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.
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.
I'm also a devotee of the Amtrak quiet car.
"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")."
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.
"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."
"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."
Nice little gloss on the TAL take on software patenting.
