‘Wiki’ May Alter How Employees Work Together
by Kara Swisher. Wall Street Journal. (Eastern edition). New York, N.Y.: Jul 29, 2004. pg. B.1.
[subscription required].
A wiki can gather, in one place, the data, knowledge, insight and customer input that’s floating around a company or other organization. And it’s a living document, since workers who are given access to it can make changes constantly.
[Politech] More on electronic voting, security, and seeing source code
This posting to the email list “Politech” describes the differences between “Direct-Recording Electronic” (DRE) voting and other electronic voting systems.
It is important to differentiate between “electronic voting”, which has
immense promise to make voting more accessible to many people, as well as
improving the efficiency and accuracy of the voting process, and
“Direct-Recording Electronic” voting systems, a type of electronic voting
system that record votes _only_ electronically, with no human verified
physical record, which raise many concerns, and have had numerous
operational problems in actual use, leading to (for example) decertification
of DRE’s in California.
Washington > Campaign 2004 > Lost Record ‘02 Florida Vote Raises ‘04 Concern” href=”http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/28/politics/campaign/28vote.final.html”>Lost Record ‘02 Florida Vote Raises ‘04 Concern. By Abby Goodnough, NYT July 28, 2004 (login required).
Almost all the electronic records from the first widespread use of touch-screen voting in Miami-Dade County have been lost, stoking concerns that the machines are unreliable as the presidential election draws near.
The records disappeared after two computer system crashes last year, county elections officials said, leaving no audit trail for the 2002 gubernatorial primary. A citizens group uncovered the loss this month after requesting all audit data from that election.
In other news, Paul Krugman, in today’s NYT op-ed section, dropped another FL bomb: “Jeb Bush insists that electronic voting machines are perfectly reliable, but The St. Petersburg Times says the Republican Party of Florida has sent out a flier urging supporters to use absentee ballots because the machines lack a paper trail and cannot “verify your vote.”"
I haven’t been able to verify this little tidbit, but it sure is interesting. I just volunteered to work at the polls in November. Shouldn’t you?!
Call him Sir Tim Berners-Lee | CNET News.com
Berners-Lee, in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, was dubbed a Knight Commander, the second highest rank of the Order of the British Empire. For Berners-Lee, a British citizen living in the United States, the knighthood marked the latest honor he has received since creating the protocols for the World Wide Web in the early 1990s.
House of Commons - Science and Technology - Tenth Report
The report, entitled “Scientific Publications: Free for all?” is a result of the UK House of Commons Science & Technology Committee’s inquiry into scientific publications that has investigated pricing, access and availability issues.
Read the rest of this entry »
Wired News: Downloading for Democracy
What a great idea. We can all be proactive about collecting government information.
Outragedmoderates.org, launched two weeks ago, has aggregated more than 600 government and court documents to make them available for download through the Kazaa, LimeWire and Soulseek P2P networks in the interest of making government more transparent and accountable.
[Originally posted by Kelda Vath on Govdoc-l]
…The ACLU said the Justice Department also continues to inflate its claims of Patriot Act success. Numerous investigative reports have revealed that while the DOJ prosecuted about 180 cases defined as international terrorism, close to half received jail sentences of less than a year and involved low-level immigration offenses.
The report also highlights the fact that the Patriot Act, touted as an anti-terrorism tool, is frequently used in non-terrorism cases.
There’s just so much wrong with Ashcroft’s latest missive. The report can be read here. USAPA is not a “laser-guided weapon to prevent terrorist attacks” (yup he said that!) but is more like a giant flood that has eroded our basic civil rights and brought us back to the age of Cointelpro. I’m not just making this up folks.
Corporate Media and Local Interests / Downsizing the monster
The issue is whether a few large conglomerates will be ceded content control over our music, entertainment and information; gatekeeper control over the civic and political dialogue of our country; and veto power over the majority of what we and our families watch, hear and read. Rather than learn the lessons of radio concentration, the FCC plunged ahead and voted to visit a policy of “Clear Channelization” on the rest of our media.
FCC member Michael J. Copps seems to have the right perspective when it comes to media concentration. The thing I question is, since 2.3 million (!) people responded to the last rules changes (99.9% against), the Congress has overturned the FCC changes in their entirety, and the US Court of Appeals has weighed in against the changes, why is there a need for ANY public hearings?! The public has spoken loudly and clearly. It’s time for the FCC, supposedly the steward of the public’s airwaves, to listen to the feedback, stop wasting time and regulate the airwaves in a way that doesn’t give monopoly control to a few large corporations. Come on already!
For more information and background, see NOW’s website on Media Consolidation or the Center for Digital Democracy.
Consumer buying habits honed to a science
By Cheryl Hall Indianapolis Star
July 11, 2004.
[The Dallas Morning News]
More and more data are being collected for marketing purposes
as it becomes increasingly possible to do so. This is relevant to libraries
as more information is available on the Web, as libraries make more information available digitally, as it is increasingly the case that you have to register to view newspaper articles, as government agencies have the ability to see who is reading what at their web sites. This article contains information about the state of the art in gathering information about consumers for marketing purposes.
Every time you use your credit card, subscribe to a magazine, write a check, fill out a survey, register to vote or even change channels on your cable TV at home, somebody collects that data and sells it to Buxton. The company then merges it into its monolithic 20-terabyte database for analysis and interpretation.
“The Library of Congress has only 14.5 terabytes for all its information,” he says. “So we’re almost one and a half times its size just with consumer spending data. And we amass data at the speed of light.”
Open Access
Association of College and Research Libraries,
Association of Research Libraries,
SPARC,
SPARC Europe. [PDF. 6pp]
The Open Access brochure presents a more specific approach to change, by describing the benefits of open access to authors, readers, teachers, scholars, and scientists.
Facts and figures demonstrate how open access to scholarly research capitalizes on Internet connectivity to increase a research article’s use and impact.
The brochure suggests steps authors of journal articles can take to provide open access to their work. This action can be at the local level in providing access to their own journal articles, and at a broader level to support open access publishers.