Via POPSCI

By Rebecca Boyle

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"Spatial humanities," the future of history

Even using the most detailed sources, studying history often requires a great imagination, so historians can visualize what the past looked and felt like. Now, new computer-assisted data analysis can help them really see it.

Geographic Information Systems, which can analyze information related to a physical location, are helping historians and geographers study past landscapes like Gettysburg, reconstructing what Robert E. Lee would have seen from Seminary Ridge. Researchers are studying the parched farmlands of the 1930s Dust Bowl, and even reconstructing scenes from Shakespeare’s 17th-century London.

But far from simply adding layers of complexity to historical study, GIS-enhanced landscape analysis is leading to new findings, the New York Times reports. Historians studying the Battle of Gettysburg have shed light on the tactical decisions that led to the turning point in the Civil War. And others examining records from the Dust Bowl era have found that extensive and irresponsible land use was not necessarily to blame for the disaster.

GIS has long been used by city planners who want to record changes to the landscape over time. And interactive map technology like Google Maps has led to several new discoveries. But by analyzing data that describes the physical attributes of a place, historians are finding answers to new questions.

Anne Kelly Knowles and colleagues at Middlebury College in Vermont culled information from historical maps, military documents explaining troop positions, and even paintings to reconstruct the Gettysburg battlefield. The researchers were able to explain what Robert E. Lee could and could not see from his vantage points at the Lutheran seminary and on Seminary Hill. He probably could not see the Union forces amassing on the eastern side of the battlefield, which helps explain some of his tactical decisions, Knowles said.

Geoff Cunfer at the University of Saskatchewan studied a trove of data from all 208 affected counties in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas — annual precipitation reports, wind direction, agricultural censuses and other data that would have been impossible to sift through without the help of a computer. He learned dust storms were common throughout the 19th century, and that areas that saw nary a tiller blade suffered just as much.

The new data-mapping phenomenon is known as spatial humanities, the Times reports. Check out their story to find out how advanced technology is the future of history.

[New York Times]

Via New York Times

By Christopher Capozziello

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Via TorrentFreak

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Delivering his keynote address at this week’s annual CA Expo in Sydney, former Google CIO Douglas C Merrill added to the growing belief that punishing and demonizing file-sharers is a bad idea. Merrill, who after his Google stint joined EMI records, revealed that his profiling research at the label found that LimeWire pirates were iTunes’ biggest customers.

Yesterday, during his keynote speech at the CA Expo in Sydney, former Google boss Douglas C Merrill said that companies stuck in the past risk becoming irrelevant. He also had some very interesting things to say about pirates.

Merrill, who was Chief Information Officer and Vice President of Engineering at Google, left the search giant in 2008 after being poached by EMI, a key member label of the RIAA.

At EMI he took up the impressive position of Chief Operating Officer of New Music and President of Digital Business, despite admitting this week that he knew the music industry was “collapsing”.

“The RIAA said it isn’t that we are making bad music, but the ‘dirty file sharing guys’ are the problem,” he said during his speech as quoted by ComputerWorld.

“Going to sue customers for file sharing is like trying to sell soap by throwing dirt on your customers.”

But those “dirty file-sharing guys” had an even dirtier secret. During his stint at EMI, Merrill profiled the behavior of LimeWire users and discovered something rather interesting. Those same file-sharing “thieves” were also iTunes’ biggest spenders.

“That’s not theft, that’s try-before-you-buy marketing and we weren’t even paying for it… so it makes sense to sue them,” Merrill said, while undoubtedly rolling his eyes.

That same “try-before-you-buy” discovery was echoed in another study we reported on last week which found that users of pirate sites, including the recently-busted Kino.to, buy more DVDs, visit the cinema more often and on average spend more at the box office than their ‘honest’ counterparts.

Merrill’s words yesterday are not the only pragmatic file-sharing related comments he’s made in recent years. Almost immediately after his 2008 EMI appointment, he made comments which didn’t necessarily tow the company line.

“For example, there’s a set of data that shows that file sharing is actually good for artists. Not bad for artists. So maybe we shouldn’t be stopping it all the time. I don’t know,” Merrill said.

