Do you sometimes feel like you’re the only one in your organization who is helping to find the great stories? 

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 Search implications are likely significant.

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As of May 27th, the average Facebook page post reaches about 21.4% of the total fans for the page.

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The idea is to give organizations more opportunities to discover new customers.  Hmmm….

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Chief scientist of the Obama campaign’s data analytics team, Rayid Ghani, shared some insights.

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I recently attended a Washington dinner about peace building and constructive dialogue. The organizations involved do great work in using dialoguing to bridge divides in many fields and the keynote was about using these methods to bring people together to help solve the daunting problems facing the U.S.

This made me both hopeful and pessimistic. The U.S. is indeed faced with existential problems set against a gridlocked and dysfunctional political system. Recent national embarrassments about the debt ceiling and sequestration rub this in our faces. The sequestration was in fact designed as a booby trap set up in order avoid a impasse over budget negotiations, and they couldn’t even avoid that. No matter which side of the political spectrum you’re on, the U.S.’s current debt financing is just not sustainable. A sudden rise in interest rates, or a pull back by our creditors would create an economic tsunami that could make 2008 seem like the 90’s. And this is just one of many challenges facing society.

Our political problems are I believe correctly attributed to the sharp partisan divide that is more operationally toxic than in any time in our history.

Discourse has become so bitterly divided that it’s hard to imagine that these people are talking about the same events. The Internet promised a leveling effect, replacing traditional media gatekeepers and hierarchical information dissemination systems with a peer-to-peer hyper-democratic world of universal information freedom and access that could lead to a more enlightened collective conscious. This clearly has not happened… yet.  

Staid old media gatekeepers have been supplanted by Internet conglomerate (read Facebook and Google) algorithms that control our newsfeeds and search results. These algorithms give us more of what we like based on previous behavior, creating filter bubbles that both reinforce our beliefs and filter out contrary information. 

Thus, to a large extent dialogue between factions is not happening on social media. Filter bubbles help to reinforce ideological tribalism as opposed to facilitating dialectic synthesis. This ideological tribalism has negated compromise and turned just about all politics into a zero sum game where a gain for one side is necessarily a loss for the other. Within this context, the constructive dialogue process and conflict resolution seem to hold out a rare ray of hope. The problem with this is the illusion of balance that is intrinsic in the assumptions of these methods.

The admirable goal of being fair and balanced, embraced by journalists as well as dialogue facilitators has been rendered quaint because one of our most vociferous ideological tribes rejects science, math, and reality in general, and scorns the legitimacy of those that disagree with them. It’s hard to roll up your sleeves, and sit down and dialog with those that mock “the reality based community.”

Take global climate change as an example. It’s is not really a problem unless you’re worried about the polar ice caps melting and global weather changes making vast areas of the planet uninhabitable. If you are concerned about those things, well then….Whether or not global warming is real or not and caused by human activity is also not a topic where there is legitimate debate within the scientific community.  “Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities”. Recently National Geographic aired a documentary “Chasing Ice”, which presents concrete visual proof of glacier melting worldwide. If you haven’t seen this, please make it a priority. It is as visually stunning as it is disturbing.

This could well be the biggest challenge facing the world, and the solutions are well within reach, yet they will never happen as long as one branch of the U.S. government is at the mercy of a tribe of zealots that are seemingly immune to evidence. 

A similar polemic exists concerning vaccinations, which as it turns out do not in any way cause Autism. But thanks to the good work of the loud and the factually challenged, many people don’t get their children vaccinated because of the false Autism scare and similar shenanigans. This poses a threat to us all because of the epidemiology of infectious diseases, which are kept in check by vaccines. 

There’s another area in which the war on reality and its reinforcing filter bubbles are having rather interesting consequences, and that’s electoral politics. The conservative denial of math and polling may well have been more part of the cause of their across the board losses in 2012 than a result.

Many political junkies will remember the vicious attacks against Nate Silver, the brilliant NY Times statistician and author of the incredibly precise FiveThirtyEight blog. In the end, Silver accurately predicted the outcome of the presidential race accurately in all 50 states and his critics were left eating crow. 

The war on reality went even deeper than Nate Silver bashing. Republican pollsters weighted their numbers to better fit their own reality bubble. Kudos to Bruce Bartlett for breaking through my filter bubble with this incredible post from RedState.com, Campaign Sources: The Romney Campaign was a Consultant Con Job. The piece details how consultants cooked numbers to hide their incompetence. No matter the cause, it points helps to illustrate the considerable technological disadvantage the Romney camp faced and the consequences it paid:

Another source that closely studied the Obama campaigns GOTV efforts as compared to ORCA [the GOP GOTV technology] said bluntly that “the Obama training manuals made ORCA look like a drunken monkey slapped together a powerpoint” adding that we must duplicate and improve what they accomplished to have any hope for the 2014 & 2016 ground game.

