@sdp

Building machines with a conscience is a big job, and one that will require the coordinated efforts of philosophers, computer scientists, legislators, and lawyers. And, as Colin Allen, a pioneer in machine ethics put it, “We don’t want to get to the point where we should have had this discussion twenty years ago.” As machines become faster, more intelligent, and more powerful, the need to endow them with a sense of morality becomes more and more urgent.

“Ethical subroutines” may sound like science fiction, but once upon a time, so did self-driving cars.

— Google’s Driver-less Car and Morality : The New Yorker (via new-aesthetic)

new-aesthetic:

“Boilerplate disclaimer copy for use of in-store data-capture surveillance” - adamgreenfield

Looks friendly, doesn’t it?

ben:

Time-scale subway map for Boston. I want one for NYC.

[London too, please. By the time I commute home would be helpful…]

In the past, few Indians bothered to initiate defamation suits, because trials can take decades in the country’s overburdened courts. A handful of plaintiffs have been awarded paltry sums after waiting years for their cases to be resolved. But in a rare case last year, a lower court in the city of Pune ordered a private news television channel to pay a retired judge damages amounting to about $18 million for mistakenly showing his photograph during a story about a judge with a similar name who had been accused of fraud. The channel, which apologized and corrected the mistake on air, has appealed.

— In India’s anti-corruption fight, news networks begin to pay a price - The Washington Post

Mandrill operates as a startup within MailChimp. It’s a product that’s both complementary and potentially disruptive to MailChimp, and we think the best way to deal with that tension is to press into it as hard as we can. So we cannibalized our own engineers and isolated them from the MailChimp team, allowing them to focus all their energy on this big new opportunity. As a result, Mandrill is evolving fast.

— I have to say I warm to this frankness hugely.

(Source: mandrill.com)

The team catapulted a typical policy-planning meeting into the Facebook age with collaborative small-group sessions that examined our biggest successes and challenges and took breaks to socialize and munch on quesadillas and kebabs. And what did we find out? Evolving how we think about public policy in the era of the social web may be as important as evolving public policy itself. Facebook DC believes in the value of pursuing a complicated policy question even if the answers are elusive, because chipping away at the big problems together makes us uniquely able to address new challenges. We believe the true sign of success is more than just a new position paper or a press release. Success is a better, deeper perspective on the role of our platform in the lives of hundreds of millions of users worldwide.

— 

Reflections on Our Inaugural “Po-Hack” - Facebook, 27 June 2011

I’ve been looking at the relatively limited number of policy hackathon examples online, and this is the one I was both least and most surprised to see.

Julia is a machine learning algorithm (JuLiA stands for “Just a Linguistic Algorithm”) that we’ve taught to understand several languages and that we continue to teach on an ongoing basis (yes, she learns over time). She reads everything submitted to HuffPost and helps the moderators do their jobs faster and more accurately. We’ve really done a lot with machine-assisted moderation, allowing us to pre-moderate 9.5 million comments a month, and Julia is core to that. I’m a big fan of having machines help us with the lower level tasks, freeing up time, resources and brain power for more interesting and complex tasks. Julia takes that a few steps further and helps us with a lot of other aspects of HuffPost in addition to helping weed out abusive members, including identifying intelligent conversations for promotion, and content that is a mismatch for our advertisers. She has allowed us to do a lot more with a lot less.

— How the Huffington Post handles 70 million comments a year | Poynter.

Wow.

Broderick sees online participation split into two very different worlds. “There is a social realm where things are rationally sorted and then there’s the anonymous place that brings out a person’s base instincts. It can become a frothing, bubbling cauldron of insanity,” he said. “Yet, you need that animalistic part of yourself. I think of it almost like your sex drive.”
So with so much potential for offensive behavior, why allow commenting in the first place?
Both Isaf and Broderick believe that open and anonymous commenting is quite powerful when it works. Sometimes, even great ideas are born among the shouters. “We’ve seen comments where people spend a couple of hours researching and writing. I’ve watched a discussion on abortion that had 50 people taking part with 200 comments without a single attack,” Isaf said.

