Join us for our first hackathon, co-sponsored by Creative Commons.
Meet fellow designers and developers. See how your peers are wrangling data into something that looks fantastic, feels intuitive and is super-useful. Use your skills to create great apps and visualizations from an open data set that includes Indeed, Etsy, Craigslist, Ebay, Zillow and others. Show your stuff to investors looking to seed data-related projects – they’ll be coming to see team presentations on the final day of the hack.
Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari was held in a Tehran jail for 118 days in 2009. His arrest came as he worked for western media outlets, including BBC Panorama. In this analysis, Mr Bahari explains why the regime fears information, the internet and a free press.
“Information is a weapon, and in the wrong hands it is even more dangerous than a real gun!”
This was my torturer's message to me in the summer of 2009 after my arrest.
Our preparations for the June 20-22 event are in full swing. This year's festival will be offering 40+ hours of content over three days as well as social events, massive play sessions, a “Game Arcade” and an Award Ceremony featuring some of the best titles in our genre. Registration is now open so if you want to take advantage of early bird pricing (30% off), visit our pre-Festival page here.
This year's over-arcing FiRe theme is Technology-Driving Global-Economics. Discussions will include:
Annual FiRe CTO Design Challenge .. 4G Devices .. Car Computing Revolution .. Economic Cyberwar .. Embedded Machine Vision .. Financial Risk in the Global Economy .. Improving Cloud Infrastructure .. Investing in China .. IPTV: Hardware and Software .. EU's Business Model .. Next-Generation Voice Recognition .. Telepresent Entertainment .. New (CarryAlong) Pads .. Next Security Designs: Protecting Intellectual Property .. Venture Investing: New Targets
Hosted by Mark Anderson, founder and publisher of the Strategic News Service™, the Future in Review® (FiRe) conference exposes world experts and participants to new ideas in a manner that produces an accurate portrait of the future in technology, including the global economy, cloud computing, biology and medical diagnostics, policy, netbooks, space travel, sustainability, and other fields that contribute to technology outcomes. (Strategic News Service and the SNS newsletter have been accurately predicting the technology industry's future since 1995.)
As we become more comfortable with sharing ourselves on the ‘social web,’ we’re revealing a lot of valuable information about our interests, preferences and social connections, and it’s strewn across the web in many different 3rd party silos. One slice of me may be at home on Facebook, another segment of relationships and topics I follow are on Twitter, my online buying habits are known by Amazon and eBay, and a range of companies unknown to me are tracking the ‘digital exhaust’ I leave as I visit websites and travel around the web. There is a growing recognition of the value of all this data to assist us in decision-making, and a concern about who owns it currrently and what’s being done with it.
According to a recent W3C report, there are at least 4 main issues that arise when our data is trapped in 3rd party walled gardens:
1. Portability – The option of taking my personal information and social connections with me across any platform or marketplace is unavailable to me, so I’m forced to reenter and duplicate my data over and over again on different websites.
2. Identity – Instead of having a federated identity that is secure and interoperable across any website, I have an overwhelming (and growing) amount of usernames, passwords and accounts, making my online identity fractured and fragmented.
3. Linkability – People may be mentioning me or sharing photos of me on networks in which I am not a member, making that information invisible to me.
4. Privacy – Once I upload or add content to a site, I have no way of controlling the context of how it’s shared or creating permissions for what can be done with it.
In light of these concerns, I’ve been exploring the emerging tools and solutions for personal data ownership, unified online identity, and a federated social web that puts the user at the center of their online experience.
One of the recurring themes I’ve seen is the call for “personal data stores” or “personal data lockers.” This is the idea of a database that would store all of your personal information. The range of its functionality varies, but here is a comprehensive overview of what it could entail (from Mydex site):
Data Storage – a single access point for my information that is currently scattered
Data Management – a toolset for analyzing and understanding what my data means
Data Sharing – the ability to choose how to share my information and with whom
Data Collection – the ability to track my purchases, preferences, and activities
Verifications – the ability to authenticate sensitive information generated by 3rd parties
Identity Assurance – the ability to prove I am who I say I am
Privacy Management – my info has a privacy setting determined by me, not organizations
Manage Permissions – deciding the communication channels between me & my contacts
Express Interests & Intentions – the ability to announce what I want to buy, do or access
Plan & Implement Projects – a life management system for how I use my info over time
Below is a list I’ve been assembling of startups, open source projects, organizations, and standards that are defining what this next stage of the web will look like, where individuals are empowered by the ownership and understanding of their data and ability to verify identity. I’ve done my best to organize these, but am open for suggestions of how to arrange the list more usefully. And as always, if I’ve missed some vital information, please add to the comments section and I’ll keep the post updated.
