carapace – Not your father's america

News release: "The Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, chaired by Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR), today advanced legislation to promote a global Internet free from government control. The bill, approved by voice vote, contains the same language that unanimously passed the House and Senate last year, elevating it to official U.S policy rather than merely a sense of the Congress in light of continued international efforts to regulate the Internet. “Governments’ hands-off approach has enabled the Internet to grow at an astonishing pace and become perhaps the most powerful engine of social and economic freedom and job creation the world has ever known. Under the current multi-stakeholder governance model, non-regulatory institutions manage and operate the Internet by developing best practices with public and private sector input," said Chairman Walden. During the proceedings, Chairman Walden also clarified the intent of the legislation and agreed to continue to work with the minority to seek bipartisan consensus. Click here to view Walden’s full remarks. On February 5, 2013, the Subcommittee on Communications and Technology and the Foreign Affairs Subcommittees on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade and Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights, and International Organizations held a joint hearing to discuss efforts by some countries to expand international regulation of the Internet. In the 112th Congress, the House and Senate adopted resolutions with overwhelming bipartisan support opposing efforts at the World Conference on International Telecommunications to drag the Internet within the purview of the International Telecommunications Union, a U.N. agency."

Via PSU Science

http://science.psu.edu/news-and-events/2013-news/Salathe4-2013

On Twitter, a popular microblogging and social-networking service, statements about vaccines may have unexpected effects — positive messages may backfire, according to a team of Penn State University researchers led by Marcel Salathé, an assistant professor of biology. The team tracked the pro-vaccine and anti-vaccine messages to which Twitter users were exposed and then observed how those users expressed their own sentiments about a new vaccine for combating influenza H1N1 …
Salathé hopes to design additional Twitter studies to test whether the same effects can be observed for sentiments expressed about other vaccines, as well as about other health issues such as antibiotic usage, dieting, and exercising. "While some of our results from the H1N1 study may seem frustrating, there are silver linings," Salathé said. "First, we have a tried-and-true way to track and analyze the wealth of data out there on Twitter. Second, further studies may reveal why positive messages seem to encourage negative tweeting; perhaps there’s something about the manner in which the message is being conveyed. For example, public health officials could use that information to send positive messages in a way that would be more likely to have the intended effect."
…

Understanding Why Users Tag: A Survey of Tagging Motivation Literature and Results from an Empirical Study, Markus Strohmaier, Christian Körner, Roman Kern. Journal of Web Semantics, preprint server.

"While recent progress has been achieved in understanding the structure and dynamics of social tagging systems, we know little about the underlying user motivations for tagging, and how they influence resulting folksonomies and tags. This paper addresses three issues related to this question: 1.) What distinctions of user motivations are identied by previous research, and in what ways is user motivation amenable to quantitative analysis? 2.) To what extent does tagging motivation vary across dierent social tagging systems? and 3.) How does variability in user motivation influence resulting tags and folksonomies? In this paper, we present measures to detect whether a tagger is primarily motivated by categorizing or describing resources, and apply these measures to datasets from seven dierent tagging systems. Our results show that a) users’ motivation for tagging varies not only across, but also within tagging systems, and that b) tag agreement among users who are motivated by categorizing resources is significantly lower than among users who are motivated by describing resources. Our findings are relevant for 1) the development of tag-based user interfaces 2) the analysis of tag semantics and 3) the design of search algorithms for social tagging systems."

Posted: 21 Jul 2012 05:05 AM PDT

Hope no one’s planning on committing any thought crimes.

"The FBI could use this to flag potential wrongdoers"

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/07/20/using-twi…

read more

"Zanran helps you to find ‘semi-structured’ data on the web. This is the numerical data that people have presented as graphs and tables and charts. For example, the data could be a graph in a PDF report, or a table in an Excel spreadsheet, or a barchart shown as an image in an HTML page. This huge amount of information can be difficult to find using conventional search engines, which are focused primarily on finding text rather than graphs, tables and bar charts…Zanran doesn’t work by spotting wording in the text and looking for images – it’s the other way round. The system examines millions of images and decides for each one whether it’s a graph, chart or table – whether it has numerical content. The core technology is patented computer vision algorithms that decide whether an image is numerical – and they’re accurate (about 98%). But the huge majority of images on the internet are not graphs etc. So even though the accuracy is high, you will still get some non-numerical images. In comparison, looking for tables is relatively simple. Once we’ve found a table we then have to decide whether it’s essentially numerical – and we have algorithms for that."