— The Thankless Job of Online Comment Moderators | Adweek

TV ratings are measured using mechanical devices that record the presence of viewers in the room when the TV is on, usually by the viewers pressing a button to register that they’ve entered the room. So it really registers presence, rather than attention – the viewer could be reading a newspaper, doing the ironing or using their iphone, but for the sake of the ratings they count as an avid viewer. Ratings technologies have been refined over time, but the basic concept hasn’t changed since it was invented by Arthur C Nielsen to measure radio audiences in the 1930s. BARB is the UK version of TV ratings, using a panel of 5,100 homes to represent the UK TV viewing public. So each percentage point in the examples above stand for a measurement sample of just 51 homes. The amount of people in these homes is around 11,300, so each percentage point stands for a maximum of 113 people pressing their buttons when they walk into the living room. It’s often a lot less, as the percentages above are share of the total viewing audience (BARB calls this the ‘universe’) at that time – many BARB panellists might be out of their homes, or might not have the TV on at that time.

— Unpacking how TV ratings are measured…

(Source: test.org.uk)

Submit to the SXSW Interactive Accelerator →

onaissues:

Are you a news startup? SXSW wants you to apply for the 2013 accelerator. Showcase you work during SXSW interactive, get feedback on your product and network with venture capitalists and industry leaders. 

For more details and to apply, check out the SXSW website. 

When the tech industry wants to engage, it works through organizations like the Information Technology Industry Council in Washington that work face-to-face with public officials and their staffs, it doesn’t create yet another web site where anonymous commenters can made poorly-informed changes to moribund legislative vehicles. When Washington and Sacramento want to engage with the tech industry, they reach out to ITIC at the national level and state-focused groups like TechNet in California.

Public officials are a lot more interested in the jobs created by Intel’s latest fab than by the jobs lost by the administrators of Reddit’s sleazy “Jailbait” and “Creepshots” sections when their identities are made public. The logic is pretty plain: Intel employs tens of thousands of people and produces essential elements of the tech economy such as integrated circuits, while Reddit and similar incubator-cooked web sites employ almost no paid labor and traffic in sexually suggestive photos of teenaged girls and “up-skirt” photos of women’s underwear taken from shoe mounted cameras. It’s not a subtle distinction.

[..]

As anyone who works in public policy can tell you, the most important part of the job is the analysis of the impact of particular policies. The bad bills all come from consensus positions that no one dares to question because supporting them has become a matter of tribal membership. You don’t come to the correct position on a policy question by simply surveying TechNet, Engine Advocacy, and The Internet Association. You come to it by examining the questions, reading the bills, and working out the implications. There is no “popularity short cut” in this process.

And when you’ve figured out what you want and why you want it, you don’t make your thinking known to public officials by scribbling anonymous nonsense on a web site, you come forward as a real person with a real name to make your sentiments known in a way that encourages direct dialog. Anything less is just playing at policy, not making it. Anonymous commentary on the web may make you feel like an activist, but it doesn’t make an impact on the world.

— Richard Bennett gives TechCrunch a curt slap for “playing at policy” - The Tech Industry’s Odd Relationship with Government

My friend Ravi Mattu goes in front of the camera to interview Mozilla, Moonfruit and Joi Ito for the FT…
(via The next big thing - ft business - companies - FT.com)

Conversations - Myria Georgiou, Lecturer in Media and Communications (by kirkt94)

R is an open source statistical programming language. It is incredibly powerful. Over two million (and counting) analysts use R. It’s been around since 1997 if you can believe it. It is a modern version of the S language for statistical computing that originally came out of the Bell Labs. Today, R is quickly becoming the new standard for statistics. R performs complex data science at a much smaller price (both literally and figuratively). R is making serious headway in ousting SAS and SPSS from their thrones, and has become the tool of choice for the world’s best statisticians (and data scientists, and analysts too).

— The people at InfoChimps reveal what they think are Five Trendy Open Source Big Data Technologies - I can understand about 32% of this piece, but it’s clearly helpful insight.