Relying on a UN Security Council Resolution, but without asking Congress or the American people, President Obama attacked Libya on 19 Mar 2011. He finally got around to explaining his actions on 28 March 2011 in a nationally televised speech given at the National Defense University. Attached below are two analyses of that speech:
Story 1 by Ed Felien appeared in The Rag Blog on April 5, a spunky left-leaning website based in the hinterlands of Austen Texas. It is harshly critical of the speech by comparing Obama's assertions to conditions in Libya and the tensions within Libya that have created a civil war.
Story 2 by Anne Marie Slaughter appeared in the the New York Review of Books blog on 20 March 2011. The New York Review of Books appeals to a far more high-falutin readership than The Rag Blog, and is a kind of a forum for the panjandrums in what's left of the American Left. Dr. Slaughter gushes over Obama's speech, saying it made an “important contribution to the Libya debate.” She bases her conclusion (“let us protect the Libya's civilians by any means necessary”) by analyzing (a word I use charitably) some impenetrable comparisons of interests versus interests to interests versus values, but curiously, she says nothing about actual conditions in Libya, or who is fighting whom, or why they are fighting.
The contrast between information and puffery in these two essays is stunning and says a lot about what's wrong with the American Left.
Phi Beta Iota: Dr. Slaughter means well, but has drunk the kool-aid. No one in Washington appears capable of reconnecting with reality and using clarity, diversity, and integrity to actually understand how far the US Government has diverged from core values of the Republic, and the public interest. The right/neo-conservatives have cost the US tens of trillions of dollars in fraud, waste, and abuse–Dick Cheney and the Iraq/Afghanistan faux wars on terror being the current classic–but so also has the left/Demopublicans so intent on keeping their own money flowing they have completely lost sight of basic principles of governance. These are all good people trapped in a bad system–all it takes to fix this is ONE LEADER committed to transparency, the truth, and trust. Barack Obama is clearly NOT that leader.
There are some significant misunderstandings about failure. A common one, similar to one we seem to have about death, is that if you don't plan for it, it won't happen.
All of us fail. Successful people fail often, and, worth noting, learn more from that failure than everyone else.
Two habits that don't help:
Getting good at avoiding blame and casting doubt
Not signing up for visible and important projects
While it may seem like these two choices increase your chances for survival or even promotion, in fact they merely insulate you from worthwhile failures.
I think it's worth noting that my definition of failure does not include being unlucky enough to be involved in a project where random external events kept you from succeeding. That's the cost of showing up, not the definition of failure.
Identifying these random events, of course, is part of the art of doing ever better. Many of the things we'd like to blame as being out of our control are in fact avoidable or can be planned around.
Here are six random ideas that will help you fail better, more often and with an inevitably positive upside:
Whenever possible, take on specific projects.
Make detailed promises about what success looks like and when it will occur.
Engage others in your projects. If you fail, they should be involved and know that they will fail with you.
Be really clear about what the true risks are. Ignore the vivid, unlikely and ultimately non-fatal risks that take so much of our focus away.
Concentrate your energy and will on the elements of the project that you have influence on, ignore external events that you can't avoid or change.
When you fail (and you will) be clear about it, call it by name and outline specifically what you learned so you won't make the same mistake twice. People who blame others for failure will never be good at failing, because they've never done it.
If that list frightened you, you might be getting to the nub of the matter. If that list feels like the sort of thing you'd like your freelancers, employees or even bosses to adopt, then perhaps it's resonating as a plan going forward for you.
Maziar Bahari faces jail if he returns to Iran
