displaying them each with their full titles and descriptions.

This flips the Twitter model, treating the links as primary and the commentary as secondary (you can still see all the tweets about each link, but they are less prominent).

Continue reading “Robin Good: Flipped Up Twitter Feed Tool – Vellum Good Stuff”

2014/04/272014/04/27

Berto Jongman: Net Neutrality — Guide to and History of a Contested Idea

Corruption, Government, Idiocy, IO Impotency

Net Neutrality: A Guide to (and History of) a Contested Idea

If net neutrality is so important, why is it so controversial? It’s complicated.

Alexis C. Madrigal and Adrienne LaFrance Apr 25 2014

EXTRACT

But this debate isn't just about the specific wording of the possible FCC rules (though those are important). People have been talking about the principle of net neutrality, in one way or another, for more than 15 years, since Monica Lewinsky dominated the headlines.

This idea of net neutrality—this cherished idea, even, among Internet entrepreneurs and activists—has a long history, roughly as long as the commercial world wide web. It is, Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig has argued, what makes the Internet special.

He used to call the principle e2e, for end to end: “e2e. Not b2b, or b2c, or c2b, or b2g, or g2b, but e2e. End to end. The core of the Internet, the core value that defined its power, the core truth that made innovation around it possible, is this e2e,” Lessig said in a 1999 talk. “The fact – a fact – that the network could not discriminate in the way that AT&T could.”

. . . . . . .

A decision by the FCC in 2002 to classify companies like Comcast as “information service providers” instead of “telecommunications carriers” ultimately undermined the agency's efforts to regulate those companies the way a telecommunication carrier would be regulated.

. . . . . . .

By common law, common carriers were 1) required to serve upon reasonable demand, any and all who sought out their services; 2) held to a high standard of care for the property entrusted to them; and 3) limited to incidental damages for breach of duty. The concept of common carriage crossed the Atlantic and became part of the American legal system. Common carriage was broadly applied to railroads and later other transportation as well as communications media. In 1901, following many state courts, the U.S. Supreme Court held that at common law– i.e., even without a specific statute– a telegraph company is a common carrier and owes a duty of non-discrimination.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Net Neutrality — Guide to and History of a Contested Idea”

2014/04/272014/04/27