“Obviously, there is piracy that is quite destructive but again I think the data shows that in some cases file sharing might be okay. What we need to do is understand when is it good, when it is not good…Suing fans doesn’t feel like a winning strategy,” he concluded.

Less than a year later, Merrill was forced out by EMI.

Via news@Columbia University

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The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science.

“Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,” said Sparrow. “Our brains rely on the Internet for memory in much the same way they rely on the memory of a friend, family member or co-worker. We remember less through knowing information itself than by knowing where the information can be found.”

Sparrow’s research reveals that we forget things we are confident we can find on the Internet. We are more likely to remember things we think are not available online. And we are better able to remember where to find something on the Internet than we are at remembering the information itself. This is believed to be the first research of its kind into the impact of search engines on human memory organization.

Sparrow’s paper in Science is titled, “Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips.” With colleagues Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard University, Sparrow explains that the Internet has become a primary form of what psychologists call transactive memory—recollections that are external to us but that we know when and how to access.

The research was carried out in four studies.

First, participants were asked to answer a series of difficult trivia questions. Then they were immediately tested to see if they had increased difficulty with a basic color naming task, which showed participants words in either blue or red. Their reaction time to search engine-related words, like Google and Yahoo, indicated that, after the difficult trivia questions, participants were thinking of Internet search engines as the way to find information.

Second, the trivia questions were turned into statements. Participants read the statements and were tested for their recall of them when they believed the statements had been saved—meaning accessible to them later as is the case with the Internet—or erased. Participants did not learn the information as well when they believed the information would be accessible, and performed worse on the memory test than participants who believed the information was erased.

Third, the same trivia statements were used to test memory of both the information itself and where the information could be found. Participants again believed that information either would be saved in general, saved in a specific spot, or erased. They recognized the statements which were erased more than the two categories which were saved.

Fourth, participants believed all trivia statements that they typed would be saved into one of five generic folders. When asked to recall the folder names, they did so at greater rates than they recalled the trivia statements themselves. A deeper analysis revealed that people do not necessarily remember where to find certain information when they remember what it was, and that they particularly tend to remember where to find information when they can’t remember the information itself.

According to Sparrow, a greater understanding of how our memory works in a world with search engines has the potential to change teaching and learning in all fields.

“Perhaps those who teach in any context, be they college professors, doctors or business leaders, will become increasingly focused on imparting greater understanding of ideas and ways of thinking, and less focused on memorization,” said Sparrow. “And perhaps those who learn will become less occupied with facts and more engaged in larger questions of understanding.”

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health and Columbia’s department of psychology.

Betsy Sparrow talks about her research, which examines the changing nature of human memory.

Via Big Think

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In Milwaukee, the fourth-poorest city in America, educators have launched a "guerrilla classroom" initiative that transforms urban locations into impromptu classrooms for parents and children. Across Milwaukee, playgrounds, bus stops and parks now feature interactive displays and game-like learning environments that encourage interactions between parents and children and teach real-world applications of classroom subjects. It's all part of a pro bono marketing effort by marketing agency Cramer-Krasselt, Milwaukee Public Schools and COA Youth & Family Centers to raise awareness about the positive impact of involving parents in the education process. If successful, it's easy to see how similar groups of determined "guerrilla educators" could extend this approach to other cities.

The notion of the guerrilla classroom, of course, is an offshoot of guerrilla marketing, which in turn, is a capitalist expropriation of old school guerrilla warfare tactics. The basic idea of any guerrilla marketing campaign, of course, is to hit people with low-cost marketing and advertising messages in the places where they least expect. Realizing that we're saturated with advertising messages across TV, billboards and print publications, guerrilla marketers solve for this problem by taking to the streets. Literally. It could involve anything from elaborate PR stunts in public places to street teams of young teens handing out cold drink samples on a hot summer day. The best guerrilla marketing campaigns, of course, are those in which we are so totally ambushed don't even realize that we're being marketed to.

