Reynol Junco, an associate professor of education, surveyed 1,600 freshmen through senior college students. He asked them about how they use the social networking site, including how much time they spend on Facebook and whether they multitask while surfing.
Junco is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.
via ISU professor: Facebook isn’t at fault for lower grades.
Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of law and computer science, said that the proposals, which Mr Cameron has pledged to implement if he is re-elected as prime minister this year, would have a huge impact on the way that the digital economy worked.
“This is not just about hardware but software. You would have to find a way for a phone not to be able to download any app that could defeat [the breaking of] encryption,” he said. “That would be a referendum on our entire ecosystem.”
via Harvard vs Cameron: Professors defend encryption | The World.
“In America, where these very few ISPs have so much market power that they can extract payments, it’s just like the mob,” says Susan Crawford, who co-directs Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “Just say, ‘you’re not going to reach our subscribers unless you pay us.’”
The Federal Communications Commission is getting more complaints about these deals. And, now, it has to decide what — if anything — to do about them. It’s not sure whether interconnection should be part of net neutrality regulations expected next month, tackled separately later on, or left alone completely.
The footnote problem, though, stands a good chance of being fixed. Last year, a tool called Perma.cc was launched. It was developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and its founding supporters included more than sixty law-school libraries, along with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Internet Archive, the Legal Information Preservation Alliance, and the Digital Public Library of America. Perma.cc promises “to create citation links that will never break.” It works something like the Wayback Machine’s “Save Page Now.” If you’re writing a scholarly paper and want to use a link in your footnotes, you can create an archived version of the page you’re linking to, a “permalink,” and anyone later reading your footnotes will, when clicking on that link, be brought to the permanently archived version. Perma.cc has already been adopted by law reviews and state courts; it’s only a matter of time before it’s universally adopted as the standard in legal, scientific, and scholarly citation.
Five years ago the majority of local police departments had a negligible presence in social media. They barely posted crime updates or traffic alerts on Facebook or Twitter; many had no social media pages at all.
“Police have always had this trouble: ‘does it tip off the bad guys?'” said Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of cybersecurity firm Co3 Systems and a fellow for the Berkman Center of Internet and Society. “That’s not just social media but any kind of public relations.”
via Cops harnessing social media’s reach to catch criminals.
“It limits creativity, it inhibits individuality, social change, progress,” added Bruce Schneier, a fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “You get conformity and stagnation. These are really big issues.”Heightening that concern, government officials in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere are studying the use of smart video-surveillance systems to spot “abnormal behavior.”
via Will our smart gadgets become trusted or oppressive companions? – San Jose Mercury News.
It’s a policy that speaks to a 2009 statement by Dr David Weinberger of Harvard University’s Berkman Center that “transparency is the new objectivity”. The media can aspire to objectivity, but content will naturally contain biases. Transparency is more achievable than objectivity. It “gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases”.
via Opinion: branded content’s rise is due to the media’s reputation | Media Network | The Guardian.
The Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers (NoC) and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University have released a new report on Multistakeholder Governance Groups, which informs the debate about Internet governance models and mechanisms.
The Global Network of Internet and Society Research Centers (NoC) and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University have released a report on “multistakeholder governance groups” to better inform the discussion over Internet governance models and mechanisms.
The report is the result of a globally coordinated academic research effort among NoC participants and consists of 12 geographically and topically diverse case studies of governance structures along with a synthesis paper that summarizes key findings across these cases.
Media Cloud, a tool developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Center for Civic Media and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, measures comparative attention to topics and locations in different segments of the news media. A study we conducted in April 2014 suggests that media outlets publish three to ten times as many stories about France than Nigeria. This disparity is striking as Nigeria’s population (estimated at 173 million) is almost three times the size of France’s (66 million).
via Media Coverage of Charlie Hebdo and the Baga Massacre: A Study in Contrasts – Fair Observer.