Weiye Loh's Library tagged Effects → View Popular, Search in Google

Jul

2011

Agricultural Information, the Global Food Crisis, and Effective Use « Gurstein's Community Informatics

Community Informatics colleague Ajit Maru, in a posting on the Community Informatics Research elist suggests some disturbing questions concerning the relationship between “Information Access” and “effective use” and its possible links to the rising food crisis globally.
He comments on the increasing shift of governments to making agricultural information available primarily in electronic form via the web or through mobile access. This is inevitably linked to declining support for the provision of agricultural information through the more traditional face to face connections of agricultural extension

gurstein.wordpress.com/...-food-crisis-and-effective-use

- Preview

Data Effects Access Open Food

Feb

2011

Why the Net Matters; The Net Delusion: reviews - Telegraph

www.telegraph.co.uk/...-The-Net-Delusion-reviews.html

- Preview

Internet Liberation Democracy Effects Social Media

The Net Delusion is a stinging rebuke to the power of the internet. Born in Belarus and now working in Washington, 26 year-old Evgeny Morozov reminds us that the web will not make us free.
He makes plain the difference between our hopes of what the internet can be and the reality of what it does. He shows us that the enemies of freedom are just as smart as the rest of us in using the internet for their own ends.

Thus China encourages blogging in order to monitor the activities of dissidents; dictators are happy for their citizens to watch YouTube, because most people are more likely to watch Lady Gaga than foment revolution. In the most powerful chapter of the book, he convincingly proves that the uprising following the 2009 elections in Iran had very little to do with social media. The book is a wake-up call to those who think that the internet is the solution to all our problems.
7 more annotation(s)...
- However, because Morozov completed it before the WikiLeaks controversy, the website only gets a passing reference. This is a serious omission.
- Since the arrest of Julian Assange in December, the US government that protested against the censorship policies of rogue states has now called for similar acts for its own protection.
  
  If anything, this proves that while the political uses of the internet are in question, so is the definition of freedom that underpins it. The internet proves that you can’t have it both ways.
- In contrast, while David Eagleman’s Why the Net Matters might sometimes suffer from what Morozov calls “cyber-utopianism”
- This new work, an enhanced app available only in digital form, is not quite a book – more an essay with added features. It is one of the first enhanced ebooks to come from a mainstream British publisher and offers some insight into what the future book might look like.
- The content is organised so that it can be navigated in any number of ways, and each page is accompanied by impressive images and graphics, sometimes with little connection to the text.
- Looking at six different ways the internet might save us from disaster, Eagleman buys into the Clinton doctrine without question. He shows how the internet will help us to combat epidemics, preserve knowledge and respond to natural disasters with websites such as www.ushahidi.com, which came into its own after the Haiti earthquake, and allowed aid workers on the ground to pinpoint in real time, using email, Twitter and SMS, where help was most needed.
- What these two books prove is that we still don’t know what the internet is and what it is for. This is no bad thing. The web is a tool that may liberate the future, if not quite delivering the type of freedom that Eagleman proposes. It is at its best when it grows from grass roots and responds to immediate concerns.

Jan

2011

The Dark Side of Oxytocin, the Hormone of Love - Ethnocentrism - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...11hormone.html

- Preview

Hormone Effects Oxytocin Love

Oxytocin has been described as the hormone of love. This tiny chemical, released from the hypothalamus region of the brain, gives rat mothers the urge to nurse their pups, keeps male prairie voles monogamous and, even more remarkable, makes people trust each other more.
As oxytocin comes into sharper focus, its social radius of action turns out to have definite limits. The love and trust it promotes are not toward the world in general, just toward a person’s in-group. Oxytocin turns out to be the hormone of the clan, not of universal brotherhood.
1 more annotation(s)...
- In a report published last year in Science, based on experiments in which subjects distributed money, he and colleagues showed that doses of oxytocin made people more likely to favor the in-group at the expense of an out-group. With a new set of experiments in Tuesday’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he has extended his study to ethnic attitudes, using Muslims and Germans as the out-groups for his subjects, Dutch college students.