To mark the 40th anniversary of the Internet, DARPA has announced the DARPA Network Challenge, a competition that will explore the role the Internet and social networking plays in the timely communication, wide area team-building and urgent mobilization required to solve broad scope, time-critical problems.
The challenge is to be the first to submit the locations of ten moored, 8 foot, red weather balloons located at ten fixed locations in the continental United States. Balloons will be in readily accessible locations and visible from nearby roadways.
We were very naive. We just thought this was a cool idea.
Samantha Power:
There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
Katie Shilton:
Participatory sensing opens the door to entirely new forms of granular and pervasive data collection. The risks of this sort of data collection are not always self-evident.
Marshall McLuhan:
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don't really have any rights left.
Joshua-Michele Ross:
The iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor. Its value lies just as much in sensing information as it does in displaying information.
Libby Purves:
There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together, unseen by officialdom.
The software also acts as a kind of connection machine, helping to supplement your own memory. The results have a certain chaotic brilliance.
I imagine some may consider this cheating: reducing the art of writing to an elaborate game of cut-and-paste.
Before Devonthink, I used to lose weeks, stalling before each new chapter because it was an empty sea of nothingness. Now, each starts life as a kind of archipelago of inspiring quotes. All I have to do is build bridges between the islands.
Jonathan Lethem (but not really):
The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are secondhand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily used by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral caliber and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands.
Social networks on the Web are growing dramatically in size and number. The huge popularity of sites like MySpace, Facebook, and others has drawn in hundreds of millions of users, and the attention of scientists and the media. The public accessibility of Web–based social networks offers great promise for researchers interested in studying the behavior of users and how to integrate social information into applications. However, to do that effectively, it is necessary to understand how networks grow and change. Over a two–year period we have collected data on every social network we could identify, and we also gathered daily information on thirteen networks over a 47–day period. In this article, we present the first comprehensive survey of Web–based social networks, followed by an analysis of membership and relationship dynamics within them. From our analysis of these data, we present several conclusions on how users behave in social networks, and what network features correlate with that behavior.
This video explores the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.
Shane Harris offers a profile of Mike Wertheimer, the idea rat behind A-Space, the "MySpace for spies."
"This has got to be about ideas. We have to sell people on the ideas."
Sixty percent of US intelligence analysts have five years of experience or less on the job. In the larger intelligence community of about 100,000 employees, which includes clandestine operatives and support staff, those young workers are about 40 percent of the rolls.
By and large, these newer members of the community are optimistic and, like Wertheimer, believe that the intelligence community is dangerously broken.
"I am threatening the status quo," Wertheimer says. "And that's a hard pill to swallow for anybody."
Wertheimer says that a colleague once told him, "You will have succeeded when you become really hard to manage."
Wertheimer says that the intelligence agencies could be compared to the record companies.
Lowenthal told him, "I think, unfortunately, a lot of this is pandering to a bunch of commissions that have no understanding of what we do for a living, or the nature of our work, and to a workforce. And I don't think that's a sufficient ground for a transformation. And so I'm left here wondering, what's the end state? For what reason?"
Visualizing Email Content: Portraying Relationships from Conversational Histories
Topic: Knowledge Management
3:42 pm EDT, Apr 3, 2007
We present Themail, a visualization that portrays relationships using the interaction histories preserved in email archives. Using the content of exchanged messages, it shows the words that characterize one’s correspondence with an individual and how they change over the period of the relationship. This paper describes the interface and content-parsing algorithms in Themail. It also presents the results from a user study where two main interaction modes with the visualization emerged: exploration of “big picture” trends and themes in email (haystack mode) and more detail-oriented exploration (needle mode). Finally, the paper discusses the limitations of the content parsing approach in Themail and the implications for further research on email content visualization.
PostHistory is one in a series of projects that explore the notion of history in computer applications and online environments. By developing time-based visualizations of digital activities, we hope to raise questions such as: what is digital memory? How can we understand, interact with and, more importantly, share our digital history?
I finished my PhD at the MIT Media Lab this past summer and now I am a researcher at IBM. My research focuses on the visualization of the traces people leave as they interact online. Some of my projects explore email archives, newsgroup conversations, and the editing history of wiki pages. I am particularly fascinated by the stories that these social archives tell us and the patterns they contain.
I am also interested in issues of online privacy. The results from the survey I did on Bloggers' Expectations of Privacy and Accountability have been published here.
This paper describes mechanisms for asynchronous collaboration in the context of information visualization, recasting visualizations as not just analytic tools, but social spaces. We contribute the design and implementation of sense.us, a web site supporting asynchronous collaboration across a variety of visualization types. The site supports view sharing, discussion, graphical annotation, and social navigation and includes novel interaction elements. We report the results of user studies of the system, observing emergent patterns of social data analysis, including cycles of observation and hypothesis, and the complementary roles of social navigation and data-driven exploration.
Understanding the daily fluctuations in the stock market is a serious business for traders, analysts and investors. There is money to be made in those fluctuations and the Map of the Market is one of the best visualization tools around: it can show the changing stock prices of over 500 publicly-traded companies on a single screen. Since its launch by SmartMoney.com at the end of 1998, the Map of the Market has become a firm favourite with users. This is due, in large part, to the fact that it presents large volumes of fast changing data in a very useful and usable format, providing people with answers to the basic question 'how is the market doing today?' at a single glance. It is probably the most useful exemplar of information mapping on the Web today and is well worth trying out if you've never used it. On one single map one can quickly gain a sense of the overall market conditions, yet still see many hundreds of individual data elements.
VisualComplexity.com intends to be a unified resource space for anyone interested in the visualization of complex networks. The project's main goal is to leverage a critical understanding of different visualization methods, across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web. I truly hope this space can inspire, motivate and enlighten any person doing research on this field.
Not all projects shown here are genuine complex networks, in the sense that they aren’t necessarily at the edge of chaos, or show an irregular and systematic degree of connectivity. However, the projects that apparently skip this class were chosen for two important reasons. They either provide advancement in terms of visual depiction techniques/methods or show conceptual uniqueness and originality in the choice of a subject. Nevertheless, all projects have one trait in common: the whole is always more than the sum of its parts.