….

The result of all of these false numbers and inaccurate ground reports is simple: Mitt Romney was ill-prepared for the actual numbers on election day and his false sense of confidence directly translated into how the campaign operated in the closing weeks. 

A culture that denies science and math is not going to produce an environment that fosters technological innovation as well as one that does.

As Mark Adonamis, a self-identifying conservative, lamented shortly after the election in Forbes: 

Without sounding too much like a concern troll, conservatives who are actually interested in winning elections, and not in offering endless recriminations after they’ve already been lost, urgently need to address the intellectual rot in their midst. If they want to compete and win conservatives need to very quickly re-learn how to deal with reality. The GOP will have every opportunity to win elections down the line unless it continues to wage war on basic and apolitical concepts like quantitative analysis and polling. 

Thus the war on reality may contain its own evolutionary cure. Let’s hope it’s the short-term one as opposed to the long term one! Truth is in fact an essential starting point in any endeavor. The perception of reality may be subjective, and true objectivity may be on some levels unattainable, but to quote Mr. Spock, “I am half-Vulcan. Vulcans do not speculate. I speak from pure logic. If I let go of a hammer on a planet that has a positive gravity, I need not see it fall to know that it has in fact fallen.” Similar logic applies to the melting glaciers. You can’t deny this no matter what your ideology says.

The extent to which the Internet reinforces misconceptions and filters out vigorous debates may itself debatable, but the toxic ideological tribalization of America is undeniable. It is my sincere hope that the Internet will increasingly generate dialogues and fulfill its promise of creating a more enlightened collective consciousness. We absolutely need to move beyond our political paralysis to take on the substantial challenges that we all face together.

Live long and prosper.

Originally posted on Truth is Cool

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If you’ve been using LinkedIn Applications, it’s time to step up to LinkedIn Professional Profile… which is actually a lot cooler.

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The Benefits of Neglectful Ownership, Where Gawker and BuzzFeed Get Their ‘Inspiration,’ and More

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Access to broadband internet is vital for economic innovation and growth, therefore ensuring the highest levels of competition and access are key to the future of the economy. Recently several high profile studies have examined the state of broadband competition in the United States and reached different conclusions.

In light of the debate that current work encompasses, I organized a panel for the Washington DC Chapter of the Internet Society (ISOC-DC) to examine the state of broadband competition and the resulting policy prescriptions. The panel took place last Friday at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) here in Washington, D.C.

A cornerstone of the debate is focused on the question whether American consumers pay more money for slower speeds. On the public interest side of the aisle, the summary in the New American Foundation’s “The Cost of Connectivity Report” sums up the“American consumers pay higher prices for slower speeds” perspective pretty well.

On the “competition is pretty robust and U.S. consumers are getting a pretty good deal” side of the the question, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation’s (ITIF) The Whole Picture: Where America’s Broadband Networks Really Stand report counters the New America assumptions and paints a pretty rosy picture of American broadband competition.

Critics of U.S. ISPs can point to lower prices for broadband in most countries, especially in Europe where “Strong regulations and strong monitoring of anti-competitive behaviours are the key, as well as public money being invested in mutualized infrastructures” has led to more robust consumer choices.

Proponents of the industry-centric view, as articulated in the ITIF study counter the view that broadband is generally more expensive in the United States with two principle arguments. The first is that American geography is more vast with lower population density and the second that such studies don’t use valid numbers in their price and Internet connection speed comparisons.

Both arguments may have some validity. Connecting rural areas in the U.S. does cost more and because of the conflation of triple plays and byzantine pricing schemes, it can be difficult to compare apples to apples. However, the population density counter argument doesn’t explain city to city comparisons. Even with varying price points, common sense dictates that the OECD’s breakdown of prices/megabit/seconds of advertised speed is probably a good benchmark.

One of the chief policy tools to ensure competition is unbundling, or open access policies that require incumbent broadband providers offer to lease capacity on their networks to new entrants selling competing Internet services to consumers”. Unbundling policies were abandoned in the U.S. by the FCC almost ten years ago. Unbundling is predictably an issue that the public interest and industry-centric analysts vehemently disagree upon.

