Facebook Data Team wrote a note titled Anatomy of Facebook. Read the full text here.
Think back to the last time you were in a crowded airport or bus terminal far from home. Did you consider that the person sitting next to you probably knew a friend of a friend of a friend of yours? In the 1960s, social psychologist Stanley Milgram’s “small world experiment” famously tested the idea that any two people in the world are separated by only a small number of intermediate connections, arguably the first experimental study to reveal the surprising structure of social networks.
With the rise of modern computing, social networks are now being mapped in digital form, giving researchers the ability to study them on a much grander, even global, scale. Continuing this tradition of social network research, Facebook, in collaboration with researchers at the Università degli Studi di Milano, is today releasing two studies of the Facebook social graph.
Sociological Imagination
I met this girl in a little village tucked away in the gorgeous but harsh highlands of Chiapas, Mexico: After the Zapatistas burst into the scene in the 2000s 1990s with their uprising, there was a lot of discussion about their use of the... January 13, 2011 C-SPAN http://MOXNews.com... 
Internet addiction disorder (IAD) is currently becoming a serious mental health issue around the globe. Previous studies regarding IAD were mainly focused on associated psychological examinations. However, there are few studies on brain structure and function about IAD. In this study, we used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) to investigate white matter integrity in adolescents with IAD. 
A new survey from the Pew Research Center finds that economic disparity is now seen as a bigger source conflict in the U.S. than race, age or national origin. 
Harvard University has taken an innovative approach to producing course syllabuses, producing videos of professors speaking in detail about the syllab...
... Via Ana Cristina Pratas 
A campaign for a chemo-themed doll catches fire... 
The promise of a world in which we collect massive amounts of data is that it will change our behavior for the better. This commercial isn't real, neither are society's standards of beauty. 
Lessons from the new world of quicksilver work, where "career planning" is an oxymoron. 
As the Spanish May 15 movement was getting started in February of last year, it did so with almost no money. What it had, instead, was a lot of participation. 
Emile Zola famously stated back in 1901, “In my view, you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it.” Today, there is a similar joke: “it did not happen unless it is posted on Facebook.” For those who use Facebook, whose friends are on the site and logging in many times a day, we have come to experience the world differently. We are increasingly aware of how our lives will look as a Facebook photo, status update or check-in. As I type this in an American coffee shop, I can “check-in” on Foursquare, I can “tweet” a funny one-liner overheard from the table next to me on Twitter and I can take an interesting photo of the perfectly-formed foam on top of my cappuccino. It is easy; I can do all of this and more from my phone in a matter of minutes. And, most importantly, there will be an audience for all of this. Hundreds of the people I am closest with will view all of this and some will reply with comments and “likes.” |
Right now we are in the age of life-logging, recording every bit of information about what we do in a day. This behavior is also called total capture and Facebook’s latest Timeline feature, has introduced the idea of total capture to mainstream audiences. A Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, Abigail Sellen is critical of the modern conversation on life-logging and total capture and argues this technical handling of memories through indexing and metadata is just not how human memory works. 
Finland has been hailed for exemplifying the ideal model of a thriving, innovative education system that prioritizes the most important stakeholders: students. International and American media are fascinated by the Scandinavian country’s approach to designing the education system. The fact that Finland manages to score among the top three countries on the PISA survey is a tribute to its success, and worth following closely, observers say. So what makes the Finland story so compelling? 
From novels to manifestos and jeremiads, the author and academic selects the best reading about the network that is shaping our world (John Naughton's top 10 books about the internet, from sociology and law to fiction (Kunzru and Stephenson) Via nukem777 
It would require a wholesale reordering of our economy, but that might happen whether we like it or not. To save the world -- or really to even just make our personal lives better -- we will need to work less. 
As global newspaper audiences decline, some media organisations are latching onto emerging tools and open-source technologies to make news more relevant, personalised, and 'hyper-local'. Investigative journalism is being reinvented and reporters are doing their jobs in unimagined ways. 'Data journalism' is becoming the competitive differentiator for global news Via Lelio Simi Leading social and tech experts present their visions for Facebook's future impact on society. Some believe Facebook will become pervasive plumbing for the social web, others argue it could simply fizzle. Contributors include Kevin Kelly (What Technology Wants, founder Wired), David Kirkpatrick (author The Facebook Effect), Howard Rheingold (author Smart Mobs), Nova Spivack (web innovator, co-founder Bottlenose), futurist Jamais Cascio, Doug Rushkoff (author Program or Be Programmed), Doc Searls (Berkman Center, author The Cluetrain Manifesto), social network research pioneer Valdis Krebs, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case, web anthropologist Stowe Boyd, innovation strategist Chris Arkenberg, Suzanne Fischer (curator Henry Ford Museum). Narrated by Alvis Brigis. Produced by the futureoffacebook.com open foresight team. Come contribute to the effort! The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities. But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? Via axelletess 
A group called the Institute for the Future - what a name, right? - is smart enough to know that it can't actually predict what will happen in 2021. But the group can use our existing knowledge of science to pose interesting "what-if?" questions about where advances in science and technology will take us in the next 10 years, which really is an eternity when it comes to these topics. 
In the summer of 2011, London erupted in flames. Now, it's not the first time the city has burned; it's had a rich history of conflagration within its walls and revolt in its urban sprawl. But this time it was different: the source of the unrest echoed the sounds of virtual revolutions around the globe -- inequality, incomprehension, inefficacy -- yet like the people on the streets of Tehran and Cairo, the Londoners who chose to riot also chose to leave an incredibly rich trail of information in their wakes. By using social media to organize and report, to promote and to publicize, they gave curious academics and other interested parties a trove of pickings that can be analyzed for impressive insights. One of the university consortia in the UK who gained access to Twitter's resources worked with The Guardian newspaper to analyze the riots, asking questions about how information -- and misinformation -- spread around the microblogosphere. Twitter, the current platform of choice for news organizations, was happy to deliver an extraordinary number of tweets to the group. With over 2.6 million tweets at their disposal, they used The Guardian's global platform to deliver the insights to an impressive mainstream audience. 
2011 was a year of transition and change. In 2012, science and technology conflicts and controversies become a resource for locating change and what it means for the future.
Scientific and technological controversies are similar to dilemmas and wicked problems; they are not readily reducible to stepwise solutions. A simple example of a controversy might be the question of how life on planet earth began. This might seem pretty straightforward, but it turns out that a whole lot of different people, groups, professions, organisms, and technologies have a lot to say on the matter. But let's leave the origin of life aside for the moment. Controversies are debates surrounding a technique or scientific fact that has yet to be determined, and they tend to generative source of information and meaning for technology foresight. 
As Media Matters detailed last week, most of the cable and network television news outlets have been busy not reporting during the evening news shows on a sweeping, controversial piece of legislation that's being championed by the parent companies of the same television news outlets busy not covering the story. The proposed legislation, strongly supported by American media giants such as Viacom, News Corp. and Time Warner, is known as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and it aims to curtail the amount of pirated content found for free on the Internet. But critics, including leading tech companies, complain that if passed in its current form SOPA would provide the Department of Justice with far-reaching powers to police piracy; powers that could severely limit internet freedom and choice. How journalism works today. Seventeen declaration |
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