Berkman Buzz: November 3, 2014

On Monday, October 27 Andy Baio posted an analysis of 72 hours of tweets with the #Gamergate hashtag. With the very best of intentions, he also shared the underlying data containing over 300,000 tweets saved as CSV file. There are several technical and potential ethical problems with that, which I'll get to later, but in a fit of “rules are for thee, not for me," I grabbed this very valuable data while I could knowing that it wouldn't be up for long.

I did some preliminary data analysis and visualization of the retweet network using this data in my spare time over the next day. On Wednesday morning, October 29, I tweeted out a visualization of the network describing the features of the visualization and offering a preliminary interpretation, "intensely retweeting and following other pro-#gamergate is core to identity and practice. Anti-GG is focused on a few voices." I intended this tweet as a criticism of pro-Gamergaters for communicating with each other inside an insular echo chamber, but it was accidentally ambiguous and it left room for other interpretations.

The proof is in: Detailed report shows how U.S. Internet access monopolies punish rivals and catch innocent bystanders in the crossfire—legally.

Devan Dewey, the Chief Technology Officer of midsize investment consultancy NEPC, has an orderly office and a highly organized mind. So naturally, when some at-home employees near Boston complained they could barely work because their connections to the company data center had slowed to a crawl, Dewey and his team determined to find out why.

His team's research led him to suspect something astonishing and dark: that NEPC, and probably many other businesses and consumers, were caught in the crossfire of an ongoing battle between "eyeball networks" run by Internet access providers, such as Comcast and Verizon; and "transit networks" used by competing video services, such as Netflix. He came to wonder whether, in their attempts to charge Netflix for access to their subscribers, Comcast and some other networks were recklessly affecting Internet connectivity for businesses like NEPC. Could that possibly be true?

Successful communities have learned a few things about how to maintain healthy public spaces. We could use a handbook for community designers gathering effective practices. It is a mark of the youth of interpublic spaces that spaces such as Twitter and Instagram [not to mention niche spaces like Wikipedia, and platforms like WordPress] rarely have architects dedicated to designing and refining this aspect of their structure, toolchains, and workflows.

Some say that 'overly' public spaces enable widespread abuse and harassment. But the "publicness" of large digital spaces can help make them more welcoming in ways than physical ones - where it is harder to remove graffiti or eggs from homes or buildings - and niche ones - where clique formation and systemic bias can dominate. For instance, here are a few 'soft' (reversible, auditable, post-hoc) tools that let a mixed ecosystem review and maintain their own areas in a broad public space:

The Coming Swarm fall book tour will be hitting (swarming?) NYC, Boston, Toronto, and Montreal. Full details here: http://bit.ly/11uPjL0
—Molly Sauter (@OddLetters )
 

The conventional (smart) wisdom is that we should not panic about Ebola in the United States (or Europe). That is certainly true because, even with its huge warts, US and European health-care systems are well-equipped to handle the few cases of Ebola that might pop up.

However, we should panic. We should panic at the lack of care and concern we are showing about the epidemic where it is truly ravaging; we should panic at the lack of global foresight in not containing this epidemic, now, the only time it can be fully contained; and we should panic about what this reveals about how ineffective our global decision-making infrastructure has become. Containing Ebola is a no-brainer, and not that expensive. If we fail at this, when we know exactly what to do, how are we going to tackle the really complex problems we face?

A couple of weeks ago, I joined other former students of Joseph P. Fell at Bucknell University for a weekend honoring him. Although he is a philosophy professor, the takeaway for many of us was a reminder that while hands are useless without minds to guide them, minds need hands more deeply than we usually think.

Philosophy is not the only discipline that needs this reminder. Almost anyone—it’s important to maintain the exceptions—who is trying to understand a topic would do well by holding something in her hands, or, better, building something with them.

On Wednesday, October 22, members of the Digital Problem-Solving Initiative (DPSI) community gathered to hear from members of the seven DPSI teams. DPSI teams feature a diverse group of learners (students, faculty, fellows, and staff) working on projects addressing problems and opportunities across the university. DPSI participants have had the novel opportunity to enhance and cultivate competency in various digital literacies as teams engage with research, design, and policy relating to the digital world.

Each team had 3 minutes to present its progress and 9 minutes of feedback from the DPSI community audience.

Projects include: AccessEd: Accessibility in Online Education, Big Data, eyeData:Data Visualization and Exploratory Tools Applied to Real-World Research Data, Farmer's Market: Building A Self-Sustaining Harvard Farmer's Market, Safe Campus: Dealing With Sexual Assault on Campus, #DocShop: Interactive Documentary Workshop, and OA2014: Open Access.

The mysterious death of Ko Aung Kyaw Naing, a journalist widely known as Ko Par Gyi, has sparked anger among many in the Southeast Asian country.

Ko Par Gyi, who previously had served as a bodyguard for Aung San Suu Kyi, was covering recent clashes between the Myanmar Army and armed forces of the Karen minority rebel group in Mon State when he was detained by the Myanmar army on September 30. After three weeks, army officials notified the Interim Myanmar Press Council that the freelance reporter was killed on Oct. 4, while in their custody, and that his body has been buried already.