Internet personalization

The Filter Bubble: how personalization changes society - Boing Boing

Pariser doesn't believe that this is malicious or intentional, but he worries that companies with good motives ("let's hide stuff you always ignore; let's show you search results similar to the kinds you've preferred in the past") and bad ("let's spy on your purchasing patterns to figure out how to trick you into buying stuff that you don't want") are inadvertently, invisibly and powerfully changing the discourse.

See also this NYTimes piece on Online Personalization

Climate change and scientific literacy

Tornadoes, climate change, and real scientific literacy - Boing Boing

What we have here is not a failure to communicate and accept the obvious effects of climate change. Instead, it's a failure to communicate and accept a critical point of how science works, without which scientific literacy is reduced to mere talking points. This is about nuance and uncertainty, and if the American public doesn't get those things, then we'll never get climate change.

Climategate

Climategate: What Really Happened? | Mother Jones

IT'S DIFFICULT TO IMAGINE how a guy who spends most of his time looking at endless columns of temperature records became a "fucking terrorist," "killer," or "one-world-government socialist." It's even harder when you meet Michael Mann, a balding 45-year-old climate scientist who speaks haltingly and has a habit of nervously clearing his throat. And when you realize that the reason for all the hostility is a 12-year-old chart, it seems more than a little surreal.

Interesting question...

What did the Internet cost? - Boing Boing

Hey there. I'm a student of the School of Library and Information Sciences at the University of Iowa. Our beloved sadist, er, professor has asked us as a class to figure out how much the internet costs. All of it, globally, from the very beginning. The electricity it takes to run every server, every laptop. The salaries. The grants. The cost of every bit of fiber optic cable in the ground around the world, every little detail.

Some of the responses are very interesting.

Anonymous or anonymous members of Anonymous

FT.com / Technology - Hackers point finger over Sony incursion

Two veterans of Anonymous have acknowledged that members of the cyber-activist group are likely to have been behind the recent hacking attacks on Sony, in spite of the group’s official denials.

An individual or handful of supporters of Anonymous’ well-publicised operation to disrupt Sony services – dubbed OpSony – went further than the rest of the free-speech campaigners expected when they broke into the electronics company’s network and stole account details, according to one person within the group.

boredom a creation of the 19th C (?)

Genevieve Bell, Intel anthropologist - 10 visions of the future. A must read - claudiabenassi's digital mix

Why? It’s all because boredom isn’t deemed possible until the industrial revolution. Before that you had idle and as Bell tells us “boredom and idle are two very different things”.

“It’s become impossible to do nothing. We all now feel that we should be doing something.”

“There is a notion that not being connected means you are bored. Not being bored means you are connected.”

Unfortunately for Bell, it’s really hard to study.

when the smart phone becomes just the phone

Phone Tipping Point Countdown Reset | asymco

I call it the Phone Tipping Point because it’s the moment when I expect we’ll stop using the word “smartphone”.

see also http://web.me.com/hdediu/Smartphonecountdown/Welcome.html

Motivated Reasoning

A Matter of Motivated 'Reasoning' - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com

The reality is that “facts” are unlikely to mean much to those who believe in their gut that Obama is not American. Political psychologists call this “motivated reasoning.” It goes something like this: I dislike someone; I learn something positive that should make me feel better about him; instead, I dislike him as much or even more. This is clearly irrational, but our feelings about people are complicated, and we tend to hold on to them even in the face of contradictory information. This is not unique to those who dislike Obama.

Piracy in emerging economies

Why poor countries lead the world in piracy | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Social scientist and Social Science Research Council director Joe Karaganis oversaw the production of the report Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, billed as "the first independent, large-scale study of music, film and software piracy in emerging economies, with a focus on Brazil, India, Russia, South Africa, Mexico and Bolivia". This weighty, 440-page report took 35 researchers three years to produce, and it is a careful, thoroughly documented rebuttal of practically everything you've ever heard or read about copyright infringement in the poor world.

Surveillance Society

Internet privacy: At every turn, our privacy is compromised by technology | Observer editorial | Comment is free | The Observer

What these developments presage is a perfect storm of surveillance, orchestrated not by the state but by huge corporations. Meanwhile, information commissioners across Europe try to enforce data protection laws that were crafted in the mainframe era, long before the founders of Google, Facebook et al were born.

Apple's supply chain

Apple factories accused of exploiting Chinese workers | Technology | The Observer

The Centre for Research on Multinational Companies and the human rights group Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (Sacom) have a track record in investigating the human cost of China's economic boom. The interviews they recently conducted in Shenzhen and Chengdu, which have been passed to the Observer, are sometimes heartrending.

"Sometimes my roommates cry when they arrive in the dormitory after a long day," one 19-year-old girl told investigators. "It's difficult to adapt to this work and hard to be away from your family."