More Data Beats Better Algorithms — Or Does It?

If you have to choose, having more data does indeed trump a better algorithm. However, what is better than just having more data on its own is also having an algorithm that annotates the data with new linkages and statistics which alter the underlying data asset. That way, the addition of each new algorithm radically improves the underlying data asset, just like the addition of a sensory input improves the way we experience the world around us.

http://allthingsd.com/20120907/more-data-beats-better-algorithms-or-does-it/

Google Fiber Splits Along Kansas City’s Digital Divide

Google’s effort to bring ultra-high-speed internet to a major American city could end up reinforcing the digital divide.

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‘Hope’ Poster Artist Sentenced to Two Years Probation

Shepard Fairey, the Los Angeles designer who created the famous poster of then-Senator Barack Obama next to the word “hope,” using an Associated Press photo as a base, was sentenced in a New York court earlier today as a result of AP’s litigation against him. He will face two years of probation and a $25,000 fine. Mr. Fairey had admitted that he tampered with evidence in his own legal efforts against the AP.

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Left Alone by Its Owner, Reddit Soars

Reddit, a vast social site that is a staple of digital life for the young and connected, but less well known among grown-ups, was founded by two fresh graduates of the University of Virginia in 2005, has just 20 employees, but serves up more than three billion page views a month.

With its basic graphics, endless links and discussions, Reddit can seem like peering into a bowl of spaghetti, but it has surpassed better-known aggregating sites like Digg to become a force on the Web. Occasionally, as in the instance of the Colorado shootings, it takes control of a news story early. Built on open-source software and guided by the ethos of its community, estimated by Quantcast to be 20 million users a month, it is a classic Web start-up in which opportunity seems mixed with barely controlled anarchy.

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New copyright rules for the digital age

Canada passed a law in June that sets a new standard of permissiveness. Britain too plans to introduce internet-friendly legislation this autumn. As with Canada’s law, the recommended new code entails exemptions for non-commercial uses and user-generated content. Another innovation is a copyright exemption for companies engaged in text- and data-mining (known as “big data”). Ireland and Australia are considering an exception that allows content legally obtained on one device to be accessed on another, called “format shifting”. Without such a provision, cloud-computing and digital-storage companies could be accused of abetting infringement. The Netherlands, South Korea and India are reviewing their copyright laws too.The tide is not all one way. EU officials want to maintain rules whereby computer users pay a small tithe on digital products to collection societies. These fees are meant to go to content creators but often end up enriching the middlemen instead.

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Preserving the Internet for posterity

There are not even any screen shots of the world’s first web page—the one that actually launched the World Wide Web in August 1991. Amid the explosive growth of internet services such as e-mail, music downloads and video streaming, along with the growth of the web itself, little thought has been given to recording information for posterity. The rapid turnover of content on the web has made total loss the norm. Lacking cultural artefacts, society has no mechanism to learn from previous mistakes.

Internet Archive (is) a free internet library capable of storing a copy of every web page of every website ever to go online. The Wayback Machine allows users to view the library’s archived web pages as they appeared when published. Today the Internet Archive also includes texts, audio, moving images and software. At the last count, its collection contained more than 150 billion items.

An interesting spin-off from the Internet Archive is the Open Library, which aims to provide a web page for every book in existence. The Open Library is not to be confused with Project Gutenberg, founded by the late Michael Hart, the inventor of the electronic book back in 1971. Project Gutenberg offers some 40,000 e-books that can be downloaded free in any of the popular e-reader formats.

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To what extent can social networking make it easier to find people and solve real-world problems?

IN 1967 Stanley Milgram, an American social scientist, conducted an experiment in which he sent dozens of packages to random people in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to pass them on to acquaintances who would, in turn, pass them on to get the packages closer to their intended final recipients. His famous result was that there were, on average, six degrees of separation between any two people. In 2011 Facebook analysed the 721m users of its social-networking site and found that an average of 4.7 hops could link any two of them via mutual friends.

Can this be used to solve real-world problems, by taking advantage of the talents and connections of one’s friends, and their friends? That is the aim of a new field known as social mobilization. It could potentially be used to help locate missing children, find a stolen car or track down a suspect.

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NASA ramps up investment in educational technology

An upcoming $10 million massively multi-player video game would simulate life on Mars and eventually provide 100 hours of playing time on the iPad, Sony Playstation and Microsoft Xbox. When a beta version of “Starlite” is released later this year, it will be NASA’s biggest foray into gaming, and one that Laughlin hopes will set the stage for future collaborations with commercial game developers.

In the past few years, NASA has released an air traffic control simulator for the iPhone, a trivia game called “Space Race Blastoff” for Facebook and “MoonBase Alpha,” a multi-player game that cost $300,000 to develop and resulted in 20 minutes of playing time.

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Flipboard's app

Flipboard, an app that displays content from Facebook (FB), Twitter, magazines, and newspapers on an elegant interface... faces competition from other newsreading apps, including Google Currents, Yahoo!’s (YHOO) Livestand, and Pulse, which has 15 million users and generates revenue by selling both advertising and digital subscriptions. To set itself apart from the crowded field, Flipboard boasts that more than 1.4 million people use its app daily, and that its users typically read its content for 86 minutes a month on their iPads and smartphones. The company also says advertisers are getting about 3 percent of users to click on their ads. By comparison, Facebook’s click-through rate is just 0.06 percent, according to a May report by Marin Software, an online advertising company.

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