Category: Technologies

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Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t …

07 Other Atrocities, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Civil Society, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Ethics, InfoOps (IO), Mobile, Real Time, Technologies
Venessa Miemis

Decentralizing the Internet So Big Brother Can’t Find You

Jim Dwyer

The New York Times, February 15, 2011

On Tuesday afternoon, as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke in Washington about the Internet and human liberty, a Columbia law professor in Manhattan, Eben Moglen, was putting together a shopping list to rebuild the Internet — this time, without governments and big companies able to watch every twitch of our fingers.

Eben Moglen

The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”

. . . . . . .

Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.

. . . . . . .

Social networking has changed the balance of political power, he said, “but everything we know about technology tells us that the current forms of social network communication, despite their enormous current value for politics, are also intensely dangerous to use. They are too centralized; they are too vulnerable to state retaliation and control.”

Read rest of article….

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Event: 20 Oct, NYC, Angel Orensanz Center, CONTACT

03 Economy, 11 Society, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Corporations, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, History, Open Government, Technologies

UPDATED TO PROVIDE OPEN WIKI PAGE

Conceived and facilitated by Douglas Rushkoff, Contact seeks to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action, and creativity.

Bringing together technologists, artists, activists, businesspeople, funders, and other stakeholders in the networked future, this summit will hatch new ideas, connect collaborators, and forge an ongoing community for innovating social media and beyond. See the new event forums.

Phi Beta Iota: Whether or not Facebook and GroupOn are paying attention, this event has the potential to turn into the seed crystal for a self-organizing World Brain and Global Game.

event link
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Internet and Revolution–Three Insights

Advanced Cyber/IO, Autonomous Internet, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Cultural Intelligence, Technologies
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In Egypt, a Facebook page administrator known only by the handle El Shaheeed, or Martyr, is one of the driving forces behind the historic protests. Mike Giglio tracks down the mysterious figure, who talks about his crucial role in organizing the demonstrations.

Iran’s Green Revolution had a martyr named Neda, a 26-year-old woman gunned down in the streets of Tehran. Tunisia’s was Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate who set himself ablaze outside a government building. Egypt’s is Khaled Said—because someone has been agitating under the dead man’s name.

Read rest of article with interview….

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A scientist at the network security company Arbor Networks has used data from 80 Internet service providers around the world to create an image of the Internet block in Egypt.

The graphic, which was compiled using anonymous traffic engineering statistics, shows traffic to and from Egypt dropping sharply around 5:20 p.m. ET. As of about three hours ago, traffic has not picked back up.

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Twitter as Psychiatric Patient Predicting Stock Market 3-4 Days in Advance w/86.7 % Accuracy

03 Economy, Academia, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Commerce, Mobile, Technologies, Uncategorized

Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market

  • By Lisa Grossman
  • October 19, 2010

The emotional roller coaster captured on Twitter can predict the ups and downs of the stock market, a new study finds. Measuring how calm the Twitterverse is on a given day can foretell the direction of changes to the Dow Jones Industrial Average three days later with an accuracy of 86.7 percent.

“We were pretty astonished that this actually worked,” said computational social scientist Johan Bollen of Indiana University-Bloomington. The new results appear in a paper on the arXiv.org preprint server.

Bollen and grad student Huina Mao stumbled on this computational crystal ball almost by accident. Earlier studies had found that blogs can be used to gauge public mood, and that tweets about movies can predict box office sales. An open source mood-tracking tool called OpenFinder sorts tweets into positive and negative bins based on emotionally charged words.

But Bollen wanted to build a more nuanced emotional barometer. He used a standard psychology tool called the Profile of Mood States, a quick questionnaire that is used frequently in pharmaceutical research or sports medicine.

The original questionnaire asks people to rate how closely their feelings match 72 different adjectives, including “friendly,” “peeved,” “active,” “on edge” and “panicky,” and uses the responses to measure mood along six dimensions: calmness, alertness, sureness, vitality, kindness and happiness.

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45 Social Entrepreneurs Showcase at “Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace”

01 Agriculture, 01 Poverty, 02 Infectious Disease, 03 Economy, 03 Environmental Degradation, 04 Education, 05 Energy, 07 Health, 11 Society, 12 Water, Academia, Budgets & Funding, Civil Society, Commerce, Gift Intelligence, microfinancing, Technologies
Explore the projects

http://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org

January 20, 2011

The Unreasonable Institute Empowers the Public to Choose the Next Wave of High-Impact Social Entrepreneurs

Global donations will determine which entrepreneurs gain admission to esteemed mentorship program

BOULDER, Colo.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Starting Jan. 20, 45 social entrepreneurs will showcase their ventures in an online platform called the Unreasonable Finalist Marketplace (http://marketplace.unreasonableinstitute.org/). For 50 days, people from around the world are invited to vote with their wallets on the most viable ventures. The first 25 of the 45 finalists to raise $8,000 in the Marketplace will earn access to the highly acclaimed six-week mentorship program at the Unreasonable Institute. At the Institute, these social entrepreneurs undergo rigorous training sessions, including personal and entrepreneurial skill development, intensive workshops and hands-on guidance from leading thought leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors.

The 45 finalists were selected from more than 300 applicants in 60 countries. Each applicant had to present a financially self-sustaining venture that has the ability to scale to serve the needs of at least 1 million people and demonstrates customer validation through sales or pilots. The finalists this year include a Chinese engineer with a prototype for waterless composting toilets; a 2010 CNN Hero from Kenya who has distributed over 10,000 solar lanterns; and an American inventor with a water purification system that can roll up to the size of a ruler.

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Citizen Satellites (1 kilogram)

04 Education, Academia, Civil Society, Earth Intelligence, Government, Military, Technologies
source article

Citizen Satellites

Tiny, standardized spacecraft are making orbital experiments affordable to even the smallest research groups

By Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and Bob Twiggs | February 9, 2011 (latest issue)

Ever since Sputnik kicked off the age of space satellites more than fifty years ago, big institutions have dominated the skies. Almost all the many thousands of satellites that have taken their place in Earth orbit were the result of huge projects funded by governments and corporations. For decades each generation of satellites has been more complicated and expensive than its predecessor, taken longer to design, and required an infrastructure of expensive launch facilities, global monitoring stations, mission specialists and research centers.

In recent years, however, improvements in electronics, solar power and other technologies have made it possible to shrink satellites dramatically. A new type of satellite, called CubeSat, drastically simplifies and standardizes the design of small spacecraft and brings costs down to less than $100,000 to develop, launch and operate a single satellite—a tiny fraction of the typical mission budget of NASA or the European Space Agency.
(full article requires subscription)
Comment: the article mentions the idea of “printing” low-cost materials as well.

Related:
+ Crowdfunding for a Satellite to Widen Net Access to Help Benefactors to Help Themselves

+ Brooklyn Space Program (weather balloon + iPhone + camera recording most of the flight into space and back)