mako: oped (66)

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  1. A super important question. Very thought provoking.
  2. Well, that's provocative.
  3. I'm a little disappointed in this article. It's a little incoherent and doesn't do a great job of talking about what it means by statistics. It's something about the political power of data collection?
  4. Written by a UWComm graduate and forwarded to the faculty by Mac.
  5. Wow, I don't think I've found myself is such load disagreement with James. I think the FB study was research. I think that the OKCupid case is much less clear.
  6. Yow.
  7. "Google is not the Eye of Sauron, finding all that is good on the Internet and corrupting it. Nor, despite its mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," is it humanity's informational savior. Google is a company that provides an enormously significant online service. When that service raises serious legal questions, we should ask whether it is good for the users or bad for the users."
  8. Advertising companies thinks there is nothing wrong with creepy advertising.
  9. Good for Zeynep publishing this. But I don't really see what the point is. The problem for democracy is that campaigning is about manipulating people to win votes, not about actually engaging in issues. The mass media approaches to this are not particularly less scary to me, even if they are not as effective as new more data-driven approaches.
  10. I'm also a devotee of the Amtrak quiet car.
  11. "If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit")."
  12. A huge argument against a position I have never heard but, we are told, has been very effective. I think this is kind of card to unparse becase VC are essentially arguing for the status quo. Like, VCs haven't successfully had bike lines removed anywhere, have they? If so, I think he's giving a kind of fringe theory more credit than it really deserves.
    updated: 2012-11-09, original: 2012-11-09 to , , , , , , , - Archived Link
  13. "We should legislate that developing, distributing, or running a program on generally used computing hardware does not constitute patent infringement."
  14. Very cool oped by Posner on the state of the patent system. He thinks its totally broken but, because he's Richard Posner, he has some ideas of what to do about it.
  15. Using the Wikipedia logo seems to be pretty lame for an article about Intrade and prediction markets. But the rest of it seems reasonable. The summary is something like: Prediction markets aren't good when there isn't good publicly available information. Which I suppose shouldn't come as a huge suprise.
  16. "The Electronic Frontier Foundation announced a new initiative on Tuesday to seek reform of the United States patent system. But conspicuously missing from the list is the most direct and obvious way to solve the problem: exclude software from patent protection altogether."
  17. Here's the spoiler: The answer is "not you."
  18. Estonia uses a flat tax and the Economist is freakin' happy about this.
  19. Great writeup by Gelman.
  20. Cool article on Joi. He also published an "unabridged" version on his blog.
  21. "Two recent articles call for an openness revolution in science: one on GigaOM and the other in the Wall Street Journal. But they’ve got it all wrong. These folks are missing that the process of scientific discovery is not, at its core, an open process. It only becomes an open process at the point of publication."

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