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Paul Ryan's Austerity Agenda Relies on Bad Math, Coding Errors and a 'Significant Mistake'

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

The Nation - By John Nichols - Apr. 18 (News Analysis) - The paper the House Budget Committee chairman has used as the intellectual and statistical underpinning for his austerity agenda has been significantly discredited by the revelation that essential data was excluded from the study, leading "to serious errors that inaccurately represent the relationship between public debt and growth." The Harvard professors who produced the paper—which Ryan cited as recently as last month—have acknowledged their mathematical error. Now, the question is whether Ryan and

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Cloud's Real Ecological Timebomb: Wireless, Not Data Centers

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0700

cacm.acm.org - By Rohan Pearce - Apr. 15 (News Analysis) - Although environmentalists have criticized cloud service providers for a lack of transparency concerning their data centers' energy efficiency, a University of Melbourne report warns that the growing use of cellular and Wi-Fi networks to access cloud services is the real ecological threat.

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The Robot Will See You Now - Jonathan Cohn - The Atlantic

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0800

Atlantic Monthly - By Jonathan Cohn - Mar. 01 (News) - IBM's Watson—the same machine that beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy—is now churning through case histories at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, learning to make diagnoses and treatment recommendations. This is one in a series of developments suggesting that technology may be about to disrupt health care in the same way it has disrupted so many other industries. Are doctors necessary? Just how far might the automation of medicine go?

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No Sales Pop for a New Version of Windows

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Nick Wingfield - Dec. 24 (News Report) - Sales of computers and tablets running Microsoft’s new operating system have been slow this holiday season, underscoring the challenges to the PC business.

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Rating Obama's promises on cybersecurity

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

PolitiFact - By Molly Moorhead - Nov. 28 (Fact Check) - President Barack Obama promised during his 2008 campaign to mandate standards for securing personal data and to require companies to disclose data breaches. They’re both consumer-friendly goals that get talked about a lot. But passing them into law? That’s another story.

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STEM labor shortages?:

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

epi.org - By Daniel Costa - Nov. 19 (Investigative Report) - (Microsoft 2012, 10). The study that produced these recommendations contains a number of flaws, the most obvious of which are addressed in this memorandum. Specifically, this paper finds:

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Anonymous claims to have blocked GOP election theft with Ohio firewall

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Baltimore Examiner - By Michael Santo - Nov. 18 (News Report) - according to the report, Anonymous stopped any voter fraud from happening. The hacker group put up firewalls on election night to any data from flowing out of Ohio. Anonymous, according to their "letter," could instead have tried to capture the data and then expose the criminals, but that would have been far too risky. Instead, they closed the hole that Rove was going to use and blocked the theft of the election.

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America’s Coming Space Wars

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Informed Comment - By Alfred W. McCoy - Nov. 09 (Opinion) - It’s 2025 and an American “triple canopy” of advanced surveillance and armed drones fills the heavens from the lower- to the exo-atmosphere. A wonder of the modern age, it can deliver its weaponry anywhere on the planet with staggering speed, knock out an enemy’s satellite communications system, or follow individuals biometrically for great distances. Along with the country’s advanced cyberwar capacity, it’s also the most sophisticated militarized information system ever created and an insurance policy for U.S. global dominion deep into the twenty-first century. It’s the future as the Pentagon imagines it; it’s under development; and Americans know nothing about it.

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Harpers Magazine cover story: "How to Rig an Election"

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Daily Kos - By Ivorysteve - Oct. 16 (Review) - My copy of the November Harper's Magazine arrived today, with a surprisingly front-and-center article on the state of America's vote-counting technology. It's a well-researched piece, with much of it depressingly familiar to many progressives who followed the tin-foil-hat-tainted theories of the 2004 election. It reviews the recent history some of us know: the ESS&S / Diebold coziness, Bev Harris and hackable GEMS system, the Help America Vote Act Trojan horse, Chuck Hegal, Max Cleland, the exit poll disparities in Ohio and elsewhere in 2004 that all exhibited a "red shift" to the Right. The article then brings things up to date.

