read | Chris Aldrich

👓 How regulators can prevent excessive concentration online – A new school in Chicago | The Economist

Read How regulators can prevent excessive concentration online (The Economist)

Conventional antitrust thinking is being disrupted from within

It is not the data that are valuable, he says, but the services powered by them. Some firms are just better at developing new offerings than others. ❧

So big piles of data can become a barrier to competitors entering the market, says Maurice Stucke of the University of Tennessee. ❧

“When feedback data from large players is available to smaller competitors, then innovation…is not concentrated at the top,” he argues in “Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data”, a new book co-written with Thomas Ramge, a journalist. ❧

This sounds like something which could be worth reading.

👓 China has the world’s most centralised internet system – The ultimate walled garden | The Economist

Read China has the world’s most centralised internet system (The Economist)

A perfect example of a Hamiltonian internet for maximum control

Leading thinkers in China argue that putting government in charge of technology has one big advantage: the state can distribute the fruits of AI, which would otherwise go to the owners of algorithms. ❧

Such thinking has also been gaining some traction in the West, although so far only at the political fringes. The underlying idea is that some types of services, including social networks and online search, are essential facilities akin to roads and other kinds of infrastructure and should be regulated as utilities, which in essence means capping their profits. Alternatively, important data services, such as digital identity, could be offered by governments. Evgeny Morozov, a researcher and internet activist, goes one step further, calling for the creation of public data utilities, which would pool vital digital information and ensure equal access to it. ❧

When it comes to democracy and human rights, a Jeffersonian internet is clearly a safer choice. With Web 3.0 still in its infancy, the West at least will need to find other ways to rein in the online giants. The obvious alternative is regulation. ❧

👓 Sourcing Content: Sara Sargent of HarperCollins Children’s Books on Working With Wattpad | Publishing Perspectives

Read Sourcing Content: Sara Sargent of HarperCollins Children’s Books on Working With Wattpad (Publishing Perspectives)

‘I’m now dedicating myself to doing things in a completely different way,’ HarperCollins Children’s Books’ executive editor Sara Sargent says, ‘combining a non-traditional way of sourcing books with traditional storytelling’ with Wattpad. Sara Sargent By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chie...

Finding material can be difficult and this certainly sounds like an interesting partial solution. Seems like there could be much larger solutions as well.

👓 'I was shocked it was so easy': meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you're gay | The Guardian

Read 'I was shocked it was so easy': meet the professor who says facial recognition can tell if you're gay by Paul Lewis (the Guardian)

Psychologist Michal Kosinski says artificial intelligence can detect your sexuality and politics just by looking at your face. What if he’s right?

How in God’s name are we repeating so many of the exact problems of the end of the 1800’s? First nationalism and protectionism and now the eugenics agenda?

👓 Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk | Washington Post

Read Twitter is sweeping out fake accounts like never before, putting user growth at risk by Craig Timberg and Elizabeth Dwoskin (Washington Post)

Twitter suspended more than 70 million accounts in May and June, and the pace has continued in July

👓 Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags | Locus Magazine

Read Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags by Cory Doctorow (Locus Online)

For 20 years, privacy advocates have been sounding the alarm about commercial online surveillance, the way that companies gather deep dossiers on us to help marketers target us with ads. This pitch…

👓 Microsub and the new reader evolution | skippy.net

Read Microsub and the new reader evolution by

Scott Merrill (skippy.net)

I was an avid Google Reader user. When it shut down, I started hosting my own RSS reader: first tt-rss, and later miniflux. I very much liked being able to subscribe to sites and read them at my leisure. I also appreciated not having my reading habits tracked or quantified. I had maybe two dozen f...

What I was really after was the confluence of RSS feeds and Twitter and the ability to post to my own site.

👓 OAuth for the Open Web | Aaron Parecki

Read OAuth for the Open Web by

Aaron Parecki (Aaron Parecki)

OAuth has become the de facto standard for authorization and authentication on the web. Nearly every company with an API used by third party developers has implemented OAuth to enable people to build apps on top of it. While OAuth is a great framework for this, the way it has ended up being used is ...

👓 My College Degree as an Open Digital Humanities Project | Mark Corbett Wilson

Read My College Degree as an Open Digital Humanities Project by Mark Corbett Wilson (markcorbettwilson.com)

I’m developing a new model for adult learners so they can avoid the experience I had while trying to improve my skills at a Community College. Combining Self-Directed Learning, Computational Thinking, Digital Pedagogy, Open Education and Open Social Scholarship theories with Open Education Resourc...

This sounds to me to be a bit like an open digital commonplace book.

(I’m noticing, yet again, that Disqus is automatically marking any comments I make as spam.)

👓 Planning a DoOO Summer Camp – Newbies Corner | Reclaim Hosting Community

Read Planning a DoOO Summer Camp by

Alan Levine (Reclaim Hosting Community)

For participants in the eCampus Ontario Extend project, some of whom have gotten Reclaim hosting, some who will be starting. I’m planning on running a 4 week online “summer camp” workshop. This will be open for anyone who wants to get involved. It will likely be a weekly “lesson” with some activities, an intro how to video, a weekly open office hours via Zoom, and a lot of tweeting & blogging. I’m curious to hear from others who have developed intro materials what sort of topics you find are m...

👓 Domain Camp | Domains of Our Own

Read Domain Camp (Domains of Our Own)

Welcome to Domains Camp, where over a four week experience we will help you get your skills up in understanding and management of an internet domain of your own. We are running this over a series starting July 10, 2018 and is open to anyone or outside of Ontario Extend who wants to learn more about what is possible with an internet domain and web-hosting package. Our instructions will be tailored to the platform offered by our provider, Reclaim Hosting, but could be used by anyone with a host that uses cpanel as the interface.

This looks like an intriguing offering!

👓 If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? | Harvard Business Review

Read If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? (Harvard Business Review)

Why you should use percentages, not words, to express probabilities.

Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia

Phil Tetlock, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who has studied forecasting in depth, suggests that “vague verbiage gives you political safety.” ❧

This result is consistent with analysis by the data science team at Quora, a site where users ask and answer questions. That team found that women use uncertain words and phrases more often than men do, even when they are just as confident. ❧

A large literature shows that we tend to be overconfident in our judgments. ❧

The best forecasters make lots of precise forecasts and keep track of their performance with a metric such as a Brier score. ❧