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Dan O’Neil Reflects on the “Community” in Community Technology
A lot of it was an education—and sometimes not a very pleasant one. I was a believer in open data, a believer in the power of technology to help people, a believer in the founding idea that technologists could solve problems if they just coded the right things. I came to see the limits of…
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June 2016 FCC Reverse Spectrum Auction Explainer
In what’s known as a reverse auction, the initial process will run over a month and include 52 rounds of bidding in all, with the FCC picking over the inventory and offering stations a price the agency thinks that station’s airwaves are worth. If the price is right, the station gives up its space on…
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Build Your Own Chatbot
A platform allowing anyone to visually build, train & deploy chatbots to do just about anything. (via A look at Motion AI, available in public beta today. | Built In Chicago)
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Arresting Photos of Chicago’s Deep Tunnel
Amazing photos of DeepTunnel and related things. These photographs present the three major portions of the southeastern section of the system: the Deep Tunnel, the Thornton Reservoir, and the Calumet Water Reclamation Plant. These interconnected facilities serve large portions of Chicago and its south suburban communities. (via Exploring the Physicality of the Tunnel and Reservoir…
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Life’s Labor, When Labor isn’t Needed
What will people do, when labor isn’t part of life expectations? If China can use robots and other advanced technologies to retool types of production never before automated, that might turn the country, now the world’s sweatshop, into a hub of high-tech innovation. Less clear, however, is how that would affect the millions of workers…
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Gun Culture and Parental Responsibility in USA circa 2016
I am sorry these toddlers died, but what does this say about parent responsibility and the insane gun culture that some people in the US hold so dear. To me, it looks like the Darwin Awards in action. During a single week in April, four toddlers — Holston, Kiyan, Za’veon and Sha’Quille — shot and…
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Axis Shifting as Pole Ice Melts
Talk about the earth moving under one’s feet… The movement of the Earth’s axis has no practical effects on humans, because it is so small. “We suspect these changes are occurring at a meter [or] a meter-and-a-half, at the most, per year,” Ivins says. But tracking the shifts in the Earth’s axis is crucial for…
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A serious problem the news industry does not talk about — We Are Hearken
A serious problem the news industry does not talk about — We Are Hearken Now that I’ve stepped back from the newsroom/classroom culture of the journalism department, I wish I had spoken up about this more. Sometimes I was surrounded and just thought I must be a pollyanna. I didn’t do enough to fight the…
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Automated Reporting in Political Journalism and Polls
Automated reporting is coming to political reporting. This site uses prediction markets, econometric models and a couple of traditional kind of polling to feed into its algorithm, which then gives forecasts for upcoming elections. As of April 14th, all the methods except econometric, put the Democrats ahead in November. The PollyVote predicts the two-party popular…
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Porn Withheld in Opposition to anti-LGBT Bill
A low blow, or more aptly, “no blow” for Tar Heels as large online porn site withholds its content to show its opposition to the anti-LGBT bill recently passed into law in North Carolina XHamster.com, a porn website that, as of Monday, is one of the world’s 100 most visited websites according to data from Alexa, is refusing…
Barbara K Iverson
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Barbara K Iverson 