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The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Klint Finley - Aug. 04 (Opinion) - The Federated Web Should Be Easier Than It Sounds

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Journalism: The best of times, and the worst of times

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

GigaOM - By Mathew Ingram - Jun. 03 (Interview) - Journalism professor Tim McGuire, a long-time newspaper editor and Pulitzer Prize judge, says there is much upheaval in the media industry but a lot of potential as well -- provided media entities give up their gatekeeper role and learn to serve their readers better.

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Behind the US/Israeli Cyberattacks on Iran

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Informed Comment - By Juan Cole - Jun. 03 (Opinion) - Megha Rajagopalan writes at ProPublica The New York Times [has] published a report detailing how the Bush and Obama administrations created the cyberweapon known as Stuxnet and used it to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment program. Much has been written about Stuxnet, which, as ProPublica recently reported, remains a threat beyond Iran.

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25 years of HyperCard—the missing link to the Web

Thu, 31 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Ars Technica - By Matthew Lasar - May. 31 (Opinion) - This month, I glanced at my historical watch. HyperCard will soon be 25, I noticed. What ever happened to it? I searched around and found venture entrepreneur and coder Tim Oren's 2004 eulogy for the program, written the week that Apple withdrew the software from the market. HyperCard's problem, he argued, was that Apple never quite figured out what the software was for. "What was this thing?" Oren wrote. "Programming and user interface design tool? Lightweight database and hypertext document management system? Multimedia authoring environment? Apple never answered that question."

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The Fight For The Fifth Screen (Fifth Screen!?) In Your Life

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Fast Company - By Kit Eaton - Apr. 22 (News Report) - Smartwatches, AR goggles, and more: There's a mighty scramble afoot for your last sliver of attention. Is the the start of ad-mageddon?

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Google's Project Glass: You ain't seen nothin' yet

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

CNET News - By Martin LaMonica - Apr. 06 (News Report) - The augmented-reality Project Glass provides a peek into Google's ambitions with artificial intelligence and how AI software could further shake up mobile computing. Google's Project Glass demo is certainly the coolest hardware demo so far this year. Behind the scenes is something equally intriguing: artificial-intelligence software.

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Google’s ‘Project Glass’ Augmented Reality Glasses Are Real And In Testing

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - Apr. 04 (Opinion) - After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass -- a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes. "We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t," wrote Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, three Google employees who are part of the Google X skunkworks. "We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input." Something tells me that they won't be hurting for feedback.

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The State of the News Media 2012

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Pew Research - By Amy Mitchell, Tom Rosenstiel - Mar. 25 (Special Report) - In 2011, the digital revolution entered a new era. The age of mobile, in which people are connected to the web wherever they are, arrived in earnest. More than four in ten American adults now own a smartphone. One in five owns a tablet. New cars are manufactured with internet built in. With more mobility comes deeper immersion into social networking. For news, the new era brings mixed blessings. New research released in this report finds that mobile devices are adding to people’s news consumption, strengthening the lure of traditional news brands and providing a boost to long-form journalism. Eight in ten who get news on smartphones or tablets, for instance, get news on conventional computers as well. People are taking advantage, in other words, of having easier access to news throughout the day – in their pocket, on their desks and in their laps. At the same time, a more fundamental challenge that we identified in this report last year has intensified — the extent to which technology intermediaries now control the future of news.

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Helping readers improve Wikipedia

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Wikimedia - By Fabrice Florin, Dario Taraborelli, Howie Fung, Arron Halfaker, Oliver Keyes - Mar. 25 (Special Report) - The Wikimedia Foundation, in collaboration with editors of the English Wikipedia, is developing a tool to enable readers to contribute productively to building the encyclopedia. To that end, we started development of a new version of the Article Feedback Tool (known as AFTv5) in October 2011. The original version of the tool, which allows readers to rate articles based on a star system, launched in 2010. The new version invites readers to write comments that might help editors improve Wikipedia articles. We hope that this tool will contribute to the Wikimedia movement’s strategic goals of increasing participation and improving quality.

