Allison.

Online Camera Obscura: Reflections of Uncertainty

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 16:12:59 -0400

Online Camera Obscura: Reflections of Uncertainty

midterm website.

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 03:02:00 -0400

midterm website.

Free to Move, Speak, Extemporise, and Yet....

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 00:04:00 -0400

Abstract:

We are now held captive by the availability of too much information, a flipping of fragments: arbitrarily gathered pieces of information presumed to belong to the same puzzle- the wealth of information available on the Internet and the fact it can be assembled by anyone with any notion of how things are related to one another should truly be a cause of major concern.

Blogging and Newspapers

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:41:00 -0400

Blogging and Newspapers:
“A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog. The NY Times Blogs on their website are blogs. People who have blogs have a hard enough time coming up with a definition of what blog is. Potential or even current readers have no real idea of what the term blog reflect in terms of quality or content….

What I’ve Learned as a Blogger for The New York Times

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:37:46 -0400

What I’ve Learned as a Blogger for The New York Times:

“Mark Cuban wrote Thursday about why he thinks that newspapers, and the New York Times in particular, are making a mistake by publishing blogs.

One of Mark’s main points is that blogs are so associated with hasty rumor-mongering and blowhard pontificating that no newspaper should be involved with the form. “A blog is a blog is a blog is a blog,” he writes.

My take is different. I’d say that blog is the name of a format for information and opinion that is roughly analogous to “column” or “newsletter.” The format itself doesn’t tell you whether the content is pedestrian or inflammatory, impressionistic or deeply researched……”

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:29:22 -0400

Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits:

“…Some young journalists have also started blogs and Internet news sites, using servers in other countries, and their reports are reaching people through the digital underground…

The Internet has become the only terrain that is not regulated,” she said in an interview. Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

Rumor's Reasons

Sun, 16 Mar 2008 01:22:00 -0400

By FARHAD MANJOO Published: March 16, 2008

In the summer of 2004, Andy Martin, a colorful Web columnist and sometime Republican candidate for state office, put out a press release announcing his sadness at having to “expose” Barack Obama as a “Muslim who has concealed his religion.” Reporters ignored Martin’s charge, which offered no proof. But the story took root: Martin’s screed bounced about blogs, mutating over the course of a couple years into an e-mail message that suggested the senator is a kind of Muslim Manchurian candidate for the White House.

Though news organizations and fact-checking Web sites like Snopes.com have debunked the claim, the story just won’t die. In an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken in December, 8 percent of respondents thought Obama was Muslim, half as many as correctly identified him as a Protestant.

The Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor does not seem to have hurt the candidate’s fortunes, at least not yet. But the myth’s persistence illustrates a growing cultural vulnerability to rumor. Journalists typically presume that facts matter: show the public what is true, and they will make decisions correctly. Psychologists who study how we separate truth from fiction, however, have demonstrated that the process is not so simple. And because digital technology fosters social networks that are both closely knit and far-flung, rumors are now free to travel widely within certain groups before they meet any opposition from the truth.

Consider, for starters, this paradox of social psychology, a problem for myth busters everywhere: repeating a claim, even if only to refute it, increases its apparent truthfulness. In 2003, the psychologist Ian Skurnik and several of his colleagues asked senior citizens to sit through a computer presentation of a series of health warnings that were randomly identified as either true or false — for example, “Aspirin destroys tooth enamel” (true) or “Corn chips contain twice as much fat as potato chips” (false). A few days later, they quizzed the seniors on what they had learned.

The psychologists expected that seniors would mistakenly remember some false statements as true. What was remarkable, though, was which claims they most often got wrong — the ones they had been exposed to multiple times. In other words, the more that researchers had stressed that a given warning was false, the more likely seniors were to eventually come to believe it was true. (College students in the study did not make the same mistakes.)

To understand this turnabout, says Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist at the University of Michigan who worked with Skurnik on the study, it helps to know how our brains suss out truth from fiction. To determine the veracity of a given statement, we often look to society’s collective assessment of it. But it is difficult to measure social consensus very precisely, and our brains rely, instead, upon a sensation of familiarity with an idea. You use a rule of thumb: if something seems familiar, you must have heard it before, and if you’ve heard it before, it must be true.

The rule obviously invites many opportunities for error. The seniors in Skurnik’s study couldn’t remember the context in which they had heard the health claims (research shows that we are quick to forget “negation tags,” like whether something is said to be false or a lie), so they relied, instead, on a vague sense of familiarity, which steered them astray. Repetition, psychologists have shown, easily tricks us. Kimberlee Weaver of Virginia Tech recently found that if one person tells you that something is true many times, you are likely to conclude that the opinion is widely held, even if no one else said a thing about it.

Is myth busting a lost cause? Nicholas DiFonzo, a psychologist at the Rochester Institute of Technology, gives Obama high marks on his handling of the Muslim rumor, particularly a refutation Obama offered during an interview late in January with the Christian Broadcasting Network. Obama offered a clear, point-by-point rebuttal to every argument in the chain e-mail, and he provided an important alternative story — “dirty tricks.”

But Obama’s well-executed refutation didn’t kill the rumor. One problem is that rumors are rarely static. “You will see them mutate,” says Bill Adair of Politifact.com. “They’ll pick up new pieces, while some pieces drop off. There’s a line that appears in one version now: ‘I checked this out on Snopes, and it’s true.’ ” At some point, it seems, someone added a line like that as a kind of defense mechanism. There’s an arms race between truth and fiction, and at the moment, the truth doesn’t appear to be winning.

