The map below depicts geo-tagged tweets posted between May 4-5, 2013 in the New York City area. Over 36,000 tweets are posted on the map (click to enlarge). Since less than 3% of all tweets are geo-tagged, the map is missing the vast majority of tweets posted in this area during those 24 hours.
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These visuals are screenshots of Harvard’s Tweetmap platform, which is publicly available here. My colleague Todd Mostak is one of the main drivers behind Tweetmap, so worth sending him a quick thank you tweet! Todd is working on some exciting extensions and refinements, so stay tuned as I’ll be sure to blog about them when they go live.
Speaker A: My friend is creating a wide-area radio network for Afghanistan.
Speaker B: Afghanistan has no infrastructure — including radio stations. Although radio is popular, it is mostly shortwave, with a few local FM stations for the local Iman. And electricity for radio stations is spotty at best including in Kabul.
Speaker A: Well, I can build really cheap, “ultra” cheap, radio receivers.
Speaker B: As long as you are doing that, why not give them OpenBTS cell phones running on ambient energy, and include a radio app? Then get someone else — Google, Virgin Mobile, the Chinese or India — to focus on all-purpose cellular towers and tethered ballons?
Part 4 of 6: Avaaz – Be the Change the Global Elite Want
by Gearóid Ó Colmáin / August 3rd, 2013
In 2006 another ‘democracy’ project made its debut throughout the world. The organization is called Aavaz. According to its website:
Avaaz—meaning “voice” in several European, Middle Eastern and Asian languages—launched in 2007 with a simple democratic mission: organize citizens of all nations to close the gap between the world we have and the world most people everywhere want.
Avaaz empowers millions of people from all walks of life to take action on pressing global, regional and national issues, from corruption and poverty to conflict and climate change. Our model of internet organising allows thousands of individual efforts, however small, to be rapidly combined into a powerful collective force.
Gearóid Ó Colmáin is a political analyst based in Paris. He is a frequent contributor to Russia Today, Radio Del Sur and Inn World Report. His blog can be reached at Metrogael. Read other articles by Gearóid.
I read “How Can I Pass the String ‘Null’ through WSDL (SOAP)…” My hunch is that only a handful of folks will dig into this issue. Most senior managers buy the baloney generated by search and content processing. Yesterday I reviewed for one of the outfits publishing my “real” (for fee) columns a slide deck stuff full of “all’s” and “every’s”. The message was that this particular modern system which boasted a hefty price tag could do just about anything one wanted with flows of content.
Happily overlooked was the problem of a person with a wonky name. Case in point: “Null”. The link from Hacker News to the Stackoverflow item gathered a couple of hundred comments. You can find these here. If you are involved in one of the next-generation, super-wonderful content processing systems, you may find a few minutes with the comments interesting and possibly helpful.
My scan of the comments plus the code in the “How Can I” post underscored the disconnect between what people believe a system can do and what a here-and-now system can actually do. Marketers say one thing, buyers believe another, and the installed software does something completely different.
As big data analytics begins picking up steam, we are seeing more and more interesting outlets to learn about different platforms to choose from. Not just catalogs and boastful corporation sites, but insightful criticism. One such recent stop was when we came about the “About” story of Bamboo DIRT.
According to the site:
Bamboo DiRT is a tool, service, and collection registry of digital research tools for scholarly use. Developed by Project Bamboo, Bamboo DiRT is an evolution of Lisa Spiro’s DiRT wiki and makes it easy for digital humanists and others conducting digital research to find and compare resources ranging from content management systems to music OCR, statistical analysis packages to mindmapping software.
One look at its tips for analyzing data and we were sold. Here we were turned on to such intriguing companies as 140kit and Dataverse. The user-supported recommendations were the best. About Dataverse, it said: “Researchers and data authors get credit, publishers and distributors get credit, affiliated institutions get credit.” Concise and giving all the needed vitals, this type of crowdsourcing recommendation site could really catch on as the world of big data analytics keeps growing beyond most users’ capacity to keep up.
Evolution does not favour selfish people, according to new research.
This challenges a previous theory which suggested it was preferable to put yourself first.
Instead, it pays to be co-operative, shown in a model of “the prisoner's dilemma”, a scenario of game theory – the study of strategic decision-making.
Published in Nature Communications, the team says their work shows that exhibiting only selfish traits would have made us become extinct.
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Crucially, in an evolutionary environment, knowing your opponent's decision would not be advantageous for long because your opponent would evolve the same recognition mechanism to also know you, Dr Adami explained.
This is exactly what his team found, that any advantage from defecting was short-lived. They used a powerful computer model to run hundreds of thousands of games, simulating a simple exchange of actions that took previous communication into account.
Swarm Management: Following a high-profile event, your swarm just tripled in size in a week. You have twenty thousand new activists — new colleagues — that are all waiting for instructions from you, personally. They’re waiting for instructions from you because your name is the only one they know of. There are no MBA classes on how to handle this situation: those people talk about the challenges you encounter when growing by more than 10 percent a year. This is how you handle 200 percent growth in a week.
