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UNESCO OER Recommendation: One Step Closer to Adoption
by Giacomo Tesio June 4, 2019

June 4, 2019

Interessante iniziativa UNESCO di cui non ero al corrente. https://creativecommons.org/2019/06/04/unesco-oer-recommendation-one-step-c… The global open education community works collectively to create a world in which everyone has universal access to effective open education resources (OER) and meaningful learning opportunities as defined by the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goal #4 (SDG4): Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. UNESCO continues to work with national governments to help them better support open education (content, practices, policy) in their countries. CC is an active leader and contributor to this work, alongside our many partners. [...] This new UNESCO OER Recommendation presents an historic opportunity for Creative Commons (CC) and others in the open education community to work with national governments to help them understand and implement model open education recommendations in their countries. CC and our international chapters will actively support national governments as they leverage this opportunity to meet the SDG4 goals.

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Facebook a induit la Commission européenne en erreur lors du rachat de WhatsApp
by Luigi Scorca June 4, 2019

June 4, 2019

https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2019/06/03/facebook-a-induit-la-com…

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Chomsky and Herman's Propaganda Model Foretells a Weaponized Facebook
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

https://truthout.org/articles/chomsky-and-hermans-propaganda-model-foretell… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Model Metropolis (da SimCity alla SmartCity?)
by Giacomo Tesio June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

Un brillante articolo da Kevin T. Baker, storico: https://logicmag.io/06-model-metropolis/ Ai miei occhi, pone questioni interessantissime. Di straordinaria attualità nel momento in cui vecchi giocatori di SimCity (come me) ragionano, discutono, votano o decidono sulle "Smart City". E di straordinario interesse non solo storico politico, ma informatico. Mostra come l'informatica e la programmazione siano mezzi di espressione capaci di diffondere un sistema di credenze e valori complesso (150 equazioni e 200 variabili) SENZA comunicazione verbale. Diffondendo veri e propri pregiudizi senza una singola rete neurale a nascondere / giustificare i bias. Giacomo ____ Almost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.” Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today. [...] When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible. [...] Forrester argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. [...] In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse. [...] Expert knowledge, of course, has an important place in democratic deliberation, but it can also cut people out of the policy process, dampen the urgency of moral claims, and program a sense of powerlessness into our public discourse. Appeals to a social system’s “complexity” and the potential for “perverse outcomes” can be enough to sink transformative social programs that are still on the drawing board.

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IEEE - Compliance with U.S. Trade Restrictions Should have Minimal Impact on IEEE Members Around the World
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

I dipendenti Huawei sono esclusi dal processo di peer review delle pubblicazioni ieee. <https://www.ieee.org/about/news/2019/compliance-with-us-trade-restrictions.…> [...] IEEE complies with U.S. government regulations which restrict the ability of the listed Huawei companies and their employees to participate in certain activities that are not generally open to the public. This includes certain aspects of the publication peer review and editorial process. [...]

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How Tanks on Tiananmen Square Defined China's Model for Control - Bloomberg
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31/how-tanks-on-tiananmen-s…> Western capitals are fuming about Beijing’s actions, Chinese companies face unprecedented sanctions and the nation’s exports are being punished. The same was true in 1989 after tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4 to crush student protests. In that 30-year interlude, China has gone from global pariah to a nation slugging it out on the international stage with the world’s biggest superpower. Those three decades are a story not just of the transformation of China’s fortune, but of the shift in technology and ideas that altered global politics and is increasingly turning developing nations toward China’s model of central control. [...] But China’s success in fostering economic growth and power while managing to avoid widespread political reform has proven an attractive model for leaders in countries rich and poor who are looking to emulate that creation of wealth. "The Chinese government has become increasingly confident about its mode of governance," said Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It increasingly believes that the kind of dictatorship that can be economically powerful and at least on the surface stable could be attractive to other governments." [...] Those changes show that, while China marks the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen by censoring any reference to the event, the world is still grappling with the consequences of the path Beijing took that night. "Free speech was the norm and censorship was the exception" in the early days of the internet, said Lokman Tsui, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a former Asia policy executive at Google who focused on free expression. "The whole climate has changed. Governments are looking to China as a model."