Come from behind win for First Amendment THOMAS ELIASTuesday March 11, 2008 In the beginning, it...

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 02:36:11 -0400

Come from behind win for First Amendment

THOMAS ELIAS
Tuesday March 11, 2008

In the beginning, it looked like an utter disaster for the First Amendment, whose guarantees of freedom of speech and press have protected Americans from prior restraint since the Bill of Rights was adopted almost 230 years ago.

But the unified defense of an obscure Web site by mainstream media and other free-press advocates instead turned around a case that could have set a pernicious precedent for squashing information governments and corporations don’t want the public to see.

This case became dangerous when a federal judge in San Francisco last month ordered the shutdown of a U.S. Web site called Wikileaks.org, which claims to have posted 1.2 million leaked government and corporate documents to the Internet, all tending to expose unethical or illegal behavior. Among items it has exposed are copies of a 2003 operations manual for the U.S. terrorist prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The site ran afoul of Judge Jeffrey White after the Swiss-based Bank Julius Baer & Co. filed a lawsuit claiming a disgruntled executive fired for “misconduct” stole documents and posted them on Wikileaks, exposing the bank’s operation in the Cayman Islands to allegations of money laundering and helping tax evasion schemes.

That, of course, seemed plausible because many other proven tax evasion schemes have laundered money through the Cayman Islands and other Caribbean and Swiss points.

The incredibly credulous White ordered Wikileaks shut down by his hosting company, San Mateo-based Dynadot, and Dyandot said it would comply. His injunction sought to impose prior restraints on both Wikileaks and Dynadot, something U.S. appeals courts have almost never upheld outside times of declared war. Prior restraints imposed by the British on colonial newspapers and pampleteers, in fact, were one cause of the American Revolution. They come when a government orders material suppressed before publication, whether or not it knows what might be published. Valid remedies for publication of false or malicious information, of course, are post-publication libel and slander actions, not fishing expeditions aimed at stopping embarrassing news stories.

Free press groups and activists did not meekly accept White’s injunction, even though Wikileaks is hardly a part of the traditional media associated in many minds with First Amendment protections.

“Wikileaks’ silencing was sought by antidemocratic governments worldwide — including China, whose censors work mightily to block all access to the site,” said Peter Scheer of the California First Amendment Coalition. “Wikileaks’ plug was pulled, ironically, (not in China) but by a federal judge in San Francisco.”

From Indianapolis came an outcry from the Society of Professional Journalists, which quickly submitted a friend of the court brief opposing the injunction along with the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Scripps Howard Newspapers, The Associated Press, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Gannett Co. (publishers of USA Today and more U.S. newspapers than any other firm) and the Newspaper Association of America. The challenge, thus, came from virtually the entire newspaper industry.

It was clear to most lawyers from the moment Judge White issued his injunction that the order would not stand long. Apparently, it didn’t take the judge long to realize this, either.

For less than a week after he issued his prior restraint order shutting down Wikileaks, the site was back up with the Bank Julius Baer documents as its lead links. The site declares upfront that it is “developing an uncensorable system for untraceable mass document leaking and public analysis.” Just what governments and many corporations don’t want and just what the public often needs.

In response to all the motions and friend of court briefs filed by the media and public interest coalition aroused by his ruling, White reversed field and lifted his injunction before any appeals court got the chance to do it for him.

He acknowledged in open court that his order had led to questions about “a possible violation of the First Amendment.” As a teenager might put it, “Well, duh.”

The real question here is how an American judge — any American judge — could be blind enough to believe the interests of a foreign bank (or any domestic government or business, either, for that matter) could possibly trump the First Amendment. It’s a question that raises serious doubts about this judge’s own judgment.

The judge also saw that his injunction, even if had stood, was essentially useless. Other Web sites — some based outside this country — quickly picked up Wikileaks’ materials and reposted them, making the order moot almost as quickly as it came down.

“This was a home run for the First Amendment,” said Matt Zimmerman, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group focusing on Internet liberty.

So a potentially disastrous curtailing of freedom of information has been turned into a triumph for openness and a valuable lesson for other judges who might share the warped sense of values that led to White’s original injunction.

Step 4 Detail a

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:42:00 -0400

Step 4 Detail a

Step 4

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:41:00 -0400

Step 4

Step 3 Detail d

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:34:00 -0400

Step 3 Detail d

Step 3 Detail a

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:33:00 -0400

Step 3 Detail a

Step 3 Detail b

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:33:00 -0400

Step 3 Detail b

Step 3 Detail c

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:33:00 -0400

Step 3 Detail c

Step 3

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:31:00 -0400

Step 3

Step 2

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:30:00 -0400

Step 2

Step 1a

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:27:00 -0400

Step 1a

Step 1

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Step 1

Diagram

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 01:25:00 -0400

Diagram

The Internet has radically enhanced the world’s access to information. However, with this access...

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:48:13 -0500

The Internet has radically enhanced the world’s access to information. However, with this access comes the ability to put the pieces of information together in the wrong way, or not have enough pieces to complete the correct puzzle in the right way.

Wikileaks.org’s mission statement:

We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies.

Wikileaks opens leaked documents up to stronger scrutiny than any media organization or intelligence agency can provide…..

Principled leaking has changed the course of history for the better; it can alter the course of history in the present; it can lead us to a better future.