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Mike Daisey: Reports of my Death have been Greatly Exaggerated

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0700

mikedaisey.blogspot.com - By Mike Daisey - Mar. 20 (Opinion) - In the last forty-eight hours I have been equated with Stephen Glass, James Frey, and Greg Mortenson. Given the tenor of the condemnation, you would think I had concocted an elaborate, fanciful universe filled with furnaces in which babies are burned to make iPhone components, or that I never went to China, never stood outside the gates of Foxconn, never pretended to be a businessman to get inside of factories, never spoke to any workers. Especially galling is how many are gleefully eager to dance on my grave expressly so they can return to ignoring everything about the circumstances under which their devices are made. Given the tone, you would think I had fabulated an elaborate hoax, filled with astonishing horrors that no one had ever seen before. Except that we all know that isn’t true.

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Michio Kaku: Captain Michio and the World of Tomorrow

Sat, 10 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Brian Bolduc - Mar. 10 (Opinion) - By 2020, the word "computer" will have vanished from the English language, physicist Michio Kaku predicts. Every 18 months, computer power doubles, he notes, so in eight years, a microchip will cost only a penny. Instead of one chip inside a desktop, we'll have millions of chips in all our possessions: furniture, cars, appliances, clothes. Chips will become so ubiquitous that "we won't say the word 'computer,'" prophesies Mr. Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York. "We'll simply turn things on."

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Pair Programming Considered Harmful?

Sat, 03 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Jon Evans - Mar. 03 (Opinion) - Coding has always been seen as lone-ranger work; witness the opening scene in The Social Network. Despite managers’ dreams of programmers as fungible units, it’s nearly universally accepted that a great developer is ten times as productive as a mediocre one, and/or that a small team of the software equivalent of the Special Forces can code rings around an army of hundreds of grunts. The flip side is that one cowboy coder’s bad decisions can cripple you — maybe immediately, or maybe next year, when you suddenly discover that your organization has quietly racked up so much technical debt that it has become the software equivalent of Greece.

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Facebook Problems: Evan Priestley, Former Engineer, Exposes Social Network's 'Buggiest' Software

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Ramona Emerson - Jan. 10 (News Report) - Has Facebook developed the glitchiest software on the web? Yes, according to Evan Priestley, a former Facebook engineer. "Facebook is the buggiest software I use regularly, by a wide margin," Priestley recently wrote on question-and-answer site Quora.

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How will technology influence the news in 2012?

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Dan Gillmor - Dec. 29 (Opinion) - Predicting the next year's news is a fool's errand, but looking at technological trends could give us a hint At the beginning of 2011, aging dictators ruled Egypt and Libya, and despotism was the nearly unquestioned reality in most of the Middle East. The eurozone was seeing trouble at its edges, but wasn't heading toward collapse. News International had successfully covered up most of its rampant bad acts, and Rupert Murdoch was on the verge of even greater control over British media and politics. Anyone who might have predicted how utterly and rapidly those realities would change might have been branded a lunatic. Which is one reason why the annual journalistic ritual of making predictions about the year ahead is a fool's errand. With that in mind, let me offer instead some observations about the technology and media trends we've seen in past months, and how they might play out in 2012. In many cases, the trajectory is deeply worrisome. But I remain an eternal optimist in the face of ...

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How news orgs are reaching millions through Facebook’s new apps

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Poynter Institute - By Jeff Sonderman - Nov. 30 (News Analysis) - It has been over two months since Facebook announced a new class of social news applications — ones that automatically share links to everything a person reads. Now we are learning more about the readership, strategies and effects of these “open graph” or “frictionless sharing” apps. Here are the six big lessons so far.

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The Apologies of Zuckerberg: A Retrospective

Tue, 29 Nov 2011 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Liz Gannes - Nov. 29 (News Analysis) - At this point, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s pattern on privacy is clear. Launch new stuff that pushes the boundaries of what people consider comfortable. Apologize and assure users that they control their information, but rarely pull back entirely, and

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