In order to facilitate a robust exchange of ideas between these perspectives, we invited the authors of the New America Study as well as the authors of the ITIF study. Originally both “sides” accepted and the event was to be held at the NAF, but sadly the New America Foundation team pulled out for specious reasons, which was really too bad because their report was a large part of the motivation for the event in the first place. As a public advocacy sympathizer I had really wanted to see them go toe to toe with top industry economists. The final panel included Robert D. Atkinson, the president of ITIF and author of its report, AEI economist Jeffrey Eisenach, a meat and potatoes deregulation, free market guy, and Robert C. Atkinson of Columbia University, the key author of the Broadband in America Report, as well as Jodie Griffin, a Staff Attorney at Public Knowledge and author of a powerful series of blog posts about “Five Fundamentals to guide the upgrade of our phone network to an IP-based infrastructure”. The panel was moderated by Dave Burstein, the Editor of DSL Prime. What ensued was an incredibly lively, albeit industry-centric discussion covering the state of broadband and what the objectives of policy should be. The video clips are below, they’re pretty impressive. I guarantee that you will learn something from them.

Video Clips

Originally posted on Truth Is Cool.

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Last week before the Boston drama had played out, a friend’s post on Facebook piqued my interest. She described the logistics that the Boston marathon bombers would have to have taken into account and then commented, “Hate to say it, but there’s a very specific googling pattern here … Not that I’m promoting invasion of privacy, but since it’s already happening why not put it to good use.”   

Two days later CISPA, or The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection ACT (HR 624) passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. The thing about CISPA is that it enhances what my Facebook friend described as already happening. More specifically, it enhances huge Internet companies’ (read Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Twitter) ability share personally identifiable data with the feds.

CISPA is a cyber security bill purportedly in response to the massive hacking and various cyber attacks that have been made against U.S. based assets recently. These threats are real and substantial, and our government should be taking active and aggressive actions both offensive and defensive to combat them. However, CISPA provides a blank check of broad protections to companies that share your data with various government agencies. According the Electronic Frontier Foundation: 

It is written so broadly that it allows companies to hand over large swaths of personal information to the government with no judicial oversight—effectively creating a “cybersecurity” loophole in all existing privacy laws.

 …. 

CISPA is written broadly enough to permit your communications service providers to share your emails and text messages with the government, or your cloud storage company could share your stored files. 

CISPA V. SOPA 

Last year’s defeat of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) was hailed as a great triumph for the cyber-activist forces of democracy. Along with well publicized blackouts outs of Google, Wikipedia, Reddit, and an estimated 7,000 other sites on January 18, 2012, millions participated in activism both on and offline, causing a tsunami of opposition that rendered the bill politically toxic. Heavily backed by the entertainment industry, SOPA sought to curb digital piracy and counterfeit and struck a deep nerve in the Internet consciousness because it could have given government the authority to interfere with ISP’s, DNS resolution, search engine listings and more – all in the name of protecting Hollywood and the music business. 

This time, industry has largely fallen inline. Last week an industry group Technet, that has “Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer, Google’s Eric Schmidt and Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith” on it’s executive council, sent a letter to the bill’s sponsors to let them know that they were on board with “voluntary, bi-directional, real time sharing of actionable cyberthreat information to protect networks”. This time there will be no Google blackout.

The bill’s supporters, include “behemoths like the Chamber of Commerce, IBM, which sent nearly 200 executives to Capitol Hill Monday to advocate for passage. Also backing CISPA: major tech, telecom and financial companies, a Who’s Who of the biggest spenders on Washington lobbying”. These Washington special interests spent over $605 million from 2011 through the 3^rd quarter of last year lobbying for CISPA compared to $2.7 million spent by civil liberties groups. 

Almost as troubling is the timing and how the bill’s supporters in the House leveraged the Boston Marathon bombing to pass the bill while the world was distracted. 

A privacy expert friend of mine commented to me on Facebook that most Americans think they’ve got nothing to hide. Let the government spy on me if it’ll “prevent another 9/11 or Boston.” We are in fact willing to give up our freedoms when we’re in a heightened state of fear from these attacks and the media spasm that necessarily bleeds forth from them. An entire city was in lock down for days to catch one kid (albeit a heavily armed kid). 

Boston need not have been locked down (you gotta read the post linked to here – did you know they kept the Dunkin Donuts open!) and the feds don’t need the authority to spider your email to stop Chinese hackers. In fact, the legendary Mandiant report that exposed Chinese hackers “is just one of many instances where companies have shared a great deal of useful threat information without authority beyond what is granted to them by current law.” 

The real danger is in passing anything that limits protections of privacy or civil liberties during the panic and media feeding frenzy following an attack like this. CISPA is dangerous because in its current form it removes due process from the total negation of these civil protections online. And it is exactly due process that delineates democracy from authoritarianism by preventing the arbitrary use or abuse of power. History teaches us that when political leaders leverage terrorist acts, violence, or fear to restrict individual liberties, the results are seldom good.

Originally posted on Truth Is Cool.

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