Posted on October 15, 2014 by Roger Macdonald Philadelphia-region Political Media Ad Watch is a pilot project that allows citizens and journalists to go online to search every political message in the Philly television market, compare all the ads from a single sponsor (sample: Tom Wolf for Governor) —positive and negative—and trace back who is paying for those ads. She’s Dishonest!He’s in Bed with an Accused Mobster!This is…
The Decentralized Web is a concept. It’s a set of technologies. It’s a network of builders and designers and dreamers. What started with small gatherings in San Francisco, London, Los Angeles, Toronto and Berlin is growing into a global movement. So how do we visually convey the identity of this idea we call the “DWeb”?…
Some people are tasked with seeing into the future to offer us a sense of what it may hold. Mary Lou Jepsen is one of those people. Her curiosity sparks and ignites with the slightest provocation and manifests itself in the tech products that transform our lives. This week, her curiosity is bringing her to…
Being able to lend an array of materials is fundamental to what public libraries do and Controlled Digital Lending–the digital equivalent of traditional library lending– is another tool for libraries to fulfill that mission, according to John Chrastka, executive director of EveryLibrary, a national organization dedicated to building voter support for libraries. “There are numerous marooned assets…
In southern Maryland, St. Mary’s County is 54 miles long and there are only three libraries. “We have people living at one end who might be 25 miles away from a branch,” said Michael Blackwell, Director of the St. Mary’s County Library that operates in the small communities of Leonardtown, Charlotte Hall and Lexington Park.…
Melvyn Urofsky suggested in a New York Times op-ed yesterday that Obama and his new administration can learn a few things from Louis Brandeis’s 1914 book, Other People’s Money, and How the Bankers Use It. Brandeis wrote the book after revelations of a Congressional investigation into the predatory practices of J. P. Morgan and other big bankers. The…
Guest blog post by Author Finn Brunton The history of money is history itself. From the accounting and contracts of Sumerian cuneiform tablets (the earliest written language) to buried coin hoards, stamps and letters of credit, Incan khipu knot-counts, or the maps and censuses written in the service of levying taxes, part of the great…
Earlier this week, I spoke with Kelsey Breseman, a rockstar engineer and entrepreneur working to solve climate change, protect public access to scientific data, and build a better web. Equal parts concrete problem solver and utopian dreamer, in her spare time, she wanders the forests north of Seattle and revels in VERY long walks. In July,…
Two thin strands of glass. When combined, these two strands of glass are so thin they still wouldn’t fill a drinking straw. That’s known in tech circles as a “fiber pair,” and these two thin strands of glass carry all the information of the world’s leading archive in and out of our data centers. When…
At the end of this month, on April 2nd, Google will shut down what they called the “consumer version” of Google Plus, their fourth major foray into building a Social Network. The deadline had been the end of the year but was moved up due to a number of cited factors, including data breaches. When a seismic event…