That's the brilliance of the Guerrilla Classroom initiative - if it goes according to plan, these impromptu classrooms across the city will draw in parents and children naturally. Waiting for that bus for 15 minutes? Why not learn a little about mathematics while you wait? Hanging out at the park? Why not take a minute to play a few little word games that will help you read better? It's a well-known fact that the greater the involvement of parents in the education process, the better the results. The involvement doesn't have to occur at home or in a formal classroom environment - it can now happen anywhere in the city, at any time.

The Guerrilla Classroom initiative goes beyond the standard PSA message that you might find around a city. These are not messages on billboards telling parents and kids what to do -- these are mini-classroom learning elements, distributed around the city. As a result, the Guerrilla Classroom concept hits at one of the central problems facing the urban parent: too little time to get involved in the educational process. This is a depressing truth at both ends of the socio-economic spectrum: minimum-wage workers are working too many hours and multiple jobs to make ends meet, while urban elite parents are typically too busy following their career and social-climbing goals to spend quality one-on-one time with their kids.

Innovators now have a host of new tools - from mobile devices to the latest thinking about game mechanics - to extend this concept of the Guerrilla Classroom and reach an even-wider audience. Based on the early success of the Skillshare model, for example, it's not hard to imagine a day when small "flash mobs" of kids decide to meet up all over the city in "cool" places like skate parks to teach each other foreign languages, music, painting, or even more fundamental things - like how to cope with parents who suddenly have shown a much greater interest in their educational development.

Via Big Think

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With the arrival of the July 4^th weekend, now is a good time to consider the types of  individual rights that the U.S. constitution continues to make possible, even against the backdrop of a rapidly-changing information-based society. We have the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the freedom of assembly - but do we also have the freedom to connect in a mobile, networked world? Does the Internet already encompass many of the fundamental rights outlined by our Founding Fathers, or is the Freedom to Connect a new type of inalienable right?

As TIME magazine points out in its cover story on the U.S. Constitution (One Document, Under Seige), the Founding Fathers could never have even imagined a whole host of modern innovations – including, but not limited to, the modern-day Internet: "George Washington didn't even dream that man could fly, much less use a global-positioning satellite to aim a missile, so it's hard to say what he would think." So, the question is not how the Founding Fathers would have felt about the Internet, but rather, whether the documents they created were flexible enough to accommodate for the phenomenal growth of the Internet and its impact on every facet of our lives, both here in America and globally.

In the wake of the popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia and across the Middle East, it is clear that the Internet represents more than just economic empowerment - it is a fundamental underpinning of a democratic society. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined in her “Freedom to Connect” policy speech on Internet freedom, “an open Internet fosters long-term peace, progress and prosperity.” And a closed Internet? The consequences are almost too dire to consider: “An Internet that is closed and fractured, where different governments can block activity or change the rules on a whim—where speech is censored or punished, and privacy does not exist—that is an Internet that can cut off opportunities for peace and progress and discourage innovation and entrepreneurship.”

While we consider the Internet to be fundamental to the flowering of democracy abroad, what about here in America? The Founding Fathers could never have imagined an Internet "Kill Switch" bill passing through the Congress, or the government-mandated seizure of domain names, or the decision of the government to selectively shut down certain parts of the Internet. They also could never have imagined Wiki-Leaks or Anonymous or LulzSec, and the limits to what type of information governments should have to divulge.

At a time when the Internet makes possible so many economic and social benefits that derive from a networked society, we sometimes forget just how important “the Internet” – including access to our mobile devices - is to the way we communicate, share and demonstrate our democratic values. People sometimes talk about the Internet as a commodity, as if it were something like electricity or water or air. In an era of Internet Kill Switches, the ability to "shut down" the Internet would be like turning off our water supply.

The “freedom to connect” in America needs to be held to a higher standard than we hold it elsewhere in the world. Given the role that the Internet plays in our everyday lives and the way it helps to distribute information and data, we need to be vigilant when elected U.S. government officials start talking about taking away our fundamental right to the Internet, or when leaders in Silicon Valley begin to acquiesce in the face of government requests to censor or limit information. At some point, We The People becomes We the Internet.