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Una Rete per unire, non dividere
by don Luca Peyron June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

"L’era delle Rete ci dice che il mondo della comunicazione non è più, se mai lo è stato, un mondo a parte, fatto di professionisti, giornalisti, mediatori. È il nostro mondo. È il mondo degli uomini. Se saranno i miliardi di fruitori della Rete a esigere per se stessi e per tutti un futuro caratterizzato dalla condivisione della regola di base che tutti ci unisce, allora la Rete saprà farci riscoprire come membra gli uni degli altri". Buona lettura e buona settimana dl https://www.agensir.it/chiesa/2019/06/01/53a-giornata-mondiale-per-le-comun… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Justice Department Is Preparing Antitrust Investigation of Google - WSJ
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/justice-department-is-preparing-antitrust-inve… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Facebook and Twitter are growing into the mainstream | Media | The Guardian
by Alberto Cammozzo June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

<https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/social-platform…> [...] Facebook had fielded Monika Bickert to answer questions from Anderson Cooper on CNN about the video. Bickert is Facebook’s most thoughtful and knowledgeable executive, heading its product policy and counter-terrorism. Her talking points were very familiar: Facebook’s approach is to flag when something is false, to reduce its reach through algorithmic throttling, but not to remove material altogether unless immediate harm flows from it. Hence terrorism and scientifically inaccurate claims about vaccinations are gone, but Holocaust denial and a clearly misleading clip that affects the democratic process are not. “We are not in the news business,” Bickert told Anderson Cooper. “We are in the social media business.” Engineers and lawyers in Silicon Valley are often mocked for their lack of facility in communications, but over the years they have been remarkably effective in constructing a whole language which casts a gauzy blanket of euphemism over a heap of ugly truths. They have eradicated all meaning and distinction around dramatically different social, cultural and political interactions by labelling them “content”, they have made the diseased metaphor of “virality” a virtue, and rebranded sales people “influencers”. Even the phrase “social media” is a positive denominator which hides a multitude of sins. The business Facebook is in is advertising (to be clear), and the “social media business” is not only the news business (increasingly), it is also the politics business, the public health business, the terrorism business, the education business, the everything in bytes business. In fact, the approach that Bickert described of flagging material as false, and reducing the reach of it, telling people who have seen it that it is wrong, is not a bad strategy and it exceeds the measures taken by many media outlets with their own material who would readily criticise Facebook. It is a necessary measure but not sufficient. In other matters, Facebook is on shaky ground. Its stated policy from its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is that people should decide what they believe for themselves up to and including Holocaust denial, which is arguably incompatible with its position on removing material which creates the potential of immediate harm. These are wide philosophical questions that cannot be used as the basis of rules that robots execute. There is not yet a computational way to correctly decide one slowed-down video is an attack on democracy and another is a piece of satire. What Facebook proposes, in one dimension, is the assembly of an independent content body, which will advise on such matters. I am pretty sure that there would be a split in how any diverse council would come to a conclusion on Pelosi: editors, whose job it is essentially to safeguard the publishing of very little material and stop incorrect information reaching the public domain, would say take it down. Those who think in a more long-term or philosophical dimension about free speech would say keep it up. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and whoever else outsources decision-making on these issues will eventually have to internalise them, too, and have a recognisable culture, set of rules, appeals process and communications system which is capable of responding quickly to information crises. The disruption that minor calls about malicious material creates are too much for any corporate system to withstand, unless it has been designed to deal with them. The inevitable outcome will be a narrowing of the type of material promoted and circulated. The platforms are no longer innovators in terms of speech, publication and the public sphere; they are incumbents, gatekeepers, publishers, however you want to describe them. In other words they are done with disruption, and will therefore inevitably become perpetuators of incumbency themselves. As the experiment of levelling access to tools and speech comes to a shuddering halt, the platforms will increasingly favour the establishment, whether that is among a narrow band of mainstream media suppliers, a smaller number of high-follower influencers, a tiered system of political actors or a particular class of advertisers. [...]

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Uber’s Path of Destruction - American Affairs Journal
by J.C. DE MARTIN June 3, 2019

June 3, 2019

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2019/05/ubers-path-of-destruction/ Uber’s Path of Destruction by Hubert Horan Since it began operations in 2010, Uber has grown to the point where it now collects over $45 billion in gross passenger revenue, and it has seized a major share of the urban car service market. But the widespread belief that it is a highly innovative and successful company has no basis in economic reality. An examination of Uber’s economics suggests that it has no hope of ever earning sustainable urban car service profits in competitive markets. Its costs are simply much higher than the market is willing to pay, as its nine years of massive losses indicate. Uber not only lacks powerful competitive advantages, but it is actually less efficient than the competitors it has been driving out of business. (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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